How It Would Be For Us To Live On The Moon

What it would take for man to settle on the moon and beyond

- S.B. Divya

A while back, my husband and I rode in a custom-built submarine, 400m below the surface of the ocean. The experience was both awe-inspir-ing and humbling. To know that a bubble of thick acrylic and some metal was all that kept us alive, I imagine this is what astronauts feel like. The bottom of the ocean is as strange, beautiful and inhospitable as outer space, but that does not keep us from wanting to visit it.

That same drive to risk our lives by exploring the unknown is what carries us beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Science fiction loves the idea of humanity settled beyond our planet—to boldly go to new frontiers, to sail the solar winds as we once did across the seas, and to establish families and cultures in a new land. Reality, unfortunately, has shown that the analogy fails in many ways. Space is far more hostile than the ocean or an uninhabited island. For humanity to successfully expand off our home planet, we will need to solve some fundamental issues of biology and physics, and those solutions will determine when and how we settle in other parts of the solar system.

Cosmic and solar radiation will be the greatest challenges for our bodies. Exposure to these leads to all kinds of physiological problems, which we are still in the process of discovering as astronauts spend more time on the International Space Station. On the other hand, biotechnology is booming and a combination of genetic engineering and nano-scale devices may be able to counteract the detrimental effects of radiation in the future.