Can we live all our life in Zero G?

From: Omar E. Vega

> Now, I believe that adapting to a zero G environment, even for
> living inside compresed cilinders, requires serveral evolutive steps
> that fascinates me. For instance, our mind is hardwired for living
> in the surface of heart, a full 3-D city or environment is harder to
> grasp and process. Perhaps certain evolutive touches here and there
> would help our biology to adapt better to those environments.

There was a sci fi novel titled "Falling Free" where it was suggested
that genetic engineers might put an extra pair of arms in place of legs
since legs are of little use in 0-G. That kind of genetic engineering
might be more near-term since it strikes me as an "edit job" rather than
the wholesale creation of brand new body structures.

I've wondered about humans whose bodies taper to a prehensile tail
rather like that of a seahorse, suitable for anchoring oneself. Maybe
that could be an edit job too, simply by repeating spinal cord and back
muscle structures.

I've also sometimes thought that rotating a habitat very slowly for
extremely low G (like 1/20 or 1/30 G) might confer many of the
advantages of 0-G while still providing some of the advantages of
gravity, like a sense of up and down and objects laid on a surface still
being there when you came back. In that case, walking might be given up
in favor of flying.

Perhaps wings could be engineered by vastly lengthening the arms and
especially the fingers, with a thin webbing running between the
lengthened fingers and all down the sides of the body. That was the
solution evolution came up with for the problem of how to equip a mammal
with wings in the case of the bat.

But we might want to transition to a 6-limbed body plan in that case.
As tool-users we wouldn't want to settle for the bat's single hooked
thumb on each wing for manipulating objects. So let's have human arms
and then wings both. Which makes you wonder if medieval notions of what
demons looked like might have been a kind of premonition of the future.

> Well, we are talking Sci Fi now.

Yeah, but it's fun to speculate about. This strikes me as less far-out
than uploading.

Regards,

Mike Combs