Building a Space-Faring Civilization

Building a Space-Faring Civilization: Advancing the Renaissance of Science, Medicine and Human Performance in Civilian Spaceflight explores an exponentially expanding, unique new trajectory for humankind—spaceflight. This book provides state of the art information on how to select the most qualified humans to undergo space travel and secondarily, consider how human physiology might be modified genetically and/or epigenetically to adapt individuals to live and perform various tasks in extraterrestrial environments. It is a novel source of current biomedical, technical, legal and social implications/issues/data associated with our exploration of space. The interest of commercial developers is enormous. The impact on human health, (already benefiting substantially from devices developed in response to life in microgravity that have had important uses on earth), including our ability to prolong life spans is enormous. It is a time of unprecedented opportunity, literally presenting humans with new worlds to explore. The challenges are enormous and should are highlighted in the book such as ethical issues that involve intellectual property, geographical subdivision of extraterrestrial bodies, our approach to other and diverse life forms—these are only some of the important topics anyone in the field will find crucial for study and advancing science, medicine and human performance in civilian spaceflight. Summarizes the work of world class investigators from around the world working on epigeneticsDescribes the impact of biological sex/gender on gene expression through epigenetic mechanismsPresents the current state of our understanding of how environmental experience is translated to future generations in a sex specific manner