Doctor Explains Challenges of Colonising a New Planet - Science of The Expanse Part 2

oh yay Delta loader and yeah India loader this video is about some of the medical challenges of settling an exoplanet as 2020 is hopefully the year the Artemis mission launches the next step towards humans establishing a base on the moon and eventually Mars which is currently slated for about 2035 I'll be using the expanse TV shows themed attic inspiration about a year and a half ago in this channel was very tiny I made a general overview of some of the major problems in space medicine again using the expanse as source material if you haven't seen that video head on over there first because that's a kind of introduction to the obstacles of interplanetary travel as well as a thought experiment into what humans might look like if they grew up in very low gravity environments it's also spoiler free if you're yet to watch the excellent and scientifically very accurate show and it even comes with an endorsement from co-creator of the expanse of the books and the TV show Daniel Abraham himself which naturally sent me over the lunar season for dropped last month and it's not only awesome but full of amazing medicine and biology the book Cibola burn which a lot of it's based on has even more so I couldn't miss this opportunity to explore some more medical concepts with you I did want to bring you this video sooner but I'm in PhD lockdown mode at the moment for the next few months so the channel is gonna be a little bit quiet as well as having this pesky day job or I've go to this big building that's full of sick people all of which really gets in the way of making YouTube videos but it is what it is this is your warning that this video is going to have season for spoilers so this is what we're going to talk about number one the body adapting when moving from a low to high gravity environment which is of direct relevance to any mission to Mars because depending on the relevant cities perihelion and aphelion and other complicated Greek words ie how close Earth and Mars are going to be at the time of launch travel time will be around six to nine months then 18 to 24 months on the surface may be a similar returned duration meaning several years potentially in low gravity then we'll talk about surgery in space infections that might occur on an alien planet and finally getting spaced exiting your spaceship without a suit okay we kick off with Naomi Nagata z' struggle to acclimatize to gravity that she encounters on the surface of illness the first world that is explored outside our solar system in the books it suggested that gravity G on the surface of illis is about the same as Earth 1g Naomi a belter who grew up in low gravity might have quite different biology to what we're familiar with in the books she's actually two metres tall but I'll never object to Dominique tipper being cast as she's reppin East London in space I explained in that first video why actually I think belters would be shorter than earthers but let's put that to one side for now and just consider the internal physiology oh sorry for any Americans I forgot to convert to meters in height that's one point 237 times 10 to the 35 Planck lengths the first settlers on Ellis are from Ganymede which very similarly to our Moon has less than a 1/6 or so the gravity of Earth and indeed we learn that some of them encountered the same problems as Naomi when they arrived the components of a program to prepare belters for life in higher gravity than there used to consists of number one strengthening the bones number two increasing muscle strength number three improving function of the cardio respiratory system the heart and the lungs and number four I presume there is possibly some sort of neurological aspects because balanced systems and eyesight are also significantly affected by a lack of gravity the actual term for all of this is countermeasures the interventions that astronauts on the International Space Station do to prevent developing all the problems that we assume Naomi will have had since birth a lack of gravity causes loss of bone density and strength reduced muscle mass and function a smaller weaker heart predisposing - one of the most common and potentially most serious problems for dehydration anemia visual disturbance and quite a lot more we see Holden injecting something directly into Naomi's intraosseous space that hollow space inside bones where you find bone marrow where many cells as I'm sure you know particularly blood cells are created however you can also infuse fluid directly into the body this way this is something I've only done on two occasions because it's really only an emergency thing where you're not able to get access to a vein which is much more preferable and basically you just push a big flipping needle through the bone and you can then infuse fluid it is easier in kids with their puny weak bones as I said that vein is preferable but Naomi will need volume expansion either way because in low gravity your blood volume is reduced because blood collects in the middle of the body fooling the kidneys into thinking you're overloaded with fluid and then the kidneys pee out more fluid if you stand up on earth about 70% of your circulating blood volume will be below the heart but in microgravity that isn't a case astronauts refer to this volume redistribution as the puffy face bird leg syndrome which sounds kind of silly and harmless but the dangers were of this were brought home very recently when the fact that astronauts have suffered from deep vein thrombosis in central large veins was published quite recently and this is because blood stasis is occurring it's blood is not flowing back to the heart as normal as the muscles in the legs and other parts of the body are not working as normal and squeezing the veins and pushing all that blood back to the heart now these clots were noted incidentally meaning they didn't cause any problems but they have the potential if a blood clot moves and ends up in the lung for example to be very serious potentially even fatal Naomi's red blood cell count will also be low she'll be anemic because that misinterpretation of fluid status by the body also means it will produce less blood so she's likely to receive erythropoietin or EPO to boost her red blood cell count which acts on the bone marrow directly even though you don't actually have to inject it straight into the bone marrow you can do but in a vain just ask any elite cyclist or distance runner however the mainstay of bone protection will be bisphosphonate drugs which reduce the breakdown of bone and have been used to prevent osteoporosis for years already here on earth she might also receive some hormonal supplementation to assist with the sympathetic nervous system changes and the high likelihood of fainting resistance exercises like Naomi does absolutely form a key part of bone and muscle countermeasures the only way to improve cardiovascular fitness is exact same way it is on earth I'm afraid exercise there's no shortcut astronauts on the ISS exercise for about two hours a day there's no way around it and I don't foresee any drugs being developed that will replace exercise if they were that surely make their inventor the richest person alive space adaptation syndrome or simply space sickness is really common and it includes nausea