Sunday, September 3, 2017

Why We're Not Going To Mars

... at least not until we solve this newly discovered problem:

The astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson commented that ‘dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked the opposable thumbs and brainpower to build a space programme’.

Yet although we now have the technological ability to leave Earth, scientists have found another stumbling block to colonising new worlds - our own immune system.

Although it is said we are all made of ‘star stuff’ when it comes to travelling away from our home planet humans are far more vulnerable to the rigours of space than our interstellar origins might suggest.

Billions of years of evolution has effectively backed mankind into a corner of the Solar System that it may be now be tricky to leave.

You can read the rest @
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/09/02/immune-systems-could-stop-humans-reaching-mars/

Hey, not to worry - we'll just change ourselves into a different organism so we can make the journey. How? Probably by using CRISPR:

https://techcrunch.com/gallery/7-ways-crispr-is-about-to-change-our-world/

Pretty cool technology, huh?

Ironically, the changes necessary for us to make the trip may turn us into something which no longer is human. Which means that "we" are not going to Mars after all. The Martian colonists will be counterfeit humans.

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