Sex on a manned Mars Mission...

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I suggest we send Hillary on the Mars mission in place of the Canadian lass. Hillary will solve all the usual problems and everyone will be wholesome and chaste at the destination.

 

[neonlyte]

Any women on this 'manned' mission?

 

[emap]

James you bad bad boy, you made me laugh so hard I almost fell out of the chair.

So I would think a crew of 14 would go, twice the normal crew. That way they aren't all doing the exact same thing every day the entire trip. Instead every other day, they are passengers. I also think it will be a mixed crew, not to be politically correct, but instead because saltpeter and the other libido reducing drugs, only work so long before total failure.

As for pregnancy, those would be really really bad for the child, namely, said child could never land on earth. Well maybe not never but would at best always be weaker and frail, not to mention probably really tall.

So we are talking either permanent surgeries or those implants in all of the women, or men. I think they are testing a version for men, or maybe it is not yet human trials ready but in 2025 I betcha it would be past trials.

I really don't think there would be much rapes happening, namely because, there are 14 crew members, there is an exit on the spaceship, with or without a spacesuit being shoved out said exit would end your trip real quick.

Also I don't think there is an easy way to do a mystery of who is killing the crew one by one, there aren't places to hide on a spaceship. It is either open space, or a storage compartment. Unless the killer is exiting the ship after killing each crew member he or she would be found fast, course exiting ship and coming back in has a big problem, namely the ship anounces when the exit opens and closes.

Instead i think it would be a mass orgy with bits of comedy tossed in.

 

[xssve]

I would think you would want them to have sex, it's healthy, and might help offset some of the physical problems that occur in extended zero G.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

In reality sex is a serious morale killer. It provokes all kinds of intrigues and conspiracies and jealousy.

 

[xssve]

It depends on who you're talking about - true jealousy is a fairly normal response, it enhances pair bonding, but mos t of the actual problems arise from the accompanying possessiveness. Cultures that practice polysexuality simple discourage jealousy, mocking it, the same way we mock promiscuity (sluts) - which is just as natural as monogamy.

i.e., there's two sides to everything: poly cultures discourage jealousy, mono cultures reward it, and vice versa with respect to multiple partners, different social controls for different stress adaptations.

You're better off cutting the bullshit and just laying some ground rules - jealousy and intrigue do not actually require people to be having sex in order to arise - in fact they might be all the more potent in presence of sexual frustration.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Sure.

And I've seen it in action. When the girls show up the bullshit starts.

 

[xssve]

When men compete over women, their balls literally swell up, and there is a marked increase in gonadal behaviors - jock syndrome.

 

[Guest]

Sex is part of survival.

 

[amicus]

And that would be why all celibate Nuns and Priests die an early death?

Amicus...

 

[xssve]

Most likely - nature has no use for celibacy.

 

[Guest]

And that would be why all celibate Nuns and Priests die an early death?

Amicus...

Only the good die young.

Actually, it isn't sex that gets people killed.

It's hunting for it.

Survival of the fittest, baby.

 

[Weird Harold]

...as with launch procedures, if you have followed them, computers are programmed to actually fly the mission far more than the mission commander is.

I suspect that will be even more true when the Mars mission actually gets underway. I do concede, however, that should a problem arise, that live crew might, mind you, might deal with the problem better than a computer.

The advantage is that human crew members can adapt to unanticipated circumstances -- things a computer programmer would never think to program the spacecraft to deal with on it's own.

That, of course, presumes that in 2025 they will be able to find four to six people who can actually think withOUT a computer's assistance.

The movies, fiction, always has an oddball character, one who is 'not with the program', perhaps the writers are correct and perhaps not. Which is why I posed this thread as a question, as I really have not concluded whether a mixed crew or a single sex crew would be more efficacious.

I think the first mission will be a single sex crew simply because officialdom won't be able to admit that a single sex crew would be more of a problem than mised crew -- and they'd have to dscriminate against singletons to form a workable mixed crew comaptible with "official moral standards.

Then again, even with the most sophisticated 'psychological profiles', one never knows what will happen in a truly stressful circumstance, whether it be mission failure or sexual urges that grow and explode.

That's why I suggested that there would have to be extended isolation testing -- a la Biodome, the movie (minus the stupidity and bad acting of Pauly Shore) -- to augment the psych studies and test actual compatibility against predicted compatibility.

Perhaps they can contract with eHarmony.com to pick a mixed crew.

So I would think a crew of 14 would go, twice the normal crew. That way they aren't all doing the exact same thing every day the entire trip.

A double crew would be nice, but it wouldn't be workable. First, there's the problem of lift capacity -- every crew member comes with a couple of tons of supplies for a nearly two year mission.

Second, not doing the same thing every day isn't going to be fixed by doubling the crew, it's going to be compounded -- the main problem for a two-year mission to mars is finding (and boosting) enough "busy work" science experiments to keep them occupied for the 20 months of just coasting along between Earth and Mars. Double the crew and you have to find (and boost) twice as much busy-work to stave off boredom.

As for pregnancy, those would be really really bad for the child, namely, said child could never land on earth. Well maybe not never but would at best always be weaker and frail, not to mention probably really tall.

I don't think the problem of bone development is as serious as you think. There have been experiments with pregnant mice almost since the beginning of the space program and I haven't seen any hard evidence that the dire warnings of science fiction about micro-gravity races developing because they can't tolerate even lunar or martian gravity.

Still, the solution is simple for the immediate future -- if the mission is going to last longer than six months, you're sterile (temporarily or permanently) or you don't go.

I really don't think there would be much rapes happening, namely because, there are 14 crew members, there is an exit on the spaceship, with or without a spacesuit being shoved out said exit would end your trip real quick.

