Let’s Talk About Sex
If we want to live on Mars, we need to talk about what nobody’s talking about.
25 February 2025
You wake to the hum of recycled air. The light above your bunk cycles from red to yellow to cool white — artificial dawn on a world vastly different from the one you left behind. You listen for movement in the narrow corridor: a cough, a zipper, the metallic hiss of the habitat door seals. There’s comfort in the routine, but beneath it hums another kind of loneliness — one that has no protocol, no checklist, no oxygen gauge.
Here, where every breath depends on perfect machinery, you find yourself missing the imperfect things: the accidental brush of a hand, the smell of another person’s skin after sunlight.
But in the colonies of the future, those might be the rarest luxuries of all.
Mars will not make survival easy. But in its vastness, it offers something that Earth rarely does anymore — a blank page. And on that page, we will have to rewrite everything we know about how humans connect.
That’s where Dr. Simon Dubé comes in — a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and Chief of Psychosocial Medicine at the Advanced Space Life Research Institute. Dubé and his colleagues have coined a field called space sexology — the study of intimacy, love, and sexuality beyond Earth.
“It’s quite embarrassing how little we know about human sexuality in space,” he says. “Space sexology is the field that studies everything that has to do with extraterrestrial eroticism — intimacy, sexuality, and love beyond our planet.”
For most of space history, we’ve treated the topic like a cosmic embarrassment. Sex in space is either the butt of a joke or the subject of silence. But Dubé warns that the silence itself is a danger. Because silence, when stretched over years and light-minutes, becomes a kind of vacuum — one that pulls at the edges of who we are until something snaps.
The Silences We Carry to Other Worlds
For decades, sex and intimacy have existed in a strange, paradoxical position in space exploration. Engineers designed habitats capable of withstanding meteor strikes; psychologists studied the effects of isolation and stress. But when it came to perhaps the most instinctual aspect of humanity — the need for connection, for touch, for emotional and physical intimacy — a profound silence settled over the conversation.
“In these high stress, high risk environments like a Mars colony, then would people prioritize the romantic relationships?”
“It’s the inner conservatism of the space environment,” Dubé explains. “Space programs were born out of scientific and military institutions — and those are quite conservative organizations. On top of that, we’re still very immature as a species about human sexuality. We have trouble talking about it, understanding it, studying it. Even though it’s one of the first things people think about, it’s always one of the last things we start doing experiments on.”
For decades, space agencies have built a mythology of the “pure” astronaut: efficient, stoic, immune to desire. In the public imagination, they are minds without bodies, spirits without skin. The subtext was clear — in space, human messiness was a liability.
But Dubé argues that intimacy is not a liability. It’s a life-support system.
“If you suppress basic human needs, you create unnecessary risk,” he says. “It’s better to plan for it, accommodate it, and create systems that support healthy, consensual intimacy.”
In the confined pressure hull of a Mars base, tension builds fast. Long-term isolation leads to irritability, depression, and emotional burnout — symptoms familiar to those who’ve wintered in Antarctic research stations or submarine crews. But on Mars, there will be no rescue flights, no rotation out. When emotional fractures appear, they’ll have to be repaired from the inside.
As humanity eyes long-term stays on the Moon, Mars, and eventually beyond, the silence is becoming untenable. Couples will form. Bonds will deepen. Families may be created. And ignoring these dynamics won't make them disappear.
In fact, it could make them dangerous.
Intimacy is Mission Critical
When you think about a Mars settlement, you imagine domes and solar arrays. But beneath those systems, there’s another structure being built — invisible yet vital — the web of human relationships.
Dubé believes that the success of a colony will depend not just on engineering, but on emotional design.
“I’m actually worried that we’ll be able to drink, breathe, and survive in space — and then people will snap,” he says. “They won’t be able to fulfill their emotional needs. They’ll have trouble finding partners, they’ll experience jealousy, breakups, depression. Someone will snap in a very, very dangerous environment where you need to depend on one another.”
