If fish tanks were installed in non-rotating parts of the space habitat they would not need excessive structural support. Fish that use gas bladders to rise and descend in the water might not adapt well. Some aquatic creatures may be better suited to weightlessness. Maybe squid?
The main reason for rotation is to prevent space sickness. There is a minimum required amount of time that people need to feel weight. If space sickness could be controlled without using rotating structures, space habitats would be much easier to build and maintain.
It doesn't seem likely, but if enough water could be acquired without having to raise it up from a deep gravity well like the earth's, the non-rotating tanks could even be used as a radiation shield.
Of course, zero G or very low G water tanks would be much easier to handle than 1G water. Has there been any research on the feasibility of this? On the ISS or somewhere similar? I imagine most aquatic creatures have some notion about up and down and might get very disoriented if up and down disappears.
Preventing space sickness is not the only reason to have gravity. While zero G has obvious advantages when handling heavy objects, in general the physical handling of small things is easier if there is some force pulling at them. Something to bring order in chaos, so to speak. For example, most forms of ore refining use the pull of gravity in some sense to achieve the separation of different fractions. The ability to achieve the same result in zero G will need some serious ingenuity.
This whole series has highlighted for me just how far, fetched the idea of space travel, let alone space colonization is, especially in our lifetimes. I've enjoyed the read, though.
Founder effects are probably stronger that most people estimate. Here's a good summary of Fischer's "Albion's Seed" regarding the origins of U.S. culture:
"Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does.
"In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US."
And the reviewer is correct -- all of the "culture war" things in U.S. culture can be mapped to cultural differences between the various founding subcultures.
If space colonies will have an abundance of mind-work imported from Earth and a scarcity of physical and practical labor, maybe it would be a good idea to hire Amish people as space colonists after all. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/amish-in-space
I agree with the premise: norms will change. But I hypothesize you underrate the effects of emotion, superstition, symbolic intuition and evolutionary psychology. Tribal and social factors might recur to help maintain order and comfort. So, loincloths or minimal coverings would probably re-emerge after a stage of nudism to have at minimal class and symbolic order. Perhaps barren or widowed people would craft them by hand from some unused resource, like some kind of utilitarian farming cloth. People might import pets—whatever adapts best to space (cats, dogs, snakes, lizards, birds, who knows)… and the remains of those pets might become a resource, too, perhaps bones to use as eating utensils or writing instruments. Wood would indeed become a luxury, but perhaps one with great symbolic power. Families or communes might keep a tiny wooden idol in their home that they pray to or even worship as some kind of Earth deity. Burning would might become a highly specialized ritual since it requires both wood and oxygen. Just some thoughts… space anthropologists might study these strange adaptations back on Earth.
Firstly, just to make it clear, this article is mostly written for comic relief. I do not really think space colonists will turn to nudism. If nothing else, for working people, having pockets is worth a lot more than the rather insignificant time it takes to sew some clothes.
If there is some substance behind the clickbait title I think it is the relation between intellectual and manual workers. This is something that I actually believe can shape a lot of any future space culture. On Earth intellectual workers reign supreme due to their limited numbers. The oddity of space is that it is very difficult to send physical goods there but comparatively simple to transfer intellectual properties. This turns the intellectual/manual worker relationship upside down. In space everything produced by manual workers will be very valuable, while everything produced by intellectual workers will be very cheap. And this is not only an initial anomaly. It will hold true for as long as Earth is significantly more populated than space, which will most probably be the case for hundreds of years. How this will affect the culture of the space colonists will really be something for anthropologists to follow.
People will probably want to wear some kind of clothes. But elaborate clothes containing a lot of textiles will seem wasteful and luxurious to a much higher degree than on Earth.
yes, yes, let alone shifting space vehicles full of water around. It would only happen well after the initial periods of space settlement. But if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, it might become a thing for the stay-at-homes. Membrane tech would be key.
I say this as someone who doesn't like to get wet.