vomiting and just feeling generally lousy and stuffed up so it's very likely Naomi would suffer an analogous fate surgery in space for this topic I called up Eleanor frosts who is an expert in space surgery that I'll hopefully be featuring in future videos along with some of her colleagues and to ask about the problems associated with surgery in space now the pooling of the blood here is correct blood from your veins which comes out at a lower pressure will indeed form a dome like this due to surface tension and the lack of gravity but arterial bleeding which this appears to be is more likely to break the surface tension and cause all kinds of mess by forming free-floating droplets that will go all over the place this is me okay I've never done this before that's pretty much exactly what I'd say at the beginning of procedures I find it instills confidence so to see what you're doing you'd need suction and an endoscope just as Alex uses however to contain the mess the current plan for any surgery in space may involve a sealed glovebox but keeping the blood in isn't the main reason it's keeping the bugs out airborne microbes have been recorded in the International Space Station at ten times the level you would find in an operating theater and because there's no convection current due to a lack of gravity hot air doesn't rise the air doesn't circulate the same way it does on earth and you can get colonization of bacteria fans can help but they can also blow the bacteria around next parasites the ilis colonists run into all manner of visual problems caused by parasites but even without that space flight seriously compromises vision space flight associated neuro ocular syndrome is loss of visual function in space that occurs very commonly but let's think about more exotic eye problems ocular parasites now not being an exobiologist like dr. lv Ocoee i would not want to speculate on the possible biology of an alien organism but in the book early on lv explains that even though humans come from an entirely different biosphere we haven't co-evolved with life on illis the way we have on earth humans are still warm walking reservoirs of fluid and nutrients so we might still be victim to microorganisms just looking for somewhere nice to live she fairly sensibly suggests total isolation by being sealed in a dome where nothing can get in or out which is always something that made me laugh about m-class planets on Star Trek I mean sure mr. data the air is breathable but what about all the frickin bugs that are guaranteed to be in that air so does something like the ocular parasites exist here on earth unfortunately yes parasitic eye infections bigger than bacteria as suggested by Elvis pictures are explained to not directly be attacking sufferers per se but just getting all up into their with the eyeholes as their a nice place to be and this is indeed the origin of the word parasite from the Greek meaning eating at someone else's table toxoplasmosis you might know as a disease court from cats many of us will have it at some point but the only ones who really get a noticeable infection are newborn babies or patients with compromised immune systems like someone suffering from AIDS it can result in blindness just like the infection on illus Chagas disease malaria leishmaniasis Giardia are just some of the other parasites that can affect the eye but we haven't even got to their really gross stuff yet if you're the kind of person that requires the auto doc to synthesize anti-nausea drugs then it's probably best you look away now as I'm going to show some pretty unpleasant pictures several types of nematode worms can infect the eye transmitted by an insect burrowing into the skin and then making their way to the sweet sweet eye juices to take up residence in the fluid filled chambers just like in the expanse and causing diseases on earth like river blindness in the book the parasites live in the vitreous humour but in the show they're in front of the iris but I'll allow it radiation anti-cancer treatment appears to be protective though in that first video I said that the uncas idols are perhaps the most fanciful science fiction which is a shame of course because cancer is such a huge killer right here on earth today radiation is likely to be a huge problem for space travel a two-and-a-half year mission to Mars is estimated to be the equivalent of 18,000 chest x-rays so without going into the radiation side of things again in this season we learned that the uncas idol drugs can be protective from these green parasites infections like the ones we just discussed are treated with anti wormy drugs like diethyl carbonate een and anti microbials now would these appear in anti-cancer drug regimens well maybe we don't know what in those uncas idols syringes but we do sometimes give prophylactic antibiotics to alongside chemotherapy and there is research ongoing at the moment into enlisting the body's own immune system to snuff out cancerous cells before they cause trouble so we could imagine that there is some immune system booster in the future which allows sufferers to beat those green lobbies themselves now incidentally if you see any products advertised online today claiming that they can boost your immune system that's nonsense it is quite literally science fiction funnily enough in areas of the world where wormie infections called helminths are endemic we note quite low rates of immune system disorders like inflammatory bowel disease multiple sclerosis rheumatoid arthritis asthma so unbelievably research is taking place which deliberately infect sufferers of autoimmune disease with helminths to see if that will help lovely stuff Elvie gets very excited in the book due to something called convergent evolution where organisms which have evolved separately reached the same solution to a certain problem a classic example is wings insects bats birds all splits off from the Tree of Life millions of years ago but yet have striking similarities this is how the angka sidles ended up killing the bugs because they evolved to use a similar chemical pathway to cancer cells another example of convergent evolution is that on most habitable exoplanets the main source of energy will be the nearest star or stars other sources of energy may be things like geothermal energy we know that's not the case on illis so life there will likely have evolved a way to convert light into energy ie photosynthesis it doesn't use chlorophyll like on earth although the microbes are green like earth plant and this explains why they make their way to the human eye because after all that's where light enters the body it's not common to need to sample fluid from within the eye itself normally just swabs or scrapings from the sir the eye are enough but occasionally it is done and most importantly it looks cool on TV the very concept of how we might interact with alien life is fascinating all life on Earth evolved from the same origin so every life form on earth shares at least some features for example all the earth life uses left-handed isomers of amino acids and right-handed isomers of sugars molecules that have a left and right-handedness are called chiral we have no idea if that would be the case on another planet and hence the settlers on Ellis if they decided they wanted to eat a plant or an animal they might not even be able to digest