• Question: could space travel couse our body to mutate???

    Asked by imbatman to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Yes it most definatly would. How beneficial I couldn’t say. Being in space exposes you to a much higher level of background radiation than on earth. This radiation causes damage to the DNA in our cells. When this is repaired sometimes mistakes are made to the code. We call these mutations. This process happens all the time but mostly they go un noticed as a vast amount of the DNA doesn’t code for anything in particular. A similar process happens in some diseases and is the driving force behind cancers.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Sure, I guess if you were out there long enough you would be exposed to a lot of radiation. The bigger problems would be the children of the people exposed to radiation. We’ve seen from things like the chernobyl disaster that these mutations are pretty much always a bad thing for the people affected, causing massive long term heath problems. (Unfortunately life isn’t like superhero comics.)

      This would be a big problem if we wanted to travel to other planets. Because everything is so far apart, we might have several generations of people born and dying on a ship before we arrive, so protecting people from the radiation is a big problem to solve.

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