Climate crises, nuclear Armageddon or a sudden meteor strike — it is clear humanity could do with Planet B — but first, we need to learn to reproduce safely in space, Dutch entrepreneur Egbert Edelbroek said.
Edelbroek’s firm, Spaceborn United, is pioneering space sex research, with the eventual aim of natural conception and birth in the partial gravity environment found on Mars.
The challenges of achieving safe space sex are galactic, but the ambitious Dutchman is confident he would see an extraterrestrial human child born within his lifetime.
Photo: AFP
“It’s important that the Earth and humanity can become a multiplanetary species,” Edelbroek said.
“If you want to have independent human settlements beyond Earth, and if you really want them to be independent, you also need to address the reproductive challenge,” he said.
Actual sexual intercourse in space presents many difficulties, chief among them the lack of gravity — a couple would drift away from each other — so Spaceborn United is first trying to conceive an embryo in space,” he said.
Starting with mice, before eventually moving to human sperm and egg cells, the firm has created a disc that mixes the cells together, with the aim of producing a viable embryo.
It is like a “space station for your cells,” said Aqeel Shamsul, CEO of the UK-based Frontier Space Technologies, which is working with Spaceborn on the project.
This embryo is then cryogenically frozen, to pause their development, but also to protect them during re-entry.
“It’s a lot of shaking, a lot of vibration, a lot of G-forces. You don’t want to expose embryos to this,” Edelbroek said.
Research is under way in simulated partial gravity laboratory conditions, but Edelbroek said a launch with mice cells was planned for the end of next year, with a timeline of “about five or six years” for the first launch with a human embryo.
However, that is only one small step. A giant ethical leap remains before such an embryo could be implanted back into an Earthling woman to give birth to the first child conceived in space.
“It’s a delicate topic. You’re exposing vulnerable human cells, human embryos, eventually, to the hazards of space, to radiation that is much higher than on Earth, to different gravity environments that embryos are never designed for,” Edelbroek said.
Such ethical issues are one reason why research into space reproduction has generally been left to private firms like Spaceborn, rather than NASA, which is queasy about spending tax dollars on such sensitive topics.
Edelbroek said his firm was the only one looking to develop a human embryo in space. Bodily fluids that are pulled down on Earth would be drawn upward in a low-gravity environment, posing several challenges for the human body.
“An adult body can handle some differences, but you don’t want to expose a growing, more vulnerable, fetus to these different variables. So you need to create the perfect environment first,” he said.
One new factor in space reproduction is the growth of space tourism, fueled by companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.
Couples on a space tourism flight might want to go down in history as the first to conceive, Edelbroek said, adding that he was consulting with the sector to make them aware of the risks.
Spaceborn’s research —which replicates the IVF process, but in space — is also helping people closer to home to conceive, he said.
The Dutchman said he had been forced to scale back his plans.
“We’ve gone from crazy ambitious to just very ambitious,” as the scale of the challenges became clear, he said.
Nonetheless, he is sure that a baby would be born in space within his lifetime.
“I expect to be at least 100 years old,” the 48-year-old said. “So that should give us enough decades to achieve that, absolutely.”
“Eventually, humanity — hopefully with us — needs to achieve childbirth in space,” he said.
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign