From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 12:09:56 MDT
Vanessa Novaeris wrote:
> spike wrote:
> <<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. After a successful colony is extablished with shoehorned
> humans, they can bootstrap back up to the more customary
> 80 kg, 2 meter scale.>>
>
> Once "shoehorned" why would it be necessary to "bootstrap"? I mean,
> would there be any critical reason to return to larger bodies? The
> shrinky-dink humans wouldn't have any negative psychological issues with their
> comparatively smaller bodies because they would never know (or be used to)
> anything else. It might be really simple & I just missed it, but why bother
> returning to a bigger, clumsier, more wasteful body type?
>
If we are going down that road, why bother with hauling
biological type squishy bodies around the universe at all? They
are suboptimal and require massive extra support. Personally I
don't believe serious space explorers/developers will choice to
have biological bodies for more than a century or two even
assuming no hard takeoffs. So it seems a bit of a waste of
energy to bio-engineer ourselves into "greys" in order to deal
with temporary problems.
- samantha
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