<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
Raw notes:
The environment out there is inherently strange to us. It is by definition not earthlike.
When you are thrown out an airlock, you don’t explode. Odds are you won’t be at 14psi. 3 lbs of pressure per square inch isn’t that much. You don’t blow up, you don’t even bleed. NASA had a suit blow while testing it in a vacuum chamber and the guy survived fine.
From space you will see stars as well as you do from Earth, which means that if you are in a lit space station, it would be like looking out a window on Earth at the night sky because your eyes will adapt to the light level that you are in.
Most stars will look white or yellow. Technically our sun is a slightly green star, but even a red K-type star will look white because the eye adapts.
What will living in space require? Everything. Air, food, water, shelter.
Air, plus a way to recirculate and regenerate the air. Though your nose and brain will eventually stop responding to bad smell, but your psyche doesn’t. The space station astronauts talk about it. That the miasma really weighs on them after awhile. In the Apollo capsule, they were actually doing calculations to see if they could vent the air and refresh it.
Got to figure out a way to make your food taste better. The body is adapted to keeping the blood from pooling in your legs, but not your head. So you get stuffed up and can’t taste food as well. You tend to spice up your food.
Disorientation of zero g. Move in three-dimensions, but we are used to travelling only in two. If you grab something, conversation of movement means that you transfer that movement to whatever you grab.
3-dimensional navigation.
Air does not naturally convect in space, because it’s a gravity fed phenomenon. You have to have fans on every heat generating source. At a certain scale, it makes sense to spin your station so you get gravity and don’t have to have so many damn fans.
Why should we go?
If we can build a sealed environment that would protect you in space, why not do it on Earth? If they just go there because they want to, they have to have a lot of disposable income. If the environment on Earth got so screwed up that we had to leave, we’d first do sealed environments on Earth ’cause you don’t have to deal with gravity or lofting something into space. Just think about the practicalities.
One thing Jay points out is that going into space takes you into someplace where there isn’t any jurisdiction.
Because it’s there is a perfectly valid reason, but you’ll have to have money and energy.
Sex in Space!
It’s almost certainly happened, or at least tried. Married couple has been in space, so Jerry is beginning to suspect that the reason no one is talking is that it’s not that good. There was an experiment with the KC-135 Zero-g plane. What they found was that it was hard to just cling each other. Any motion causes spin. Plus the motion causes you to push apart, so you needed a third person or something similar to keep you from floating apart.
Pregnancy in space. There’s a lot of hormonal function that is gravity based. They’ve tried breeding zebra fish and it’s not happy. It’s looking like we need gravity for fetal development. If an astronaut got pregnant on the space station, likely NASA would tell them to use the emergency pod to return to Earth.
Jerry asked Stan Schmidt what one thing he would like us to know. “Tell them why its unlikely to have a habitable planet around a planet with a name.” The named ones are the large bright ones. If you do put one there, make sure you do the math to get it right.
Get the timing right, if you have someone looking at the sky on Earth.
In terms of stars, everything you see rising today, will rise four minutes earlier tomorrow.
The moon rises an hour later everyday, because it’s orbiting toward the east. The full moon is always directly overhead at midnight — by sidereal year. A sidereal day is how long it takes the earth to rotate and point again at the same spot in the stars. That’s four minutes shorter than a solar day. A solar day is how long it takes the earth to rotate to face the sun.
High tide points at the moon and the sun. Roughly, if the moon is rising in the sky, then the tide is coming in. If it’s setting, the tide is going out. The atmosphere also has a tide. In theory, without a moon, we’d have a calmer atmosphere.
The moon appearing larger overhead is a perspective shift.
Very cool post, Mary. Thank you.
Happy to share.