If fish tanks were installed in non-rotating parts of the space habitat they would not need excessive structural support. Fish that use gas bladders to rise and descend in the water might not adapt well. Some aquatic creatures may be better suited to weightlessness. Maybe squid?
The main reason for rotation is to prevent space sickness. There is a minimum required amount of time that people need to feel weight. If space sickness could be controlled without using rotating structures, space habitats would be much easier to build and maintain.
It doesn't seem likely, but if enough water could be acquired without having to raise it up from a deep gravity well like the earth's, the non-rotating tanks could even be used as a radiation shield.
Of course, zero G or very low G water tanks would be much easier to handle than 1G water. Has there been any research on the feasibility of this? On the ISS or somewhere similar? I imagine most aquatic creatures have some notion about up and down and might get very disoriented if up and down disappears.
Preventing space sickness is not the only reason to have gravity. While zero G has obvious advantages when handling heavy objects, in general the physical handling of small things is easier if there is some force pulling at them. Something to bring order in chaos, so to speak. For example, most forms of ore refining use the pull of gravity in some sense to achieve the separation of different fractions. The ability to achieve the same result in zero G will need some serious ingenuity.
This whole series has highlighted for me just how far, fetched the idea of space travel, let alone space colonization is, especially in our lifetimes. I've enjoyed the read, though.
Founder effects are probably stronger that most people estimate. Here's a good summary of Fischer's "Albion's Seed" regarding the origins of U.S. culture:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
"Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does.
"In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US."
And the reviewer is correct -- all of the "culture war" things in U.S. culture can be mapped to cultural differences between the various founding subcultures.
If space colonies will have an abundance of mind-work imported from Earth and a scarcity of physical and practical labor, maybe it would be a good idea to hire Amish people as space colonists after all. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/amish-in-space
I agree with the premise: norms will change. But I hypothesize you underrate the effects of emotion, superstition, symbolic intuition and evolutionary psychology. Tribal and social factors might recur to help maintain order and comfort. So, loincloths or minimal coverings would probably re-emerge after a stage of nudism to have at minimal class and symbolic order. Perhaps barren or widowed people would craft them by hand from some unused resource, like some kind of utilitarian farming cloth. People might import pets—whatever adapts best to space (cats, dogs, snakes, lizards, birds, who knows)… and the remains of those pets might become a resource, too, perhaps bones to use as eating utensils or writing instruments. Wood would indeed become a luxury, but perhaps one with great symbolic power. Families or communes might keep a tiny wooden idol in their home that they pray to or even worship as some kind of Earth deity. Burning would might become a highly specialized ritual since it requires both wood and oxygen. Just some thoughts… space anthropologists might study these strange adaptations back on Earth.
Firstly, just to make it clear, this article is mostly written for comic relief. I do not really think space colonists will turn to nudism. If nothing else, for working people, having pockets is worth a lot more than the rather insignificant time it takes to sew some clothes.
If there is some substance behind the clickbait title I think it is the relation between intellectual and manual workers. This is something that I actually believe can shape a lot of any future space culture. On Earth intellectual workers reign supreme due to their limited numbers. The oddity of space is that it is very difficult to send physical goods there but comparatively simple to transfer intellectual properties. This turns the intellectual/manual worker relationship upside down. In space everything produced by manual workers will be very valuable, while everything produced by intellectual workers will be very cheap. And this is not only an initial anomaly. It will hold true for as long as Earth is significantly more populated than space, which will most probably be the case for hundreds of years. How this will affect the culture of the space colonists will really be something for anthropologists to follow.
People will probably want to wear some kind of clothes. But elaborate clothes containing a lot of textiles will seem wasteful and luxurious to a much higher degree than on Earth.
maybe we should just become aquatic apes and live in great en-bubbled spaceballs of water in which feral swirls let the crayfish sing
An interesting idea, but that would seem to require lofting even more mass than providing for apes living in air.
yes, yes, let alone shifting space vehicles full of water around. It would only happen well after the initial periods of space settlement. But if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, it might become a thing for the stay-at-homes. Membrane tech would be key.
I say this as someone who doesn't like to get wet.