How would living with a lower gravity affect health negatively?

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Specifically if you never go back to regular gravity. Ex: you go to live on another planet with say 3/4 Earth’s gravity and never return to Earth.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know, fully. Everything we know about this comes from studying astronauts living in space. Those astronauts, among other things, lost bone density and muscle mass; astronauts have to exercise heavily while in space to be able to even stand when they get back to Earth months later.

More generally, the human body is adapted in *very* precise ways to Earth’s environment. It has no reason, for example, to be adapted to *not* putting stress on your bones and muscles, because a living human will always do that regardless under anything resembling normal conditions.

My favorite example of this is that heavy water (using hydrogen-2 rather than hydrogen-1 in the water molecules) has very very slightly different chemical properties than regular water does. The differences are tiny, and barely noticeable in the lab. But if you drank nothing but heavy water, your cells would malfunction and die because they are tuned to the extremely precise details of exactly how water’s physics play out.

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