Zero G Space Settlement

Brad Walsh wrote:
> It's not that zero-g has magical effects on bone
>and muscles that are not understood, it's that zero-g
>turns one into a couch potato in a drastic way.

I've always looked askance at ideas to alter us (or the idea that we
just might evolve into it some day) to live in microgravity. It's not
just that we'd be unable to return to higher G, but being a couch
potato has other effects, far more harmful than loss of muscle tone
and bone mass. Aside from the unanswerable (for now) questions about
immunodeficiency mentioned here, the main problem seems to be that
our heart shrivels up into a soft, weak shadow of a healthy person's.
You can't stay alive very long or be very healthy if your cardio-
pulmonary system is weak or underdeveloped.
Lets face it: a marathon runner is probably going to outlive and out
perform a sofa spud. Muscles and bodily structures like and need to
be stressed regularly to stimulate removal of old cells and regrowth,
and the whole system of moving construction materials around the body
needs to be worked, or it all goes soft and unresistant to stresses
and entropy.
Possibly the strongest and most healthy people in the future will
push the envelop of engineering and adapt to higher centripetal
forces as conveniently possible.
Evidence abounds for this in experiments of animals living in
centrifuges. (See the book "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhumanist
Condition"). They're stronger and live longer lives in better overall
health than controls (more likely to mate and pass their genes
along?).

I resist speculation about becoming so dependant and symbiotic to
technology that we every day of our lives and fetuses of our babies
need adjusting with radical therapies or tinkering into something
that's not us, just to survive. As a lazy transhumanist, I don't have
much of a problem accepting that people will opt for just this kind
of thing someday, whether it's to do with microgravity or not, but
that's not my idea of perpetuating humanity and Gaian life across the
galaxy. Not when all it (apparently) takes is 1970s technology in
stressed cables in a 1+meter sinter-crete colony hull. (showing my
predilection in colony hull design again)

> Is there something about gravity that centrifugal
>force can't simulate?

I've often wondered about that, (something other than simple
mechanical stress of moving against a floor that's always pushing up
against your feet) but it's certainly not something we can point to
now. I'm confident that the "conservative engineering" they used in
the Summer Studies to make colonies that just about everyone could
adapt to is adequate to go ahead and plan as if we know that all we
need to do is spin it.
And I too was highly skeptical about Savage's assumptions (long
chains of assumptions) about living in microgravity.

> Are there subtle health effects of minor coriolis
>forces that we're not yet aware of?

In ignorance, I doubt that almost as much as I doubt that we'd ever
be able to live and evolve as healthy couch potatoes. Some evidence
is that people live aboard watercraft for years at a time. I know
it's not the same, but it's an indicator of living in conditions
where "down" wanders about under your floor.

Back around Y2K, I saw an article where they asked different people
about where we were at, compared to where we could be and what
different predictions about the 21st century had said. Arthur C
Clarke said that it's almost shameful that nobody has run long-term
studies in rotating environments in space.

I haven't heard anything lately from the Mars Society about
their "TransLife Biosatellite" experiment.
http://www.marsgravity.org/main/