XPost: sci.space.policy   
   From: joe@strout.net   
      
   In article <401ac821.190576099@news.eircom.net>,   
    wallacethinmintr@eircom.net (Russell Wallace) wrote:   
      
   > >don't need to do that, we know that people survive a year just fine in   
   > >much less than 1/6 G.   
   >   
   > Survive in the technical sense of "not dead yet", but I wouldn't call   
   > having your health seriously and to some extent permanently damaged   
   > "just fine". (Particularly since most of their waking hours have to be   
   > spent on keeping it at the "not dead yet" stage.) It's certainly not a   
   > viable basis for long-term human habitation of space, and if that's   
   > not the end goal, why are we spending money putting people in space at   
   > all?   
      
   Well obviously, people are not going to be living (in the long-term   
   habitation sense) in microgravity (*).  But this is not a difficult   
   problem to solve: you spin the habitat.  We've known how to solve that   
   problem for decades.   
      
   Now, that doesn't work quite as elegantly on the Moon, and this may or   
   may not turn out to be a problem for long-term habitation there.  If it   
   is, then maybe the Moon will never have many long-term inhabitants, but   
   only term workers.  I'm OK with that.  But we won't know until we go set   
   up base there and see how we do.   
      
   - Joe   
      
   (*) At least in biological form.  Once mind uploading is developed, of   
   course, we can build ourselves to be perfectly comfortable in a wide   
   range of environments, including microgravity.  But that probably won't   
   happen in this century.   
      
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