The Latest Sex in Space Hoax

The reason space sex has been on my mind lately is that since last weekend, the internet has been packed chock-full of “Sex in Space” articles that, unlike classic space sex hoaxes and zero-G porn, have no sex. While I’m thrilled to see space sex headlines, all the articles seem to move right into pregnancy and interstellar propulsion. Where’s the sex?

It’s all in the wake of a public symposium held for the Hundred-Year Starship (100YSS) Project. A project of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA, 100YSS is meant to be a study of the feasibility of sending humans to other star systems. At the Florida symposium, Biologist Athena Andreadis of the University of Massachusetts gave a talk called “Making Aliens.” In it, she addressed questions of sex and procreation on long-term space flights. The Daily Mail has a piece on it that, well, barely talks about sex at all:

Giving birth in zero gravity is going to be hell because gravity helps you,’ said biologist Athena Andreadis of the University of Massachussetts, ‘You rely on the weight of the baby. Sex is very difficult in zero gravity, because you have no traction and you keep bumping against the walls.’

Other researchers speculated that living in zero gravity could harm children or prevent conception. What is known is that even months spent in environments such as the International Space Station can be incredibly damaging for the human body. Long periods away from Earth’s gravity result in damage not only to muscles, but to our skeletons.

[Link.]

The headline of the Daily Mail piece? “Sex in space: The survival of the human race might depend on it.” But that ultra-noncommittal and maddeningly nonspecific statement  from Andreadis, “Sex is very difficult in zero gravity, because you have no traction and you keep bumping against the walls,” is the sum total of the article’s comment’s about sex. Ba-da-bing! The piece goes right into conception, pregnancy and birth, then starts talking about how big space is and how far away the stars are.

It’s like wandering into the wrong room at a science fiction convention because you heard there was a sex party going on, and getting trapped in an hourlong conversation about Blake’s Seven.

The talk and the Daily Mail piece were both cited by Discovery News writer Ian O’Neill  in his article entitled The Interstellar Space Sex Fallacy, in which he duplicates the same Andreadis quotes as above, then jumps into the irrelevancy of questions about sex in space, which seems to have been one of Andreadis’s themes. Wrote O’Neill:

But this discussion is moot considering the kind of human-rated vehicle we’d have to build to make the trip. Assuming warp-driven spacecraft won’t be a reality for the immediate future, our future interstellar travelers will spend their lives in an interstellar craft. In fact, it’s conceivable that generations of people will live out their lives forever gliding through the interstellar void.These starships wouldn’t just be incredible technological feats, they’d also be the grandest social experiment ever attempted!

[Link.]

The thing that I find maddening about both of these articles — and most other writing about sex in space — is that it titillates us with promises of “sex in space” and then talks about procreation, when they’re not talking about stuff that isn’t even remotely related to sex. That same headline, and the same ultra-thin Andreadis quotes, are reproduced in articles with “Space Sex” or “Sex in Space” headlines over at Daily Tech, DVice, Space.com, Redorbit.com — the list goes on and on — all without any additional information about actually fucking in space!

This is a recurring problem with just about any mainstream articles about sex in space. Even science fiction blog io9, famous for being the hippest and horniest of all mainstream geek outlets, features a January, 2011 article headlined Two Decades of Research on Space Sex, which features, you guessed it, no space sex at all, but jumps right to procreation. That io9 article derives from a Physorg.com piece titled Space Sex? Houston, We Have a Problem, in which — anyone? anyone? — that’s right, there’s almost no talk of sex!

Repeatedly, “Space Sex” related keywords are used, but then nobody seems to have much to say about it.

Damn you all to hell! I want my Drunken Space Sluts!

Of course, the best way to get information about space sex is the way that important scientists have since the dawn of the Space Age: to make it  up. Remember that hoaxed NASA report about the sex-in-space studies on Space Shuttle mission “STS-XX”? That one was all, “Zero-G Doggy Style!” It even inspired Violet to write the now-classic Tiny Nibbles Zero-G Sex Guide,in which she reasonably bemoaned the unfashionability of ZGS as imagined by NASA physicians.

I agree with Violet. Sex in space will be hot, interracial, and involve spanking fetishists. It has to. Otherwise, why go?

However, I do have to say that O’Neill’s point in that last two paragraphs quoted above is a good one, if you want to get all serious about the future of the human race and all that boring stuff that probably won’t involve all that much drunken space sluttery. It’s also a point that is often missed not just in writing about sex in space, but writing about lengthy space voyages in general. Humans who are born, grow up, live and die on a starship will be vastly transformed by their environment, and zero-G sex will be natural them…it’ll have to be. What’s more, with human knowledge of biological science advancing (to my eyes) much faster than space travel technology, it seems likely that some degree of physical selection will be involved — maybe even genetic engineering. As O’Neill writes:

Rather than changing alien environments to suit us, perhaps we can change ourselves to adapt to alien environments.

“We will have to grow up and do self-directed evolution, realizing that what comes out of the other end may not be human,” [Andreadis] added. “If we stake our future among the stars, we must change for the journey and the destination.”

So, although sex in space will always be a headline-grabber and an excuse to post pictures of Jane Fonda in various famous Barbarella poses (top, sorry, couldn’t resist), the bigger picture is whether or not we’d even need a basic human impetus like sex to maintain a human presence throughout the cosmos.

This is especially true if, as Andreadis points out, our interstellar descendants aren’t even human.

Andreadis, incidentally, is involved not just with 100YSS but with the Lifeboat Foundation, a donation-funded project which features a number of prominent science fiction authors as members — Robert J. Sawyer, Gregory Benford and Allen Steele, all best-sellers in the science fiction field, were at 100YSS as representatives of the Foundation.

But while there may not be many drunken space sluts at the Lifeboat Foundation, the group doesn’t do its credibility any favors by having the headline on the landing page of its site ask me to “Help us begin the early steps in constructing a NanoShield.” And yes, the page that’s supposed to explain to me what in the holy name of Mother Mary a NanoShield is? Well, it actually reads as follows:

The NanoShield Fund is used to turn our NanoShield program into reality. While we won’t be funding the development of massive utility fog curtains or orbiting laser platforms in the near future, we can do something today.

I know it sounds reasonable to you, guys, but I haven’t spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to combat the not-yet-invented threat of nanoweapons so I can write science fiction novels about them, so I think NanoShield sounds like an intelligent chastity belt locked onto interstellar sex slaves in a three-hundred-part science fiction porn epic posted to Alt.Sex.Stories in 1993. I’m just saying.

Image from Currythief.blogspot.com.