Within the annals of phony viral photographs, the certainly one of former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield holding a bag of weed whereas aboard the Worldwide House Station is correct up there.
The photograph made the rounds in 2018, prompting a fact-check from the web watchdog Snopes.
Within the authentic photograph that was posted to Hadfield’s Twitter account in 2013, he’s seen holding a bag of Easter Eggs.
The web being the web, that very same picture was manipulated years later and reposted by a Fb web page (paradoxically named “Footage in Historical past”), this time with the eggs changed with ganja.
“Not solely is the picture of Chris Hadfield holding a bag of marijuana faux, but it surely’s unlikely that any related (however real) images of astronauts with drug paraphernalia exist, as NASA has been a drug-free office since a minimum of the mid-Nineteen Eighties,” Snopes stated.
However the spurious picture might have been considerably prescient. Late final yr, Hadfield joined the board of BioHarvest Sciences, a biotech agency concerned in medicinal hashish.
In an interview with Futurism that was revealed this week, Hadfield and BioHarvest CEO Ilan Sobel detailed how “area may even be the right setting to provide out-of-this-world, medical-grade cannabinoids.”
“We see the potential capacity for beneficial minor cannabinoids to be grown at considerably larger portions in comparison with its progress on Earth,” Sobel instructed Futurism.
“These distinctive compositions of full-spectrum hashish might have important worth in offering extra optimized therapy options for a lot of palliative ailments the place present pharma synthesized compounds should not delivering satisfactory options,” he added.
However Hadfield instructed Futurism that cannabinoids are just one a part of BioHarvest’s cultivation program, and what actually drew him to the corporate “was the scalability of the biotech platform, and the way it can remedy a variety of the agricultural issues we face in feeding 10 billion individuals.”
As such, BioHarvest “is focusing its efforts on offering future astronauts—and people again on the bottom—with microgravity-enhanced vitamins, quite than a solution to get excessive,” Futurism reported.
Hadfield joined BioHarvest’s Board of Advisers in December, saying on the time that the corporate’s “proprietary platform expertise has the potential to make a major influence on the world in addition to in bio-space science.”
“The corporate has constructed a world-class group of scientists, and I sit up for working with them, with my fellow advisors, to scale BioHarvest’s resolution,” Hadfield stated within the announcement.
Sobel stated on the time that Hadfield’s “unparalleled expertise will assist marry our plant mobile biology experience with area science.”
“He is a superb addition to our advisory board at this part of our progress, and he’ll assist us in our drive to be a worldwide biotech chief,” Sobel stated.
As for that notorious viral picture, Hadfield instructed Futurism that toking in area may not be such an excellent thought.
“On the area station, if there’s an emergency, you’re the hearth division,” he stated. “You may’t have intoxicated your self or inebriated your self or no matter, simply because if one thing goes incorrect, then you definitely’ll die.”
He did depart open the chance, nevertheless.
“As soon as the inhabitants will get massive sufficient, when you get to a steady sufficient scenario, individuals are gonna need, , a drink,” Hadfield instructed Futurism. “Persons are gonna need some pot.”
On the subject of cannabinoids and area, Hadfield and BioHarvest aren’t precisely going “the place no man has gone earlier than.”
In 2020, the ag biotech firm Entrance Vary Biosciences introduced that “it is going to be sending cell cultures of the hemp plant to the Worldwide House Station on a resupply journey,” Rolling Stone reported on the time, including that the “goal of the venture is to see whether or not or not these cells develop any genetic mutations in these situations, and as soon as they return, scientists will analyze their DNA to see if they’ve modified in any respect.”