Darshana Narayanan, “Baby-Making on Mars” | Pioneer Works

On January 15th, 2026, IPK Fellow Darshana Narayanan penned an essay for Pioneer Works titled “Baby-Making on Mars.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

Humanity has entered a new era of space exploration. This time, we don’t just want to visit, we want to stay. From Musk and Bezos to former NASA administrator Michael Griffin and the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, advocates for moving off-planet increasingly frame the need to migrate as imperative to our survival, key to withstanding existential threats and building long-term resilience. But if getting to space will be a feat of engineering, staying there will be a feat of biology.

We’ll need to conceive and raise children away from Earth. Mothers and their young—not towering rockets—will bear the most weight of our space dreams. It’s through them that humanity will transform into a multi-planetary species. And for all the excitement about venturing into space, we know astonishingly little about how life there will affect pregnancies or child development—and, by extension, the future evolution of our species.

Whether space can actually save us remains far from certain.

Read the full article here.

Illustration by Mike McQuade