Mars OneThe husband of one of the first women to go to Mars has said that scientists believe she will become something ‘not quite human’.
Sonia Van Meter plans to be one of the first human beings to go to the fourth planet from the Sun when the Mars One mission establishes the first human settlement there in 2025.
Speaking about his wife, and the mission, Jason Stanfod said: “I’m going to have to expect that she’ll change not just in the way any of us are shaped by novel experiences but in ways humans have yet to experience.”
He continued: “In fact, as Chris Impey argues in Beyond: Our Future in Space, Sonia will first stop being an earthling and next become something not quite (it’s hard to write this) human.”
It is beleived that the body of an astronaut will drastically change due to Mars’s weaker gravity, and rays from space never-before experienced by people on Earth.
And Kevin Fong of UCL has even more bad news for astronauts of the mission, saying: “Deprived of gravitational load, bones fall prey to a kind of space-flight-induced osteoporosis. And because 99 percent of our body’s calcium is stored in the skeleton, as it wastes away, that calcium finds its way into the bloodstream, causing yet more problems from constipation to renal stones to psychotic depression.”
It must be a terrifying thought, knowing that you will soon have to say goodbye to the woman that you love for the very last time – before she embarks on the most dangerous one way trip ever.
Jason said: “Imagine that you know you will be watching your spouse evolve on another planet before she dies of cancer inside of a decade.”
Sobering. We can’t even begin to put ourselves in his shoes – nor hers. And we have huge respect for them both.
