about living in space?

Question

can a ship ship with poeple on it live far away from a sun. can you live out side of a galaxie? on a ship?

Answer 1

As long as you have atmospheric conditions which are condusive to life inside your space vehicle... you could live there.

The trick is maintaining those conditions for any length of time.

Answer 2

The problem with living in a closed enviroment is entropy. Which basically comes down to: not everything can be reprocessed, you will have toxic waste at some point, not to mention that you need energy to maintain the order, which is life itself. Therefore, without an external power source, it is impossible to continue living in such an enviroment.

However, one can use several external energy sources, like light from distant stars, or interstellar hydrogen (even if there is very little, there is some gas between the stars). On the other hand, outside of the galaxy, the options diminish greatly I'm afraid.

Answer 3

To get outside our galaxy would take speeds of greater than 95% of the speed of light. And there's no coming back. Even if you only age 20 years, thousands or millions of years would have passed back on Earth.

You would actually be safer on a ship outside our galaxy or even way outside our solar system. The reason is that the sun's radiation is deadly. Our Earth's atmosphere protects us from the deadly radiation. On Mars or on the Moon or inside a spaceship in our solar system, there is not much protection from a solar flare. If the astronauts had landed on the Moon a month later, when there was a solar flare, they would have died. At least one astronaut believes he got cancer from being in space because of solar radiation mutating his body cells. Until we can build adequate shielding for a spaceship, space is not that safe.

As far as living far away from a sun, you would have to bring your own heat, light, and food along. With energy, you can grow plants without sunlight. You would use light bulbs instead.

Answer 4

To try to understand what u would need look at the earth as if it were a space ship. The air is recycled ,the plants help recycle the ox. the CO2 is absorbed by plants and recycled to ox. the leaves and stems are washed down the rivers to the delta where it turns to oil & gas . this old earth has recycled for a long time. but if it is far enough from the sun that photosynthisis will not work.

Answer 5

You could live for awhile on a ship, at least. On a ship, there is considerably less gravity than on Earth, so your muscle mass would decrease. The muscles would not need to work as hard to do simple things like walking, or even standing, so they would not be needed in space.
Also, there's the radiation, but I think enough people explained that.

Answer 6

Theoretically, if the ship is big enough to solve such problems as food/water/air supply, enough energy for all life-supply systems to work (ie electricity), gravity development, than it is possible.

Answer 7

they say that just traveling to mars would subject people to gamma rays that would lead to an early death, so you would want to wait for technology that can protect you from cosmic rays or cure cancer first.
In fact, if you are not too tired, read on:



The radiation encountered on a journey to Mars and back could well kill space travellers, experts have warned. Astronauts would be bombarded by so much cosmic radiation that one in 10 of them could die from cancer.

The crew of any mission to Mars would also suffer increased risks of eye cataracts, loss of fertility and genetic defects in their children, according to a study by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Cosmic rays, which come from outer space and solar flares, are now regarded as a potential limiting factor for space travel. "I do not see how the problem of this hostile radiation environment can be easily overcome in the future," says Keran O'Brien, a space physicist from Northern Arizona University, US.

"A massive spacecraft built on the moon might possibly be constructed so that the shielding would reduce the radiation hazard," he told New Scientist. But even so he reckons that humans will be unable to travel more than 75 million kilometres (47 million miles) on a space mission – about half the distance from the Earth to the Sun. This allowance might get them to Mars or Venus, but not to Jupiter or Saturn.

Risky business
Helped by O'Brien, the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma City investigated the radiation doses likely to be received by people on a 2.7-year return trip to Mars, including a stay of more than a year on the planet. The study estimated that individual doses would end up being very high, at 2.26 sieverts.

This is enough to give 10% of men and 17% of women aged between 25 and

34 lethal cancers later in their lives, it concludes. The risks are much higher than the 3% maximum recommended for astronauts throughout their careers by the US National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

The risks are smaller for older people because cancers have less time to develop. But women are always in more danger than men because they live longer and are more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers.

The study warns that cosmic rays would also increase the risk of cataracts clouding the eyes. Furthermore, men exposed to a solar flare might suffer a temporary reduction in fertility, and the chances that any children conceived by travellers to Mars will have genetic defects are put at around 1%.

Serious brain damage
The study's lead author, the FAA's Wallace Friedberg, highlights other work suggesting that heavy nuclei in cosmic radiation cause "serious brain damage" in mice, leading to memory loss. "Heavy nuclei exposure must be a serious consideration for space missions such as a trip to Mars," he says.

Improving spaceships' shielding by using water, hydrogen or plastics can protect astronauts to some extent. But this is limited by the constrictions of craft weight and design, Friedberg points out.

"Increased speed would also reduce radiation exposure" by reducing journey times, he notes. "And drugs or food supplements that can reverse radiation damage are being considered."

Others suggest more radical solutions might be needed. "Radiation exposure is certainly one of the major problems facing future interplanetary space travellers," says Murdoch Baxter, founding editor of the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity. "Unless we can develop instantaneous time and space transfer technologies like Dr Who’s TARDIS."

Answer 8

yes.. but the ship would need life sustaining equipment on board... oxygen, water, food, sun (even artificial).