I’d want to live on the moon (or in a space habitat) because the moon is a harsh mistress*. I’m tired of idiots all around me. Idiots would have a very short life expectancy on the moon. Anyone too stupid or arrogant would manage to kill him/herself off quickly. I think that I would get along with my fellow Lunies much better than I get along with most people.
I’ve had arthritis since I was in my early twenties, and I was slender at the time. Now that I’m staring 50 in the face, and not slender any longer, my arthritis is much worse. A low gravity environment would be great. Maybe I’d never be able to set foot on Earth again, but just not being in pain all the time would make up for a great deal. Blue skies and fresh air are nice, but I seem to be allergic to the whole outdoors, and during the spring and fall I pretty much have to live indoors with the air filters going 24/7 anyway.
Food, water, air, other supplies…many people have considered the problems of living in space, and have come up with some interesting ideas. It might not be easy, but I think it can be done, and I think that we’d learn a lot of useful information finding out what works, information that might also be applied to earth.
Some people want to go live in a log cabin out in the woods. I want to live on a steel beach on the moon*.
*Those of you who know what I’m talking about, know what I’m talking about.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing up a thread in which I prove that anyone who lives in space (at least during the pioneering days) will never have to put up with the likes of Pat Robertson and his ilk for very long, if at all. If that ain’t a good enough reason to colonize space, I don’t know what is.
There were lots of “Pat Robersons” during the early days of the wild west. Preachers have always been among the first professions to move to exotic locations. Think of Spanish priests in the New World of the 1500’s.
And it there are any aboriginal inhabitants on other worlds, you can bet we earthlings will try to save their souls…halleluyah…
Well, I don’t have a cite for the hand-eye co-ordination thing, but the Soviets managed to set many records for extended stay in space, including a 2 man crew who spent more than a year in orbit onboard Mir. Soviet space program - Wikipedia
I imagine a great deal of our long term knowledge of extended micro-gravity physiology comes from them, and from animal research… I have no cite, again, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that several generations of lab mice have been bred on the ISS or in Mir back before it was re-entered.
Ah, but has been pointed out, conditions in space are much harsher than they ever were in the old west. Are you going to be willing to put up with some preacher harranging you (and that air he’s using is going to be costing him money) when you know that a slight puncture to his space suit means it’s all over for him? And no one will ever know that it wasn’t an accident. Any devoutly religious folks in space will quickly adopt the benign attitude of Buddhists and the Amish, or they’ll be kool aid drinkers who’re more interested in “checking out” than bothering folks.
This is the result of three things; one, that the bulky, pressurized suits they wear are massive and awkward. Think of trying to do roofing work in one of those big Disneyland costumes with a paper mache head and you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to work in one of those. Second, in free-fall, there’s no gravity to hold you in place; thus, when you go to turn a wrench, you turn the other direction unless you’ve braced yourself. Applying 50 ft-lbs of torque to a bolt means that you have to apply the equivilent couple somewhere else (with your other arm or legs). Third, in a free fall environment, you have no innate sense of orientation; even after you’ve acclimatized, it’s still very easy to become disoriented. Even a small amount of gravity is enough to prevent this.
While you’d still have some issues in an enclosed, low gravity environment, you’d be able to work without a bulky suit and would have some gravity to stabilize you. It would be not unlike working underwater (with low gravity being replaced by bouyancy) and we managed to perform major construction activities in such an environment with managable difficulty.
This is a free fall environment, i.e. there is no net gravitational force. (There is still measurable gravity at the altitude of the ISS or Mir, but it is negated by the acceleration of the station and contents going around in its orbit.) Again, we have no body of data for the effects of a long-term low gravity non-free fall environment on terrestrial mammals that would relate to humans. I would expect that there is some threshold below which deleterious physiological effects would manifest, but we have no idea what that would be or what effects would predominate.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but your reasoning seems to go like this:
0G = Bad
.5G = Not so good
1G = Good
But following that reasoning, we could then say:
0G = Bad
.5G = Not so good
1G = Good
1.5G = Better
2G = Excellent!
I think until we know more it’s dangerous to assume the effects of gravity work that way on human physiology. It could turn out low-gravity has some long-term negative effects but it could also turn out low-gravity is even better for humans than normal gravity. Perhaps the reduced strain on the body over the course of a life-time results in even longer life-times.
True, but weren’t a lot of the Spanish missionaries able to tag along only because monarchs were really looking for domain and gold? And the “wild west” wasn’t really all that exotic, compared to the moon. Having a horse and wagon, or an ocean sailing vessel is very different from having an elevator that goes to space. California is a much more hospitable environment compared to Massachussettes; it was just far away from most Europeans. Once gold was found, people flocked there, and when the gold hunters who went bust ended up in L.A. and created a den of iniquity, then it was ripe ground for “Pat Robertsons,” not to mention L.Ron Hubbards. The point is that there have to be people there first for the Pat Robertsons to want to go there.
