Living Document
The Unknown Unknowns
This page tracks what we don't know about long-duration spaceflight. Including the gaps we suspect exist but can't even describe yet.
Risk Classification
Quantified Risks
Oxygen consumption rate. Bone loss per month. Water requirements. These are measured, documented, and engineers can design around them. Most of this site covers known knowns.
Identified Gaps
Can humans reproduce in space? What happens psychologically at 150-person scale? How does 0.38g affect long-term health? We know the questions. We just don't have answers yet. These can be researched.
Ignored Data
Submarine crews, Antarctic winter-overs, prison populations. All of them have produced data that nobody has fully cross-referenced against space habitation. The dots exist. Nobody's connected them yet.
The Blind Spots
Risks we can't even articulate because we've never been in the conditions that would reveal them. We obviously can't list them all. But we can map out where they're most likely hiding.
Unk-Unk Territories Being Tracked
These are the areas where surprises are most likely to show up
What happens to the human genome after 2, 5, 10 generations in reduced gravity and elevated radiation? New epigenetic changes? Unusual genetic drift? Nobody alive has ever spent their entire life off-Earth. The second generation may reveal problems we can't currently predict.
Bacteria evolve in confined environments. ISS microbiome studies already show mutation and adaptation. In a 150-person closed system over years, what do gut bacteria, skin bacteria, and environmental bacteria turn into? Could new pathogens emerge from our own microbiome?
150 people in a sealed environment with no outside authority, no way to leave, and no new arrivals. What kind of social order forms? Democracy? Authoritarianism? Something new? No simulation has accurately predicted how confined populations self-organize at this scale and duration.
No human has ever lived permanently in a sealed artificial environment. Does the brain adapt? Do entirely new psychological conditions emerge that have no equivalent on Earth? Prison psychology is the closest analog, and it's deeply unhealthy.
How do habitat materials, seals, electronics, and structural components hold up after 10-20 years in Martian dust, temperature swings, and radiation? ISS data covers some of this, but the Mars surface environment is different in ways we may not fully understand yet.
What happens when psychological wear, physical deconditioning, CO2-impaired thinking, and social factions all hit at the same time in a crew that has to maintain its own life support? We study these variables one at a time. They don't happen one at a time. This is the cascade problem at its deepest.
We can't list what we don't know.
But we can narrow down
where the surprises are hiding.
This page will grow as new blind-spot territories get identified. Each long-duration mission and isolation study chips a bit off the unknown territory. For the questions we can already name, see The Open Problems.