it and by the same token our own immune systems might be completely useless against local pathogens in the book LV talks about life on Ellis beam by Cairo the concept of mirror life using molecules of different chirality to us has been explored in sci-fi like Mass Effect or even through the looking-glass when Alice goes into mirror world so this storyline is just phenomenal on every level I give it 5 space lasagnas death slugs well many creatures on earth defend themselves with potent neurotoxins but none that can enter the bloodstream as quickly as the death slugs that I'm aware of the book explains the slugs are just accidental lethal bastards not actually using the neurotoxin as a defense mechanism regrowth gel well this one is potentially not that far off don't get me wrong we're no where near regrowing digits quite yet but the research is pretty exciting I know this because I started researching a video on the signs behind Deadpool I never made that video but I learnt all about salamanders like axolotls that are favourites of regenerative medicine researchers as they can regrow entire limbs what's more funky is if you remove a tail and a leg from an axolotl and swap them around reattach them they will convert into the correct appendages the tail will become a leg and the leg will become a tail but that's nothing compared to planaria which can be cut into 279 pieces and each will regrow into full organism complete with conditioned neurological responses I don't want to call them memories but that's how they are sometimes reported humans of course don't do this except infants babies can actually regrow the tips of their fingers but please do not attempt to test this out mammals of course normally form scar tissue instead the jezik information is there in ourselves to make a new limb or finger but whereas axolotls can switch the right genes back on and make appropriate stem cells and grow limb we lose that ability and research in the field is trying to find out how we might be able to activate those genes and finally being spaced there's no end of dramatic depictions of what would happen to a human in the vacuum of space and almost all of them get it completely wrong this is probably the best I've seen as we have of course come to expect from the expanse although I would say the physics are a little bit off here as the doors open the air would rush out incredibly quickly and not only would he feel intense agony as his ears violently popped but we would not be able to hear david straithan's dulcet tones almost immediately rather than gradually fading out but hey this is the end of the series and my feeling is that science should never get in the way of drama and storytelling so this is much more poignant anyway that to one side cold when you're in space is not really the issue there's no air to conduct or convict heat away from your skin but don't hold your breath because when the doors open the air would expand inside your lungs just like coming up from a very deep dive with a lung full of air which can be fatal you see teal inject Asia and petechiae forming all over Ashford's skin and eyes these are dilated and burst blood vessels gasses in these superficial tissues and blood vessels would boil and there would be significant tissue damage this is called a bull ism the formation of bubbles beneath the skin when the legendary Joseph Kittinger famously jumped from the edge of space in 90 60 his right glove tour and he developed a bull ISM localized to his right hand swelling to twice the size of his left he made a full recovery though three Soviet astronauts died due to decompression in space but amazingly this also happened to someone who survived not in space but in a vacuum chamber here on earth when a pressure hose came loose I heard over the headset that he was losing suit pressure the tube pressurizing his suit had become disconnected he was in serious danger [Applause] annoyed when any feeling it was just happening so fast you know trying to get the chamber back to his safe pressure and gym to a safe fresh herbs inside the suit as I stumbled backwards I could feel the slide on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious current belief is that a human would be able to recover without disastrous injury if exposed to the vacuum of space for less than about 90 seconds something that we see right in the first series as I mentioned earlier unfortunately the channels taking a bit of a backseat temporarily I had hoped to get this out at the end of last year so forgive me this little retrospective but 2019 was a big year for the channel I started on just under 7,000 subs I ended and around 150,000 and I've got all of you to thank for that well and Tom Scott it was the year I got insanely lucky to have joined a group of amazing educational creators like real engineering Wendover tears ooh Thomas Frank's cinema wins CGP Grey Goose Gazoo and loads more we started up nebula a new streaming service without the YouTube algorithmic sword of Damocles hanging over us but not a day goes by that I'm not crippled by imposter syndrome around these subscriber millionaires some viewers will you help me crush them yes if I can throw superior sign up figures for the curiosity stream nebula bundle in this do you successful handsome faces then perhaps they'll stop making me eat on the floor there are literally thousands of good reasons to sign up for this honestly fantastic deal that will benefit you directly but spite competitiveness and insecurity have always been my main motivators in life so perhaps you think the same way this is also the first year I got sponsors and curiosity stream have supported me more than any other from my very first sponsored video about transfusing young blood into old people - one about medical torture right through to this one about eye parasites so they probably think I'm some sort of twisted weirdo but I don't even mind because they're awesome they have thousands of high-quality vetted documentaries which you can access for only two dollars 99 a month if you're a space fan you are spoiled for choice you can learn about exoplanets like illis except they're real but my pick has got to be destination moon a series exploring how we could colonize Luna our first step into the world of the expanse and not only accuracy stream supported me but they're offering you a completely free subscription to nebula where you'll find all your favorite educational creators for no additional cost war what is it good for well not being recommended by the YouTube algorithm that's what so videos like my Holocaust one or real engineering's nebula original series on the logistics of d-day can be made thanks to nebula acting as a platform that's run by us not a corporate overlord there are no pre-roll ads and most importantly no punitive algorithm stopping us from tackling certain topics so to enjoy not only everything curiosity stream has to offer as well as access to all these educational creators Polly ground of new ideas sign up at the link below and use the promo code midlife to get a month free if you decide to continue after that it's only two dollars 99 a month I'm always humbled by how many of you asked if I have a patreon but instead sign up for this offer and you get something out of it instead of giving me money directly that I'll just spend go in Bob or Rome for ba

