I was thinking about the Nutty Putty Cave incident and how one of the things that contributed to the urgent need for rescue was that the diver was upside down. He had hours.
Meanwhile, people have spend months, years in space. If we’re so sensitive to gravity, how can we deal so well when we remove it completely?
In: Planetary Science
Microgravity is actually very bad for the human body. It leads to blood pooling in the head and face (although to a lesser extent than when upside down, since there’s no gravity adding to the effect)
Nausea, low apetite, poor digestion, muscle and skeletal atrophy, brain fog, insomnia. Astronauts on long duration space flights have to exercise frequently just to slow down the rate at which their body atrophies.
There’s also substantial radiation exposure outside of the magnetosphere leading to increased incidence of cancers, as well as high energy cosmic rays causing visual flashes and temporary partial blindness.
Basically, being in microgravity is like having the flu 24/7. And many of these effects take weeks or months to recover from once returning to normal gravity. Its why the crew of the ISS has to be regularly rotated.
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