Pregnancy in weightlessness

From: "Combs, Mike"
To:
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:08 PM
Subject: RE: [spacesettlers] Pregnancy in weightlessness

[snikt]
> This was pretty much the view of J. D. Bernal. Marshal Savage suggests
> living permanently in 0 G, and if I were him, I would adopt this argument
as
> well. Instead he suggests we'll live in 0 G, but will maintain our
Earthly
> physiques via technological means.
>

By the way, my exemplar of "The Millennial Project" arrived a couple of days
ago. I'm eager to start reading it, but first I've to finish "The Cassini
Division", by Ken MacLeod. (An interesting science fiction with scenarios
pretty related to recent discussions in this list: space habitats, floating
cities, dome cities, etc. My skeptical alarms ring every time that the
author talks about the unimaginable capacities of nanotechnology or the
virtues of a non-capitalist economic system, but otherwise it is an
extremely interesting thing to read.) Now I'm curious to know which methods
exactly Savage proposes to maintain our Earthly bodies in zero-g; and,
mainly, *why* does he proposes it. Is it just a matter of aesthetics? In my
vision, the Earthly version of the human boy is kind of inadequate to
zero-g. Slightly modified humans with hand-like feet and prehensile tails -
or, even better, flying bat-like humans - would probably be much more agile
in zero-g...

[snikt]
> The construction might be more monolithic, and hence simpler, but wrt
larger
> sizes I'm not so sure there'd be a significant advantage. It turns out
the
> primary load on the shell of a space habitat is not the centrifugal force,
> it's the air pressure.
>

Indeed. However, while the options for coupling many shells are limited when
constructing a rotating habitat (basically, you can just build a lot of
shells interconnected through a single shared rotating axis, and this
configuration would soon bring transportation problems between the shells, I
think), in the case of a zero-g habitat you could interconnect shells in any
way. For example, you could connect them in an unlimitedly expansible
three-dimensional fractal pattern that would avoid problems of heat
dissipation while making transit between the different shells very easy and
giving some structural stability to the whole thing to support weak tidal
effects from nearby heavenly bodies. (Or so I intuitively think ;-). Of
course intuition does not lead to rational conclusions, and a deeper study
would be necessary to conclusively compare the pros and cons of rotating and
zero-g habitats.)

[snikt]
> Regards,
>

Regards,

> Mike Combs

Lucio Coelho