On Mars, the heart becomes a variable in the mission equation.
Every choice — who’s chosen for a crew, who shares a habitat, who’s in charge — has implications that go far beyond logistics. Falling in love with your commander could compromise authority. A breakup could ripple through crew morale. A birth could throw resource calculations into chaos.
And yet, these are the same dynamics that make life meaningful.
“There’s a beautiful concept I like to explore,” Dubé says, “called erotic friendships. Friendships can be the foundation of very strong emotional bonds, and sometimes we underestimate them. On Mars, friendships — even erotic ones — might be what hold people together.”
To survive, settlers will have to learn what many on Earth still struggle with: to love carefully, to communicate openly, and to let go without collapse.
Learning from Earth’s Intimate Cultures
When Dubé imagines how Martians might navigate love and sex, he doesn’t look to NASA. He looks to Earth’s most communicative communities — those that have already built complex emotional architectures around consent, identity, and trust.
“I would look into three important communities,” he says. “The LGBTQ+ community, the kink and BDSM community, and the open-relationship and polyamorous communities. Because they’ve done a really good job with some of the key elements we need in a functional space erotic culture.”
The BDSM community, he notes, emphasizes mutual consent and exhaustive communication. Its practitioners discuss boundaries, risks, and aftercare — habits that could be lifesaving in an environment where a single misunderstanding can endanger the group.
The LGBTQIA+ community models the resilience of chosen families — bonds built on intention rather than tradition. On Mars, where bloodlines and old norms will dissolve in the dust, this may be the template for a new kind of kinship.
And the polyamorous and swinger communities, often misunderstood, have something equally valuable to teach: emotional honesty. “They teach us that being attracted to other people doesn’t have to be a threat to your relationships,” Dubé says. “You can move between structures — monogamy, polyamory, openness — depending on what works for you. We need that flexibility.”
These communities thrive because they assume something most institutions deny — that human connection is not simple, and never has been. The future Martian settlers who survive will be the ones who normalize that complexity instead of repressing it.
“We need to accept gender and sexual diversity, we need to accept the diversity and sexual orientation and preferences...we need to accept that either people are going to bring that baggage with them and that background and those identities, or they’ll be born on Mars or in space with these realities.”
All of these communities, Dubé notes, have one thing in common: they do not assume that love and connection are simple. They accept complexity. They plan for it. They normalize conversations that much of society still treats with discomfort or shame.
On Mars, that acceptance could be the foundation for survival.
The Fragile Physics of Love
Even if we master the psychology, Mars will challenge intimacy at the cellular level.
Microgravity affects blood flow — which makes even arousal unpredictable. Radiation threatens fertility. Habitats, designed for efficiency, rarely include privacy or soundproofing. Even physical closeness — the simple act of sharing body heat — will be constrained by schedules, duties, and the sterile geometry of the living modules.
And yet, Dubé insists these are not reasons for avoidance. They are reasons for research.
“We’re 30 years behind,” he says. “Taboos cannot be an argument for preventing something that’s going to be essential to make us a spacefaring civilization.”
Scientists are already exploring ways to address these barriers. The International Institute of Astronautical Sciences recently tested intrauterine device (IUD) procedures during parabolic flight — a step toward understanding reproductive health in microgravity. Meanwhile, Dubé’s own team is preparing studies for analog missions, including the World’s Biggest Analog, to examine the relationship between sexual functioning, mental health, and crew cohesion in isolated environments.
But beyond biology, the real experiment will be social. It will test whether humanity can create a culture that is both sexually open and emotionally disciplined — capable of balancing autonomy with collective responsibility.
Because on Mars, every relationship will be public. Every secret will echo through thin walls.
Love, Code, and Companionship
Of course, not all intimacy will be human.
Dubé’s journey into space sexology began with technology — studying human-machine erotic interaction, or what he calls erobotics. “Everything that has to do with our relationship with and through technology,” he says, “whether that’s artificial agents, virtual reality, or augmented reality.”
