Planet Pailly

Today I’d like to share an amusing photograph from the early days of space exploration. This is Ham the Chimpanzee.

His name comes from the laboratory that trained him for his mission: the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center. That’s important to know because Ham’s training is a key part of his story.

Ham was not just another confused and frightened animal strapped into a rocket and launched into space (though it sounds like he was definitely very frightened during his trip). Ham had a mission. He had a job to do during his flight. And he did it.

Specifically, Ham was trained to push a lever when he saw a flashing blue light. During training, he was rewarded with a banana pellet if he did his job correctly (he was also punished with electric shocks if he did his job incorrectly).

Ham’s success was significant because it proved that even under the physical stresses of space flight, it is possible to respond to visual stimuli and perform basic tasks. A human astronaut would therefore be able to operate the controls of a spacecraft during flight, which was an important thing for NASA to know in the early days of space exploration.

P.S.: I assume human astronauts are still rewarded with banana pellets when they do a good job (and also punished with mild electric shocks when they do their jobs incorrectly).

Links

Ham (Chimpanzee) from Wikipedia.

A Brief History of Animals in Space from NASA.

Ham the Astrochimp: Hero or Victim? from The Guardian.

Let’s say we’ve found a human-friendly planet orbiting another star, and we’ve decided to go colonize it. How many people should we send? In terms of maintaining a healthy human gene pool, what’s the minimum viable population for a distant, isolated space colony?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent many a sleepless night pondering that question.

I sincerely doubt anyone can provide us with a firm, specific number. However, there is a sort of generalized rule of thumb in the field of conservation biology called the 50/500 rule.

Originally proposed in 1980 by geneticist Ian Franklin and biologist Michael Soule, the 50/500 rule tells us:

• Populations below 50 are under near-term threat of extinction due to inbreeding.
• Populations below 500 are under long-term threat of extinction because the gene pool is too small to adapt to environmental changes.

Except the 50/500 rule is not a hard scientific law. It’s just a rule of thumb, and it has many, many detractors.

Even Michael Soule, one of the co-creators of the rule, seems to have gotten pretty frustrated by the way people took the rule literally. Here’s an interesting and, I think, revealing article about some endangered parrots. A team of conservationists contacted Soule, asking if they should even bother trying to save these parrots, because there were only 48 left.

There also an argument to be made that the numbers 50 and 500 are too low and that a 100/1000 rule would be more appropriate. And of course, can we really apply this rule to all species equally when some species reproduce more rapidly than others or face different kinds of environmental challenges, etc, etc….

Still, if we’re trying to imagine a colony of humans on some distant world, a colony struggling for short-terma and/or long-term survival, I think the 50/500 rule at least gives us a good place to start.