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Though the thought of zooming off to Martian frontier is a romantic one, the key to sustaining such a colony needs more than just romance to make it happen. If you thought raising a gaggle of kids on Earth was tricky, just think about confronting all the challenges of settling a new planet and chasing after the first generation of Martians.

Bryan Kelly at Inverse takes a look at the different approaches to this problem, one of which says there would need to be at least 160 people to offer enough genetic diversity to make it work.

And yet:

The catch is that we’ve got to get to 160 and we’re not sending busloads of astronauts into the big black. Essentially, the two approaches to solving this problem are:

1) Inbreed like crazy.

2) Bring frozen embryos or frozen sperm and frozen eggs.

And, no, we can’t just send 160-people worth of genetic material into space. It’s not reasonable to expect, let’s say, 10 astronauts to raise that many children. It will realistically take multiple generations to hit the 160 mark, at which point there will be actual families and shared genes on the planet. It’s that third generation, consisting of naturally conceived and not-so-naturally conceived babies that can hit the threshold.

So, what do we do?

Full story at Inverse.

Settling space.

Photo credit: NASA, Graphics credit: Canva