It is a fascinating topic if you have an interest in the long term prospects for humanity to expand off-planet: how will low gravity affect reproduction.
If this Japanese mouse study is anything to go by, sex in zero-gee might be athletic fun, but it may be bad for fertile eggs:
What I'm most curious to know is whether mice (or humans) conceived and born on the Moon will look different and be capable of adapting to full Earth gravity. The suspicion could be that a low gravity human would grow tall and thin, but nature has a way of confounding such predictions, so maybe they would be small instead. As someone somewhere has suggested before, maybe grey aliens are the time travelling descendants of off-planet humanity......the group reported that the growth of fertile eggs slows in a near-zero-gravity environment, lowering the birthrate by half when the eggs are put back into the wombs of mice.
The eggs of humans, as a mammal, could face the same problem, the scientists said...
"If we find out how much gravity is needed for a (human) fertile egg to grow, we may be able to know if a baby can be born at a lunar base," said Teruhiko Wakayama of Riken Center for Developmental Biologyin Kobe, who headed the joint group with Hiroshima University.
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