Channel: Medlife Crisis

Views: 115,008

Rating: 4.9681678 out of 5

Keywords: Medlife Crisis, Medicine, Science, Education, Comedy, Doctor, Cardiology, Medical School, The Expanse, Sci fi, Astronaut, Space, Mars, NASA, Artemis, Moon, Space exploration, Space medicine, Doctor watches, Real doctor reacts, Dr Mike, Microgravity, Weightlessness, James A Corey, Daniel Abraham, Amazon Prime, Surgery, Cibola Burn, Evolution, Vacuum of space, doctor mike

Id: c8lOgJ70rKQ

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kuikuilla]

So basically: everything in space wants to kill you. Even your body.

[u/MedlifeCrisis]

Damn you were fast! Thanks for posting, appreciate it. You all contributed to this in a big way. I posted here a few weeks ago asking for medical topics you wanted covered and I incorporated most of them :)

Hope you like it, bit long but I wanted to get quite detailed. Thanks all!

[u/Nano_Burger]

As an American, I measure everything in Planck lengths.

[u/hamlet_d]

Anyone know the movie(s) shown at around 15:45 and 16:00?

[u/Drgnmztr]

Wow... um.. that was insightful. I'll just wait until they get all the bugs worked out before I go into space. LOL

[u/RedditWurzel]

I still remember watching his first video about this topic some time ago

[u/gessyca]

I would rather see an astronaut discuss the expanse with an astrophysicist than a regular md

[u/fvieira]

!remindme 2 days

[u/Secundius]

As I recall, in the Movie "Titan" volunteer astronauts have to be themselves "Terraformed" to be able physically live on Titan's surface. Which pretty much means that they can never come home without a Spacesuit simulating the atmosphere of Titan...