Last week NASA put a spacecraft back on the Moon for the first time in half a century.
The idea is to get humans back up there in the near future as well, and there’s always talk about set up a lunar colony, maybe even a human base on Mars.
You probably know that there are already lots of scientists and technicians trying to figure out everything it would take to make these far-off places safe and habitable for humans.
And there are also people trying to figure out the ways those civilizations will mirror the ones here on Earth, and how they might be different.
For example: what if a human colony on Mars ends up developing its own accent?
It’s one of those questions that most of us wouldn’t think to ask, but when we hear it, we say, actually, that makes a lot of sense.
Accents typically form when people in particular places, or within the particular communities or groups, adopt the same ways of pronouncing words, the same vocabularies, the same ways of speaking.
And there’s research that shows this works even when people come from a variety of places come together.
In 2019, there was a study about researchers who worked in Antarctica over that continent’s winter.
They included five people with accents from southern England, three with accents from northern England, one from the northwest United States, one from Germany and one from Iceland.
So there was a range of accents within the group.
But over time, every single person in the group started changing the way they pronounced specific sounds so that they sounded more alike.
It wasn’t a conscious thing, nobody set language rules, they just started sounding more and more alike.
Imagine sending a small group of people like these Antarctic researchers on a rocket to somewhere else in the solar system.
Who knows what kind of accent might develop!
In fact, the longer humans are on another celestial body, maybe we could even have more than one accent develop.
One astronaut might have a distinctly southern Martian accent, not to be confused with the noticeably different-sounding northern Martians accent.
I like to think I have a pretty thick Earth accent, myself.
Here’s a device that can save street artists a lot of time and effort.
Ukrainian artist Vitaly Tesh has developed the Graffiti Color Mixer.
With help from hydraulic pressure and 3D printing, he can start spray painting with one color and then switch over to a different color without having to change cans or even stop painting!
Will future colonists on the moon and Mars develop new accents? (Live Science)
A Clever Color Mixer That Puts Different Hues Into a Single Spray Paint Can (Laughing Squid)
Back our show on Patreon and help spread this show from one end of the galaxy to the other
Image by Les Bossinas of NASA Lewis Research Center, via Wikicommons