The problems of long space flights are very similar to the problems of winter shut-ins in that arctic/antarctic regions -- google "Cabin Fever" for some of the gruesome stories of what happens when people are confined in small spaces for long periods; or just watchthe re-runs of Mythbuster's Alaska Special for a short example of Cabin Fever.

Instead i think it would be a mass orgy with bits of comedy tossed in.

In a fictional story, you'd be right. In a real mission, probably not -- see my answer to Ami above about "official" morality's effect on crew selection.

 

[ms.read]

agreed mr. Harold.

 

[fifty5]

I find a bit of humor in considering where some writers here might take a story such as this.

I, personally, would attempt to predict how that planned mission in 2025 would actually go, using as much research and logical speculation as possible to create a real, if imagined and fictional event.

Robotics and Nanotechnology may well be worth exploring and if the political climate changes in the United States, it may well be a Chinese crew that does both a Moon mission and a Mars mission long before the USA does.

Both Solar and Cosmic radiation pose hazards to humans on such a long voyage, as does muscle and bone degeneration which has been documented by extended stays on the ISS.

There is much yet to be learned before man ventures off to Mars.

Thanks to all, most interesting...

Amicus...

Random thoughts...

Rather than Chinese, a Russian venture is, from what I know, more likely. An event I attended where a Russian cosmonaut and a mission-planner came to Yorkshire and addressed an audience of teachers and school kids outlined a believable plan for aggressive space exploration. In a decade and a half it is possible that China could bring a similar plan to fruition, but China has other issues to tackle.

Most likely in fact, I think (irrespective of which country mounted the project), would be a unisex crew. Historically that has been the norm for official ventures.

Nelson's navy (and that general period) had some similar voyage durations - plus a death penalty for buggery. Stories of females who impersonated males do exist, though, to me, less credibly than those of a female pope, who never worked bare-chested.

These days, any unisex crew would almost certainly be screened against (or in the right story category, it could be for) gay tendencies. With that exception, in erotic fiction that would be boring and unsuitable.

For this type of fiction, the married pairs scenario seems to me to have most potential. That could be credible as an authority decision that could keep Mrs Grundy from generating sufficient public outcry to prevent the mission happening. One could then introduce secret screening for poly acceptance - and go on to whatever episodes made the story attractive to writer and readers.

Pregnancy in a mixed crew does need to be dealt with - the payload consequences in vehicle design are difficult to ignore - but several solutions have already been proposed. This needn't be a big issue, unless that was chosen to be a story line. Each couple could be mutually sterile, but cross-coupling might not be....

If I were to write this as an erotic story, I wouldn't allow pregnancy (not my thing), but would instead play up the swapping opportunities. With 3 or 4 couples (the payload limits), quite a number of permutations are possible. For such a mission, the intellectual requirements on the crew make it credible that 'moral' prejudice could be eliminated. Practical issues like STDs and pregnancy risks are easily (as above) ruled out, so there's no practical issue with swapping.

Standard personality issues (who actually does fancy whom) could provide the requisite dramatic tension - or as stroke, that could be disregarded.

The set-up could be made sufficiently credible by suitable selection procedures (made public and kept secret), together with the relevant mechanical/biochemical safeguards.

If you want a deeper story, then the commonly used model is why they died.

 

[emap]

Perhaps I should point something out. Payload issues are mostly only a factor when you are designing a planet to space voyage. You have to keep it under such and such a number or the ship cannot leave the atmosphere let alone escape the magnetic field.

When you are talking a trip to another planet, the payload issues have less of a factor besides for building up speed and stopping. So in a manned trip to mars say, they would assemble the ship in orbit, ferry up the required supplies, scientific materials and fuel for the trip in several trips, then ferry up the crew. A planet to planet trip the required mass is rather negligible until how many engines you can place onto the ship hits the no more available range. Obviously they would design the ship for such and such a weight and crew size, but creating a ship to mars with 5 or 500 crew is simply a matter of adjusting the total payload and engines.

Granted simple run down, but really that's the most important part, how many engines you have available for the ship, and how many modules you can create in the allotted time to accomodate the crew, equipment, supplies, and fuel. Moving between planets is not the problem, being able to land at the other end, do experiments then return is. Why I said double crew, they want to plan for every eventuality and losing the ground team is one of them.

 

[Weird Harold]

Obviously they would design the ship for such and such a weight and crew size, but creating a ship to mars with 5 or 500 crew is simply a matter of adjusting the total payload and engines.

Granted, getting the crew and equipment out of the gravity well could easily be done in stages and the interplanetary craft assembled in orbit as big as necessary.

However, whether you lift the crew and ship out of the earth's gravity well in one lift or a thousand lifts it is still necessary to accelerate x Kg of mass to seven MPS to get it into orbit and then generate enough delta-V to make a trasfer orbit to mars. The amount of delta-V that can be generated determines how long the trip lasts.

Once you reach a size that can't land on mars, you start adding mass for a mars lander and fuel for the landing and return to orbit (times the capacity of the lander.)

I mentioned earlier the amount of mass required for the logistics support for each additional crew member -- For a minimum burn orbit to Mars, you'd probably need one shuttle launch per crew member to boost crew member, supplies, and fuel -- not counting however many shuttle launces (or equivalent lift capacity) would be required for that crew member's portion of the space craft itself.

For a mximum delta-v orbit to mars, the food for the crew could be reduced considerably (a maximum delta-v transition is about four times as fast as a minimum burn) but the fuel required goes up more than the food required goes down. Beyond a certain point, more delta-v just means more shuttle launch equivalents to bring more fuel.

Technologically it's just a matter of scheduling the launches, but economically a "double" crew just for redundancy is beyond the reasonable economic commitment of every space faring nation/agency and I don't see the economics improving any in the next fifteen years.