Ever since we managed to put men on the moon, we've been looking for other places for people to go. Then bigger and better telescopes led us to exoplanets, those outside our solar system. Somewhere along the way, we switched from thinking of pure exploration to colonizing other planets. But our bodies were built for Earth. Even if we find an exoplanet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, liquid water, and tolerable temperatures, would we be able to live with a different level of gravity?
If its gravity is too strong our blood will be pulled down into our legs, our bones might break, and we could even be pinned helplessly to the ground.
Finding the gravitational limit of the human body is something that’s better done before we land on a massive new planet. Now, in a paper published on the pre-print server arXiv, three physicists, claim that the maximum gravitational field humans could survive long-term is four-and-a-half times the gravity on Earth.
Read how they figured that out at Discover magazine. -via Digg
(Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)
Plasmagryphon, you must have an opinion on this.