Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: katieHaylor on 08/09/2017 16:42:38
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David asks:
How would the brain/body adapt to space travel if there is no time reference?
What do you think?
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The body has its own rhythm, there have been experiments done where they changed the clocks rate, making people adapt up to some 48 hours days if I remember right. The same should go for space, but then again, weightlessness have other problems with it. We need a gravity for our bodies to function as far as I've read. Long travels in weightlessness won't do us any good, and then you have the confinement to consider too.
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm
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I agree, the lack of gravity would pose serious problems in terms of biological functions. However, and I may be wrong, the longest time a person has been in space is, I think, roughly 2 and a half years. I am not sure what affect this may had on their body?
However, my question was more to do with time, and the affect this would have on the body in terms of their being absent any time reference (rotation of the earth, the seasons etc etc) when it came to long time travelling in space.
If there is a mission to the planet Mars, it is believed it would take 9 months or more to get there, and 9 months to get back to Earth. How would this affect the body and its timing in regards to sleep etc etc? As well as the sleep pattern being disrupted, other biological processes would be affected due to, as you have mentioned, the lack of gravity and how would this affect other biological functions and their ' knock-on affects '?
How would the body adjust to a new time pattern if there is no reference (rotation of the Earth) long term?
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This interview about how the heart adapts to being in space (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/hearts-space), with Ben Levine, might be of interest to readers of this thread.
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In the absence of a time reference it seems that most animals adopt a 25 - 26 hour cycle of wakefulness. Dates and seasons don't require "adaptation" as we are quite used to travelling around the world to equatorial places with almost no seasons and arctic places with extreme seasonality. Menstrual cycles appear to be unaffected by microgravity and the effect of working shift patterns is much the same as in earth..
The real problems of adaptation to microgravity seem to be circulatory and musculoskeletal, not associated with time. And anyway, there will always be a time reference because communication, work patterns and navigation all demand a common clock.