I've seen lots of sci-fi about making mars
habitable by giving it an atmosphere (ignoring perhaps that the retention of
molecules of various type is I believe a byproduct of gravity!). I've seen
similar thoughts about the moon. I've seen thoughts about living inside domes.
And they've talked about (I think) Ganymede or some other moons as possible
places to live.
But what I haven't seen is anyone suggest how we beat the gravity problems.
I've seen studies by NASA (I believe) and others that seemed to indicate that
long term exposure to lower or zero gravity depressed the human immune system
in an AIDS like manner. I've seen studies that suggest you get bone density
problems that can't be fully offset by excercise. So, how do we live on the
moon or mars for a long time barring the development of large scale,
presumably energy consumptive, gravity plating that lets us simulate something
like 75% or better of a standard gravity? I mean this alone seems to make Mars
infeasible with today's tech. We could go there, but it'd do a number on us if
we tried to live there....
Any thoughts? References?
Try www.Marsgravity.org
--Binhan
> -----Original Message-----
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> A idea that was used in the dirty pair commics was having the base
Arthur C. Clarke in '3001' has the idea the people living in the low gravity
levels of his ring city couldn't visit the Earth itself for more
than an hour or so without severe discomfort, and Heinlein in 'The Moon Is A
Harsh Mistress' makes a similar point. Any settlers on low gravity worlds
would have problems, but their children, and their children's children could
well be unable to come back to Earth.
> At 10:33 AM -0400 8/6/02, John Sowerby wrote:
The Red/Green/Blue Mars series makes similar notes. But according to
that series, short visits are possible depending on where you're coming from.
Nirgal is I recall, had trouble on earth during his short visit and was quite
happy to get back to low Gee's.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwb/rgbmars.html
Kim Stanley Robinson makes some interesting points about terraforming that had
me thinking quite a bit. I also liked some of Sax's mars orbital defense
methods in the low tech environment.
Re: Retaining an atmosphere.
If you can _get_ an atmosphere back onto Mars, the question is of how
long you can retain it. If I remember correctly, If you instantly gave a ~ 1
bar earthlike atmosphere to Mars, it would continually thin but remain
liveable for hundreds of thousands of years without active maintenance. The
time would be considerable shorter (order(s)(?) of magnitude) for the moon.
Re: human physical adaptation. As has been said, as long as the trip were one
way, the loss to bone density etc, might not be considered a major issue. It
would affect the
absolute physical durability of long-time residents or natives of the
low gravity environment. This has been fodder in the gaming and SF
worlds forever, where high-g worlders tend to be stronger and hardier,
sometimes awkward at low g, and low-g'ers more frail and "quick",
sometimes crippled at high-g. Has this been folded into SG or DS yet?
Re: immune system problems. If they're real, positing development of immune
system boosters
(biological or otherwise) in the not-too-distant future is no further a
stretch of imagination at this point as positing a self sufficient colony on
another world. Certainly more plausible than gravity plating.
Related GZGverse question: what human-colonized planets have the
strongest gravity? Could/should they be considered the best locations
for (physical) training of ground troops (assuming orbital facilities as
well for low/0-g components?