It’s the latter. What I mentioned is still impossible, though, as brewha can tell you.
Now there’s a phrase we definitely don’t hear enough.
I remember watching some doco many years ago on russian cosmonauts and how when they get into space after a few days there faces puff up as the blood is pump to there head is now greater since there is no gravity but after a few days it goes down and acts normal. They also had a thing where the Russian scientist beleaved if we lived in space we would eventually evolve and some of the things that would change would be our arms would become longer and our legs would become shorter and torso would become longer. They had a whole list of reasons why, i just cant think of them off the top of my head as it was years ago i saw this doco.
Post #3. Although Stranger covered it more thoroughly.
Beuller? … Beuller?
PBS had a show on just last night that touched on this.
If you spend too much time in zero-G, you lose muscle mass. Your heart actually gets smaller, and you lose strength pretty much all over. In as little as a week or so, you get a noticeable effect. Hence the exercise equipment on the space station.
The right person doing that with the right technique in the right state of (un)dress could probably make a fair bit of money selling videos.
Why does it need velocity? Wouldn’t it just float away? Failing that, couldn’t we just move away from it? Fish poop underwater and I’m not aware of any special mechanism they have to ‘shoot’ it out.
One method of natural childbirth involves gving birth underwater. This would seem to negate gravity’s role in it.
I’m not sure I’d accept the premise, that we’re just as suited to zero G as we are to one G. Yes, we can live through long stretches of zero G, but not without some significant physiological changes. And that’s only based on a matter of several months in micro. What type of animal would result from 50 or 100 generations in zero G? My bet is that it would be different. How different is interesting speculation, but there would some changes. That is a move toward speciation. We have evolved within the influence of Earth’s gravity, and it is no doubt reflected in features that are and may not be so obvious. I think it’s a bit of a reach to suggest that that force has been irrelevant.
Fish do indeed swim away from it. And they’re in water, which helps. People aren’t, always (usually, anymore), and people waste can be notoriously tenacious. Right now the weight due to gravity helps to force it away. Resistance against air is nothing compared to resistance against water. Unless you want to reach in with your hand (which, in a way, some creatures do), you take advantage of the helping hand of gravity.
Not inside the mother’s body it doesn’t, and that’s where I suspect gra vity is helping.
I wasn’t thinking of any systems in particular, as they are, but wondering how they evoloved to function independent of gravity, which seems like a useful force to do some free work. Though I admit being guilty of giving gravity too much credit, as it is a relatively weak force compared to others involved in a complex organism, and didn’t account for most of our blueprints coming together in creatures of the sea, where it was pointed out gravity is a bit more ambiguous. I am still curious, is there any known organism that would not function in a low gravity environment?
Growing seeds push their shoots up, and their roots down. They need gravity to tell up from down.
or so I’m told
I’m not sure this is correct. When floating, the body is supported by pressure from the water. The parts of the body that are deeper experience greater pressure. This effectively squeezes the blood and organs upward. I think anything trying to move downward, whether in the body or not, would be fighting this pressure.