Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Planning for lunar living

An Astronaut Gardener On The Moon - Summits Of Sunlight And Vast Lunar Caves In Low Gravity

Yay - someone who thinks, like me, that it's more sensible to be planning on lunar colonies being the first off Earth permanent colonies for humans, rather than distant, extremely hard to get to, Mars.

This long, long post talks about many aspects of living on the moon.  I haven't read it all yet, but I'll get back to it.

One thing to be curious about - the long term health effects of lunar (or Martian) low gravity.   How can that ever be guessed at until you get people living there for a year or more.  Even more curious - would babies gestated there end up taller, weaker, or what?  I would guess that one of the first things to do on a lunar base would be to raise generations of mice or rats there, and see what happens.   (I also remember some telemovie from - I think - the 1990's that had a mining outpost on the Moon, and the pregnant mother getting spun gently in a centrifuge to provide some artificial gravity to her fetus.  I think she was then heading off to Earth to give birth?  I don't remember much about it - I didn't watch the whole movie.)

Update:  I know that studies have been done with rats raised in centrifuges to simulate a high gravity life, but short of having a centrifuge running permanently on the ISS, the equivalent studies of them raised in low gravity are hard to envisage...

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