Proposal for large scale habitat on Mars.

I wore the Gumby suit once in a while when I was in Miami. Kind of fun in a "car goes over the edge and tumbles down the canyon" kind of way.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
We are stretching the doom thing, aren't we. I would bet your left lung that volunteers would go and do their damnedest to make it work. And they might succeed.
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They might indeed. But if women cannot bear children there due to the low gravity, any colony will fail eventually.
 
TheVat said:
No steel mills, no women giving birth? I have two words for you, BillV.:

bam.
boo.
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Yep. That was Robinson's approach. And it would indeed be a great material for walls and floors and whatnot, at least once we have indoor space, air, soil and grow lights.

Still, I think you will find it hard to build centrifuges, vehicles and structures that hold pressure out of bamboo.
 
They definitely wouldn't know about that danger and therefore wouldn't take any action to avoid the problem. Damn. I was hoping it would work.
 
billvon said:
Yep. That was Robinson's approach. And it would indeed be a great material for walls and floors and whatnot, at least once we have indoor space, air, soil and grow lights.

Still, I think you will find it hard to build centrifuges, vehicles and structures that hold pressure out of bamboo.
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Well thank God for wicker, then. If there are no rattan centrifuges in our future, that's a future I don't want to live in.

Possibly I was poking a little fun at the whole centrifuge concept. On a serious note, I would ask if .4 g is really too low for childbearing. Having lived, twice, with a pregnant person, I gathered the impression that diminished gravity might actually offer some medical benefits (unless 4/10 gravity is low enough to harm normal bone mineralization).
 
TheVat said:
Possibly I was poking a little fun at the whole centrifuge concept. On a serious note, I would ask if .4 g is really too low for childbearing.
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Very good question. We know that zero-G is an issue for fetal development, especially late in pregnancy. From studies of positional development (i.e. does having a pregnant comatose woman in bed 24/7 harm development?) we know that lack of normal gravity (i.e. gravity in the inferior direction, like you get when you stand or sit) causes hypotrophy of the spine and leg muscles, slower development of trunk muscles, delayed development of the spine and femurs, and hyoptrophy of the left ventricle of the heart.

Zero-G will be even worse because there's no gravity at all, not even the dorsal gravity that bedridden women get.

But what's the threshold? If it works like most other developmental factors, 40% of gravity will avoid 40% of the problems you see (in the absence of rattan centrifuges of course.) But you still have 60% of them. 60% may be OK for people on Mars, because they don't need their muscles/bones/heart to be as strong. But that would certainly mean they could never go back to Earth.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
We are stretching the doom thing, aren't we. I would bet your left lung that volunteers would go and do their damnedest to make it work. And they might succeed. Or die trying.
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People in difficult circumstances doing their damnedest to survive - and still failing - seems quite commonplace; lack of sufficient motivation is rarely the reason why. Desperation can also turn selfish and potentially destructive of the cooperative efforts required.

The only thing worse than inflexible preplanning will be insufficient forethought and planning. Given how extreme and deadly the conditions it seems essential to have everything worked out beforehand in detail - covering all the contingencies for every conceivable possibility.
 
Ken Fabian said:
People in difficult circumstances doing their damnedest to survive - and still failing - seems quite commonplace; lack of sufficient motivation is rarely the reason why. Desperation can also turn selfish and potentially destructive of the cooperative efforts required.

The only thing worse than inflexible preplanning will be insufficient forethought and planning. Given how extreme and deadly the conditions it seems essential to have everything worked out beforehand in detail - covering all the contingencies for every conceivable possibility.
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I spent ten days in the Mekong making it back to my base because I couldn't walk, so yeah, "damnedest" works for me.

Concur on the flexible planning. "You're born, shit happens, then you die."
 
billvon said:
we know that lack of normal gravity (i.e. gravity in the inferior direction, like you get when you stand or sit) causes hypotrophy of the spine and leg muscles, slower development of trunk muscles, delayed development of the spine and femurs, and hyoptrophy of the left ventricle of the heart.
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Hadn't realized this was so significant in fetal development. Partly owing to the notion that fetuses are floating in fluid and so they have some g-force already cancelled by bouyancy. But this apparently doesn't sidestep the effects of a normal gee field. As to whether the 40% of the gravity means 40% of the developmental problems remedied, it seems difficult to assign such a linear relationship. Many health effects are nonlinear in this respect. 20% of an 18th century sailor's vitamin C requirements might reduce 90% of the scurvy. A 50% drop in UV exposure might bring an 80% drop in melanomas. Many effects in health are threshold effects. A flat line followed by a sudden steep curve. Viral load is another example.
 
TheVat said:
fetuses are floating in fluid and so they have some g-force already cancelled by bouyancy.
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That works up until the 5th month or so. Then they are no longer floating, and experience gravity the same way the mother's abdomen does.
 
Interesting thread with some interesting ideas in it. My answer to the implicit question is yes I think humans are ingenious enough to be able to build a small viable settlement on Mars.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Use the material available in Ceres to make a gravity-simulated environment. Larry Niven proposed this.
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He did.

Drill a tube down the major axis.
Fill it with water.
Set it spinning.
Use lasers or solar to heat the whole asteroid's outer surface evenly (while it spins) until it's molten.
When the heat reaches the watery core, it turns to steam, expands and inflates the asteroid many-fold.
Let it cool and you've got a spherical, spinning habitat with plenty of water.
 
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