IF YOU are a person that believes in getting up early to seize the day, it is likely you will never be selected to colonise Mars.
This is based off new research into the impact a disrupted body clock could have on those partaking in space travel — in particular those headed to colonise the red planet.
Lead researcher Professor Andrew Loudon said as days on Mars are 37 minutes longer than here on Earth, night owls would adapt better to the planet’s slower rotation.
“The rotation speed of Mars may be within the limits of some people’s internal clock, but people with short running clocks, such as extreme morning types, are likely to face serious intractable long-term problems, and would perhaps be excluded from any plans NASA has to send humans to Mars,” he told The Telegraph.
“The prospect of settling on Mars is a somewhat distant prospect.
“But if we ever do get to the Red Planet, I suspect we will be faced with body clock problems; those people with abnormally slow body clocks would be best suited to living there.”
Prof Loudon said he expected sleep patterns to be a consideration by NASA when deciding the best candidates to colonise Mars.
“A correctly ticking body clock is essential for normal survival in the wild, and this has to be in phase with the rotation speed of the Earth,” he said.
“Animals with clocks that do not run in synchrony with Earth are selected against.
“Thus, the body clock has evolved as an essential survival component for life on Earth.”
To come to this conclusion, Prof Loudon and a team of scientists from Holland, Germany and the UK studied mice with the ability to speed up the natural circadian cycle from 24 to 20 hours.
For the next 14 months, animals with 24-hour or 20-hour clocks shared a pen in an outside environment.
During this period, mice with fast-running clocks gradually became less common and by the end of the study, the population was dominated by animals with 24-hour clocks.
From this, researchers were able to demonstrate the value of having an internal body clock that matches the speed of the earth’s rotation.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.