Spinning, Whales

On Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 09:17 AM, Combs, Mike wrote:

>> When there are
>> thousands of orbital colonies, and they get cheap to make, a group of
>> whale lovers could conceivably build a colony specifically designed
>> for
>> whales -- although food supply is an enormous problem for reasonable
>> sized colonies.
>
> All one would have to do is ensure the right amounts of CO2 were
> available,
> add self-reproducing plankton to the artificial ocean, let in
> sunlight, and
> problem solved.

The problem is the amount of plankton. Whales live in a very big
ocean, and I strongly suspect that a couple of cubic miles of salt
water can't possibly produce enough plankton to support one whale, much
less a pod. Anybody have data on this?

>
> One might need to discuss sending up frozen whale embryos, and
> arranging
> some kind of in-vitro gestation and birth, as sending an adult whale
> up into
> space (Mr. Scott's miracles notwithstanding) might be problematic.
>

Whales are pretty smart, possibly even smarter than we are. I strongly
suspect that mother whales teach their kids a lot, although perhaps not
the right stuff for space colony living. Anybody know anything about
whale learning in the wild?

>

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.