Human Space Travel There are many problems confronting us with human space travel. I’ve talked about many of these problems before but it seems we could have an answer to some of them in the near future. One of the problems is we keep finding out more about what happens to the human body when it is in space. This indicates to me there will be a lot of other problems discovered which we know nothing about at the moment. A scientific article was just released which discussed what happens to the genes in the heart of humans when they returned to earth. It seems many of the genes change while humans are in space and when they return to earth most of them snap back to normal but not all. I don’t know what this effect will have on humans as they age, but it sounds like going into space for a human right now is not a good idea. What could be the cause of these changes? Is it a lack of gravity, exposure to radiation or something else which we know nothing about? Maybe it could be something as simple as the atmosphere the astronauts are breathing while not on earth. Maybe there is something we breathe in which we need to keep our genes stable. We are going to need a lot more experimentation in this area. When NASA sent one of two identical twins to the international space station for a year, the other twin remained on earth. The one at the space station was astronaut Scott Kelly and is identical twin who stayed on earth was Mark Kelly. NASA scientists thought this would be a very good way of finding out the ways a person is changed due to the fact they were just in space. We have to remember there was no gravity on the space station. We also have to realize there was more radiation exposure than one would have gotten if they stayed on earth. The lack of gravity caused fluids to flow into his upper body and head, activated his genes in different ways which they wouldn’t have been on earth and increased his immune system tremendously. Scott lost some of his body mass, had increased swelling in major blood vessels, changes in the shape of his eye, his metabolism changed and is telomeres lengthened. A telomere is the protective structure at the end of our chromosomes and some scientists believe the longer they are the better chance we have for longevity. Studies have shown as we get older, they get shorter. So, what did NASA learn? I think it is obvious, they learned humans are not built to go into space without certain protections. Maybe the problem wouldn’t have existed if the changes would have been made and the international space station had complete radioactive shielding, artificial gravity which was the equivalent of the gravity on earth and an exact earthly atmosphere. We can’t be sure this would have cured the problem since we never tried it because we are not capable yet of doing it. Seems to me we will need these steps before we can truly do human space exploration, and we may have to make other changes. If we want to be true space explorers, we need to protect our bodies so they don’t get altered in space. This is only part of the problem with exploring space. Another problem is communication. The further away a spaceship is from a transmitter the longer it takes the signal to reach that ship and for the ship’s signal to reach the transmitter. This can be a very big problem even when we travel within our solar system. There may be emergencies where an instant reply is necessary and yet we would not be able to do that today, but there is something on the horizon which may revolutionize communications in space and everywhere else and it is quantum communication. It may be possible to have instant communications no matter how far away an object is. Einstein predicted something called Spooky Action At A Distance. It was this theory which talked about quantum entanglement. This had to do with one particle being able to change another particle instantly no matter how far away it was. It didn’t even matter if we were talking about vast distances and recent experiments seem to prove this is true. There is so many uses for this it boggles the mind. Besides making communication with our spaceships instantaneous, it could also make the field of looking for alien intelligence successful. If we discovered an alien intelligence using this technology, we would be able to instantly communicate with them. I don’t know if this would be a good or bad thing but it would be a possible thing. In the future the technology could be used in a similar way we use buoys to detect tsunamis. We could place space buoys hundreds or thousands of light years away from our planet which are set up to detect dangerous explosions which could affect us or even large bodies heading our way which would give us time to prepare. There is only one problem with this we would need spaceships which were capable of far exceeding the speed of light. Perhaps this concept could also be used in some way to power them? So far, I have discussed the fact we need to protect the human body in space, and we need both speedy communication and a spaceship engine capable of many times the speed of light, maybe even thousands or hundreds of thousands of times that speed. If we had some sort of quantum engine it might be able to take us anywhere we want to go instantly. That quantum engine might even be able to solve the problems of humans in space because they wouldn’t be in space long enough to be affected by the various problems. The human body has problems in space that’s for sure, but it also has problems on earth. Will we ever find a planet which would be a perfect fit for humans? If we did it might hold the answer to what we need in our future spaceships to have a perfect environment. As I have said before many scientists believe we may have come from somewhere else because we just don’t seem to fit in. Many of us have lower back problems due to the gravity on the planet, births a very hard in many cases and yet animals don’t have these problems. Maybe there is someplace in our universe where we wouldn’t have these problems and it could be a place we might have come from.
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