And there goes the newest installation of my animated GIF adaptation of Al Feldstein's classic '50 Girls 50' from the pages of EC Comics' 'Weird Science' magazine. Those of you already familiar with the source material may already notice that I'm diverging from the source material a wee little bit, as I did take some artistic license here and there with minor details. But it will still be essentially the same story.
In the original story, the ship's mission is only 100 years, and the protagonist (whose name, oddly enough, is Sid – though he goes unnamed in my version) wakes up a mere two years after leaving Earth, rather than thirty. I changed the numbers to be more in keeping with what I think a realistic travel time would be to one of our nearest most likely habitable neighbors (if you're a big enough exoplanet nerd, you can probably guess which one). I also named the originally nameless ship 'Cronus,' after the Greek titan who swallowed his children – the future Olympian gods – and then regurgitated them into the world.
As an aside, not that it has much to do with the story, but most genealogists believe you would need a minimum population of 10,000 humans to start a human colony and ensure stable genetic diversity, and ideally you'd want at least 40,000 to really be certain. So the idea of starting a colony with just 100 people, as was the idea in the original Feldstein story, was probably doomed from the start. But I guess it's possible that with advanced enough gene modification tech, that wouldn't be an issue.
More to come of this. The premise of the story takes a little bit more establishing than my other animated series so far, but it's a pretty neat little story, with a nasty twist or two thrown in.
There's a lot of nail-biting going on at NASA right now over plans to send astronauts to Mars. It's not for the reasons you might think, like how are they going to protect the astronauts from solar flares – we've recorded mass ejection events that would have killed anyone caught cruising through open space at the time – or how to keep a crew alive for the two to three years' round trip. There's serious concern that astronauts on a mission to the Red Planet may arrive with severely deteriorated eyesight, or even permanent blindness.
A recent study has found that some 30 percent of space shuttle astronauts and over 60 percent who've stayed on the International Space Station have suffered a decline in visual acuity as a result. It's a condition called Visual Impairment/Intracranial Pressure Syndrome, and it's probably caused by a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain which occurs due to weightlessness. The increased pressure squashes and flattens the back of the eyeballs and inflames the optic nerves. In many cases, it goes away within a few weeks after the sufferer is back on solid ground, but in other cases, it can last for months or longer. No one knows how bad it would get on a very long mission, like a flight all the way to Mars and back, but it's possible that it could lead to a permanent loss of vision. This is, it should go without saying, potentially a very big setback for plans to put human explorers on Mars.
I'll bet the mission planners at NASA were quietly crossing their fingers that they might be able to pull off their first manned Mars mission without needing artificial gravity. Their luck may have run out on that front. If this syndrome turns out to be caused by weightlessness – and I suspect it will – then that probably means they'll need to at some point either build a rotating module for the ISS or, just as likely, build a second generation ISS that rotates to create artificial gravity and that could all add decades to the time tables for the mission… or even price it out of consideration.
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