It’s easy to scoff at the idea of sex robots on Mars, but Dubé’s vision is more nuanced. He sees technology not as a replacement for love, but as a tool for emotional survival.
“In space, technology is everywhere. There’s no way to survive without it,” he says. “So why not try to reduce some of the burden related to human intimacy using technology?”
AI companions, haptic interfaces, or virtual lovers could offer more than physical satisfaction. They could help monitor emotional health — acting as therapists, confidants, even early-warning systems for psychological decline.
“You might not want to tell your commander that you fantasize about them,” Dubé laughs. “But you could talk to an artificial partner — and it could help you process that safely.”
As generative AI grows more lifelike, these relationships may challenge our definition of love itself. “Love and intimacy aren’t stable concepts,” Dubé says. “They evolve with our technology and the way we integrate it into our lives. On Mars, under those conditions, it might become more of a necessity. And when it becomes a necessity, humans will adapt.”
Perhaps the first Martian romances will be hybrid — half digital, half flesh. Perhaps love will stretch across latency delays, sustained by avatars and holographic proxies. Perhaps the distinction between “real” and “artificial” will blur entirely, until what matters most is not who we love, but that we do.
Red Dust, Blue Light
The day will come when settlers on Mars won’t remember Earth’s gravity. When love will unfold in one-third weight — slower, suspended, but no less powerful. And when that day comes, our old moralities will feel as distant as the blue dot on the horizon.
To love on Mars will mean to rebuild humanity from its first principles. To ask again what consent means in a closed ecosystem. What family means when births are rationed. What fidelity means when loneliness is a kind of radiation.
In Dubé’s view, none of this is theoretical. It’s survival.
“We need to normalize space life,” he says. “And sex is part of normalizing space life.”
The question, then, is not whether humans will fall in love on Mars. It’s whether our institutions will allow them to — or if settlers will have to invent love in secret, the way their ancestors once did on Earth.
Sex on Mars is not a punchline. It’s a blueprint for survival.
And the time to start building it is now.
Signal Received
The future of space settlement won’t be written only in blueprints and mission plans. It will be written in the quiet, unseen spaces between people—the bonds they build, the needs they honor, the humanity they refuse to abandon even in the cold emptiness of another world.
If we are bold enough to leave Earth, we must be bold enough to carry every part of ourselves with us: not just our ambitions, but our vulnerabilities. Not just our ingenuity, but our longing. Love, intimacy, and connection aren’t distractions from exploration. They are the reasons we explore at all.
What this conversation reminds us is that intimacy is infrastructure. It’s not something extra. It’s not a distraction. It’s a thread that holds the entire social fabric together. Whether shaped by polyamorous networks, chosen families, or the quiet bravery of emotional honesty, love in space will demand that we be more intentional—not less.
And maybe that’s the real gift of distance. Not the miles we put between planets, but the chance to design from scratch—to build ways of loving that are strong enough to hold under pressure.
There will be protocols. There will be pressurized domes. But in some small, shared habitat—under low light and a softly humming oxygen system—someone will brush a hand against another’s wrist. Not because a mission required it.
But because we’re human.
The farther we go from Earth, the more we’ll need to loosen the grip of old assumptions—about love, about gender, about what relationships are supposed to look like.
Out there, where everything is new, maybe love can be too. Not smaller. Not safer. But wider. Stranger. More honest.
We’ll have to get better at asking for what we need. At listening when someone dares to say what they want. We’ll have to create space—not just physically, but emotionally—for people to define connection on their own terms.
Because the future won’t be built in pairs. It’ll be built in constellations—of intimacy, of care, of curiosity.
And if we’re willing to be open to that, we might just find that love doesn’t shrink in space.
Like space itself, it expands. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Simon Dubé for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode titled "Sex and Love on Mars" which aired on 25 February 2025.