With mention of the Moon being a harsh Mistress I’m reminded of another Heinlein story relevant to this thread. In “Columbus Was a Dope” some guys are in a bar discussing the building of the first starship. One is enthusiastic but the barman is dismissive, questioning why anyone would want to leave home and go off on such a risky journey, ending up saying, “Columbus was a dope.” It is only in the last line, as the barman tosses up a glass under one sixth gravity that we realise they are on the moon.
Sorry if the details are wrong. Probably haven’t read the story for twenty years but the gist has stuck. Great writer!
Suppose the decision is made to found a Mars colony. We roof over a crater with glass, fetilize the land, and plant trees and crops. We import food animals and dogs/cats,eventually, we have a self-sustaining ecosystem inside the dome. Now, we have several generations of humans and animals born and raised in Mars’ low gravity field-would these people be able to live on earth? Or would we adapt 9taller, thinner bones0 such that a return to earth would be deadly? I would say a martain colony is more liekly than a moon colony-at least there is air and water. by the way, what is the sunlight like at noon on mars? Is it a lot darker than earth? is there enough sun to grow crops on mars?
You’ve got it mostly right, except it wasn’t the barman who was dismissive, but one of the other patrons. It was a short-short with an O’Henry-style twist ending as you describe.
It’s likely that early development in a low gravity field would have some kind of effect on physical development. Bones and muscles would probably be weaker, though I don’t know that we’d be any taller. Note that these are phenotypical effects, not genetic ones; there’s little reason to believe that there would be significant selective effects (at least in the short term) unless there’s some kind of chronic conditions caused by living in a low-gee field which would prove lethal prior to sexual maturity. There’s no reason that their descendants couldn’t live on Earth, but whether someone who has developed or lived a significant amount of time on a low-gee field would be able to tolerate Earth’s gravity is a question to which we don’t have any authoritative answer. See previous posts in this thread for more detail.
There’s no air to speak of on Mars; just an exceedingly thin layer of mostly carbon dioxide. There is water (or at least strong indications of it) but how much, how widely distributed, and how readily it can be extracted for use is a big question. (There is, however, water in space in the form of comets and icy asteroids.) Sunlight on Mars is going to be substantially less than that on Earth (about 42%, not accounting for atmospheric absorption), and higher in UV, since there’s no UV-absorbing ozone layer; no doubt you could contrive a way to get enough to grow crops (frensel lenses, light columnators, et cetera) though if you have the capability to get colony-sized groups of people and materials to the planet it’s probably just easier and safer to grow crops underground using hydroponics.
I think everyone who stated that the first large-scale colonization of Luna will be people trying to get rich are right. You can find people who will endure any harsh conditions you want if they think that they could get rich. The question, then, is what on the moon is worth bringing back? How about this:
Helium-3 (two protons and a neutron) is incredibly valuable on Earth for use in nuclear fusion reactions. It’s believed that the far side of the moon has large amounts of He-3 embedded in the regolith from the solar wind. A couple pieces from the Helium-3 Wikipedia article:
"It is believed that the Moon’s surface has large amounts of helium-3 in the lunar regolith.[3] At the start of the 21st century several countries planned to explore the Moon and to use its resources. Helium-3 is expected to be one of those resources if a commercial fusion process is created. "
"Cosmochemist and geochemist Ouyang Ziyuan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is now in charge of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has already stated on many occasions that one of the main goals of the program would be the mining of helium-3, from where “each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world.”[4]
“In January 2006 the Russian space company RKK Energiya announced that it considers lunar helium-3 a potential economic resource to be mined by 2020.”
Granted that the moon is going to be pretty unpleasant to live on for a while, people will probably go there looking for natural resources. People will live there as a job, and in order to attract applicants, companies will try to make life on the moon as pleasant as possible, which will encourage more people to live there, which will mean a larger market for goods on the moon, and the whole thing will snowball until the moon is as habitable as the earth.
You don’t like living under the laws and constraints of your current society, so you want to go off and create a Utopia somewhere and start fresh. No laws on the Moon!
Every set of skills you have becomes more valuable on the Moon, in a limited population. There is more appreciation for a person’s contribution (and more pressure to contribute).
Higher set of standards for the population; they don’t take just anybody.
Okay, but then when someone with a bigger 1920s-Style-Death-Ray than me can knock me over the head and steal all my valuable moon dust, what can I do? His Death-Ray outdoes mine.
So I’m going to get rich selling golf balls, because the first thing they’ll build on the moon will be a golf course.