From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 00:48:05 MDT
spike66 wrote:
> The tech I feel we still really need for successful colonization
> of the solar system is shoehorning and bootstrapping. By
> shoehorning I mean generating scaled down humans with
> minor tweaks to the genome. Think of a housecat as
> compared to a lion, or a llasa apso vs a wolf. In each
> case, I suspect there is a lot of similarity.
>
> If we we able to shoehorn humans down to about 20 kg,
> and 1 meter height without excessive loss of intelligence,
> then the scale of everything goes down significantly. Recall
> the mass of the pressure vessel goes down as the cube of the
> linear dimension.
I would disagree, out of a matter of practicality. People aren't going
to fund something to put tweaked humans on the Moon - at least, nowhere
near as much as to put *themselves* on the Moon, untweaked, even obese.
Besides, shoehorning humans would take much technological development;
we're talking about getting up there with tech that's available *today*.
I apologize for being relatively impatient, but I belive there is a
small - very small, but not insignificant - chance that we might be
limited to only a few decades before we must either be up there or
perish (at least, according to "immortality of mind" theory). Other
people have stated the reasons why in other threads; the point is, if we
are limited, then waiting for significant biotech advancement is not as
feasable as simply making bigger and/or better rockets to take the
heavier payloads.
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