The astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson commented that ‘dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked the opposable thumbs and brainpower to build a space programme’

Yet although we now have the technological ability to leave Earth, scientists have found another stumbling block to colonising new worlds - our own immune system.

Although it is said we are all made of ‘star stuff’ when it comes to travelling away from our home planet humans are far more vulnerable to the rigours of space than our interstellar origins might suggest.

Billions of years of evolution has effectively backed mankind into a corner of the Solar System that it may be now be tricky to leave.

A team of scientists from Russia and Canada analysed the effect of microgravity on the protein make-up in blood samples of 18 Russian cosmonauts who lived on the International Space Station for six months.