It's Tough Being An Astronaut!

We have always considered gravity as the foe that drags us down and dreamed of how liberating it would be to float in the weightlessness of space! The absence of gravity for even a few days accelerated the astronauts’ physical degeneration. We found changes in their bodies of the kind that we typically associate with aging. Could it be that living without the downward pull of gravity was actually detrimental? We observed that by merely returning to their active lives on Earth, the astronauts could quickly be restored to full fitness. It became obvious that gravity is a greater contributor to good health than anyone had previously thought. We discovered that living without gravity is like being immobilized, since leg muscles, bones, and the brain and spinal programs that regulate our movements are no longer needed and atrophy. Nothing speeds up brain atrophy like immobilization. Gravity can’t help us when we’re sitting! It tells why, when, how often, how much, and exactly how you can make the most effective use of gravity for lifelong health and vigor. Preventive health care starts at home with a foundation of constant motion to reset and sustain health, strength, confidence, and vigor. If this systems works for the astronauts, it can certainly work for you! However, living in space profoundly magnifies the changes that normally take a lifetime to appear. On Earth, from age 20 we lose roughly 1 percent of our bone density a year. Yet astronauts in space lose 1.6 percent of their bone density a month, and some have lost as much as 1 percent in a single week! This is on top of their muscles becoming weaker, their immune systems being suppressed, and their sleep being disturbed.

Grown Up Wrong

And when they first return from space, they have less stamina, they shuffle when walking, and they have lost their sense of balance. It’s tough being an astronaut! Fortunately, these dramatic changes are reversed after astronauts return home and commence a recovery regimen. So what exactly is their secret to restoring full health? John Glenn’s memorable return to space in 1998 on the shuttle Discovery once more highlighted the fact that astronauts returning from space show a pattern of symptoms that collectively resemble those seen in older persons. The medical community initially concluded in the early 1970s, when these observations were first made during the Skylab missions, that astronauts grow old faster in space. However, it soon became clear that astronauts fully recover shortly after they return to their normal lives on the ground. Was this a reversal of the aging process? And were astronauts really aging more quickly in space? But we found we couldn’t keep human subjects immersed in water up to their necks for more than a few hours at a time because of prune skin and other problems. After trying a few conditions, it was determined that simply lying flat on one’s back reduced the pull of gravity on the body sufficiently to allow the effects to be studied. In my years of conducting research on this question, I used healthy young men and women volunteers to study the effects of space flight, as closely as could be induced by lying in bed continuously, without getting up to go to the bathroom or for any other reason. Surely these volunteers couldn’t be growing old faster merely by lying in bed! I learned from my research that how quickly they and astronauts recovered largely depended on how many days they had been in bed or in space. Like others, I had initially believed that advanced age in a subject would further slow down this rate of recovery, but I was proven wrong. From this and many other observations and experiments, I arrived at the conclusion that astronauts do not in fact grow older in space. The lack of gravity causes a rapid progression of the kinds of changes in their bodies that we on Earth associate with age.

Something Got Me Started

Communicating through an electronic synthesizer and raised eyebrows, a beaming Hawking said, The zero gravity bit was wonderful. I could have gone on and on. It is a part of nature, a force of the universe. It holds the world together and we are all linked by it. Gravity exerts its stimulating benefits on the human body in many different ways. When you stand upright, you feel the pull of gravity as it pulls you down to Earth. Gravity firmly grounds us. It determines how we look, how we function, and what we weigh. Therefore, how we orient ourselves toward this invisible, colorless, odorless, silent force determines how we use the gravity vector to stimulate different parts of the body. You can run faster with less effort if you’re running downhill because gravity pulls at your body, helping you down. It is gravity that slows you as you try to run uphill away from it. Given how pleasant it feels to be free of gravity’s downward pull, it is hardly surprising that life forms started out in water, where they are spared gravity’s maximum influence.

The End Of The End

Plants on Earth’s surface have limited mobility and use gravity in relatively simple ways. They derive directional cues of up or down, and use gravity to separate and layer their internal components in a way that controls their growth and development. Whether we are talking about plants, animals, or humans, the gravity vector not only acts on the whole body, but on its component parts as well. How, then, do we keep from sloshing down onto the floor? Our bodies are held in place by physical surfaces, such as cell membranes, that isolate their different constituents. When you stand up, gravity pulls your blood toward your feet, and your heart must pump hard against gravity to send blood back up to your head. Gravity makes particles in a liquid settle, and makes liquids mix or separate, as in salad dressing. Cell structure and function, as well as organ development, were designed so that they would not collapse when pulled down by gravity.