How can we genetically engineer ourselves to live on Jupiter’s moons?

Submitted by Trick-Use6124 t3_1267dof in Futurology

I have heard multiple time that the Galilean moons are perhaps the best places in the solar system for humanity to colonize; but what I want to know is if we ever did colonize the Galilean moons, how could we use genetic engineering to make life somewhat bearable?

I’m specifically trying to figure out how our anatomy could be changed to live in underground city environments where the gravity is so low that even something as simple as a small jump can make you fly 8 feet in the air? Would we give ourselves a stature similar to someone with dwarfism to make our movements in lower gravity more controlled and to stop us from jumping to high, as well as to make living in cramped conditions more bearable. Or would we make our bodies denser and heavier to try to “even things out”?

To keep things simple let’s say that the moons aren’t terraformed and that people live underground similar to how people live on Ceres in the Expanse.

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iCameToLearnSomeCode t1_je80ph4 wrote

The fact is that we won't intentionally change our physiology.

We'll go there and our bodies will adapt.

It'll probably kill most of us really young but we'll spend thousands of years using every trick in the book to keep our bodies functioning normally until those of us who can't adapt as well fail to reproduce.

We don't understand gene expression well enough to do a better job of altering it than 3.5 billion years of evolution.

Whales once lived on land and looked like wolves, Europans will view us the same way whales look at wolves today.

The solutions our bodies come up with to adapt to the environment will be unexpected and far better than anything we could plan, for the low low cost of millions of dead people.

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jaa101 t1_je87vdv wrote

Radiation is a severe problem for the Galilean moons except for Callisto. You could probably live metres underground on Ganymede to be adequately shielded but you'd have to arrive and leave very quickly. Only a few days on the surface, or in transit on a spacecraft, would result in a fatal dose of radiation. That's not the kind of problem that you can work around with genetic engineering. Even on Callisto, radiation is over ten times higher than on earth but at least its gravity is 0.13 G.

The non-Galilean moons are all tiny—at least four orders of magnitude less massive—with the surface gravity on Himalia only 0.006 G. Better to choose one of the dozens of larger asteroids which avoid the complications of Jupiter's gravity well.

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