Space sex: Are we ready for ‘alien’ babies?

Are we ready to conceive babies in space? Photo / Getty Images

Every human being that has ever lived has been conceived and born on the same spinning blue marble, billions of us emerging screaming into Earth’s atmosphere with gravity tethering us to Papatūānuku.

But, as humans increasingly look to the stars for our future, scientists are working to discover if we might life sustain life as we float through the wastes of space.

Dutch firm Spaceborn United is banking on our species leaving terra firma, following up on the current wave of commercial space travel with plans to see if the very basics of human existence will work outside our atmosphere.

“Humanity needs a backup plan,” Spaceborn United CEO Egbert Edelbroek told MIT Technology Review.

“If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species.”

But are we ready for “alien” babies?

“If you want human colonies (...) beyond Earth, and if you genuinely want them to be independent, you also need to address the challenge of reproduction,” Edelbroek said to AFP.

There’s little room for romance in a new zero-gravity future and Spaceborn is aiming to achieve conception by mixing sperm and egg in a disc, described as a “space station for your cells”.

This would be done in low Earth orbit and then the embryo frozen before it is sent back to Earth to see if it can be implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to term.

“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 of the embryo’s arrival on Earth.

Initially, the firm plans to test its system using laboratory rodents, aiming to see if they can be conceived in space before going on to be born and then carry a new generation.

A first launch is planned for 2024, but producing a human embryo is much further down the track.

There would be huge ethical concerns over any attempt to implant an extra-terrestrially conceived embryo into a human woman, something Edelbroek describes as a “delicate subject”.

“Ultimately, you expose vulnerable human cells, human embryos, to the dangers of space (...) for which embryos were never designed,” he told AFP.

He says producing a human embryo will take “five or six years” - and that is just the beginning.

Birth in space would present its own challenges, with bodily fluids that Earth’s gravity normally pulls downward instead going in the opposite direction.

Years of spaceflight have shown that human bodies can withstand zero-gravity but a growing foetus is “more vulnerable.” Edelbroek admitted.

Edelbroek told MIT Technology Review that his research is also important in the short-term, saying the rise in space tourism means there is a growing risk of a baby being conceived in space and a need to investigate if any such pregnancy would be viable and safe for mother and baby.

Edelbroek says he first thought it would take years to achieve his goal of an “alien” baby but now realises it will take much longer.

“We went from wildly ambitious to just very ambitious,” he told AFP, adding: “I expect to reach at least 100 years. So, that should give us enough decades to achieve it.”