Superman And the Moon

say in 75 years we are starting moon bases. sort of how the 1950s envisioned them, suburban comunitys on the moon… big funky domes and all that.

now say we have second generation moon men. what level of strength would they have? how strong would an average person born and raised on the moon be? since anything they ever encountered would be like 20% of what it is on earth… even their own weight. to me it seems like a mooninite would be about a quarter over all in strength of a normal human (haveing never had to lift anything heavy in daily life)

what kind of social structure could this lead to?

what if imigrants from earth are rare… (like space flight is only mildly cheaper than it is now, just someone decided a moon base was a must have)

what would the social effect of haveing a new person around that could lift four times the average… or if they were strong on earth… 5 or 10 times…

what would be a realistic happening to the sudden appearance of a “super man”

Whoa mayor whiplash!

You resurrected a memory of a syndicated Sunday comic almost for sure called “New Era” they dealt with this question too. I can only remember the last panel: with less gravity, future generations of selenites will be taller than the earthlings, unfortunately visiting earth could be dangerous for them as bone structure would be weaker. All that because there is less gravity on the moon, so much for the super moon man.

What would be the realistic happening to the sudden appearance of a “super man”? Since few societal and political issues are decided by he-man contests, and since your “super man” wouldn’t exact be immune to a big stick or a firestick, I’d say that it wouldn’t really influence lunar society at all.

Huh? On the Moon (or shall we say “Luna”), all the colonists would be able to lift more-or-less the same amount as any other colonist, subject to the usual variations in human strength. Of course, objects on Luna have just as much mass, so if you gave a shove to something weighing 100 pounds on Luna (which would weigh 600 pounds on Earth), you might find yourself in serious trouble when you tried to make it stop.

Your Lunar colonists certainly wouldn’t be supermen on Earth, where they’d be weighed down by a gravitational field six times greater than what they’d been born under. Quite possibly a Lunar native wouldn’t even be able to walk, and might suffer serious or life-threatening medical problems if they remained on Earth’s surface for very long–astronauts in freefall for extended periods of time (on space stations) suffer losses of bone and muscle mass, but no one has ever spent more than a few days in Lunar gravity, let alone been born and raised there, so we don’t really know for sure what the effects on human physiology would be of lifetime exposure to lower gravity.

So, ah, what’s the debate about, anyway? Do you just want to debate what a world with “supermen” in it would be like (socially speaking), or where you going for something more GQ-ish along the lines of “What would people born in a Lunar colony be like, physically speaking?”

This all means that the moon will probably become a retirement mecca. There would be less problems with the lessing of bone mass and falling would not be a big problem. :smiley:

Well, your supermen would, as far as we can tell to date, be dependent upon ongoing medical treatments to avoid life-threatening alterations in their bone structure, ligament attachments, and cardiovascular function integrity. I assume the protocols for successfully dealing with these effects over a lifetime are solved by your proposed seventy five year future date.

It isn’t just hard to stop a six hundred pound object, by the way, it is just as resistant to initial acceleration as it is on earth. So, pushing things is no easier, only lifting things. The relationship of weight and mass would be different, since mass would be the same, and weight much less. Throwing things would be a very hard thing to learn to do, on the moon, if you had not grown up there. All the trajectories are wrong. Pitched balls would be no faster, nor hit the glove any easier. You could certainly throw curve balls, but sinkers would be hell to throw. I don’t know what a knuckle ball would do. But the hit ball would travel a lot farther. Baseball would suck even more than it does on Earth.

Football would be an entirely different game, since fast starts are no easier, but jumping and vaulting are a piece of cake. The bullet pass is just not going to be the same, since it has to be dead flat, or it won’t come down for three or four hundred yards. Forget the long bomb, the game won’t last long enough for one. Punting and kicking are just flat out of the question, unless the field is six times larger in all directions.

Or boxing. A good stiff uppercut, if landed just right would lift the guy into the air! He has no leverage, and you can keep him up in the air for as long as you can land jabs up into his solar plexus. You could flip a guy over! Short guys would rule. As soon as someone jerked his head and shoulders upward to avoid a punch from a smaller man, his momentum would leave him on his tiptoes, waiting for a sucker punch to lift him clear of the ground! Even punching the shorter man gives up stability, and grounds the opponent even more.

Intense aerobic activity is much different as well, if the atmosphere is at a lower pressure. There are many engineering plans that consider one quarter or less the normal pressure of sea level to be preferable, even given the fire hazard of more highly oxygenated air. But there is very little good data on the effect of such environments on aerobic development, or sustained respiratory effort such as sports in a low gee, low pressure environment. What growing up in one would do is an as yet unstudied field.

Nope, not supermen. Technology dependent specialists.

Tris

By my reading, the OP is asking what would happen if an earth-born human showed up on the moon, significantly stronger than anyone else.

Like Czarcasm said, not much. Compare the powerlifters of this world to the average man: they may be four times stronger. Does it matter? No.

Oops. I see you’re right, ultrafilter; I misread that part of the OP.

IIRC Arthur Clark mentioned a child born on the moon in the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey who had unusually delicate bone structure.

oh gawd! I thought this was another BZ0000 thread for a second.

If studies into astronauts in 0G are anything to go by, they wouldn’t be stronger at all - quite the opposite. Their muscles would be smaller, and their bones more brittle, due to the reduced gravitational pull to which earthbound people are constantly subject - less work needed for the muscles, and less calcium needed in the bones.

Wasn’t that the original explanation for Superman’s strength, that his home planet of Krypton had lower gravity than Earth?

Bras will not be needed on the moon, no more sagging breasts.

Partly: the difference between Krypton’s red sun and Earth’s yellow sun (“yellow solar radiation”) figured in as well.

Fenris

Oops…and the original explaination was that Kryptonians were “more highly developed” then Earthmen.

The gravity/sun one came about in the early '50s IIRC

Krypton was a much larger planet than earth, hence had higher gravity. Hey, would the BBC get it wrong?

Inertia is not the only thing that makes pushing difficult. Don’t forget friction.

For example, pushing an object of even a few dozen pounds across a regular floor will be quite a formidable task on earth, but would be a lot easier on the moon because the object is not digging into the floor as forcefully.

For a truly memorable example of these effects, find an object – preferably one whose mass is many many tons, such as a power boat – which is floating in the water. Standing on the dock, give it a push. It will take some time until you overcome the inertia, but then the negligible friction will allow it to move on its own even without pushing, and your continued pushing will simply accelerate it. But then watch out, as it will be difficult to stop!

Of course, the emigrant retirees would have to survive a multiple-g boost from the Earth’s surface to get there…
For a novel in which this subject is fairly prominent, I’d recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. The politics of the book are a bit kooky and the weird speech patterns of its narrator take some getting used to, but it is a good read nonetheless. Definitely my favorite Heinlein.

Larry Niven has a number of stories in which the themes of different gravitational fields affecting body development and comfort are addressed. Niven talked about residents of the Moon, and “Belters” - residents, mostly miners, who lived among the asteroids and had even less of a G-field to deal with.

  • Rick

That sword cuts both ways. There will be less floor friction from the objet you are moving but your feet will have less traction on the floor by the same factor.