From: John Marlow (johnmarlow@gmx.net)
Date: Sat Feb 17 2001 - 01:54:43 MST
LOL!
Still trying to figure out whether you're serious about this stuff.
You really tread the line.
Seems to me what you REALLY need are some of those little gray guys
with the tiny bodies and the big heads; I mean, how much can they
eat? Recruiting these guys/gals/critters would also neatly solve your
transportation problem; they've already gotten here from (presumably)
considerably farther places than Mars--so intrasystem travel shoulod
be a real snap for them.
Better yet--just hitch a ride!
Perhaps you might offer your services (or the services of others) as
an experimental subject in exchange for transportaion of personnel
and equipment/supplies. Hey, it's a thought...
jm
On 16 Feb 2001, at 23:24, Spike Jones wrote:
> > John Marlow wrote: SPIKE! SPIKE! I HAVE YOUR SOLUTION!
> >
> > What you need to do is recruit pygmies, midgets, and dwarves for
> > astronaut training and perhaps voluntary selective breeding.
>
> Actually John, we discussed this about a year ago, but I have
> enough new information to drop another post. I have been
> lurking on a couple of chat groups for persons with growth
> disorders, but have not yet gotten up the guts to post anything,
> and I am not guaranteeing that I will ever do so. Dont know what
> I would say:
>
> Hi! Im a six foot rocket scientist interested in recruiting a
> female from among you for a one way trip to Mars. How
> much do you weigh? How much do you eat? How much
> do you *really* like this planet?
>
> I dont think so. But I have learned some possibly useful
> information. As it turns out, humans do not scale linearly
> with weight. If all of my dimensions were cut in half, my
> height would be 3 ft, my surface area would be a quarter
> its current value and my weight one eighth. So, 15 pounds,
> rocket scientist's dream, lets fly.
>
> But as we said, humans do not scale linearly down. Verne Troyer,
> the actor that played MiniMe in Austin Powers, is 2 ft 8 inches
> but weighs almost 70 pounds. I may tell later how I found this
> out, but the fact is, for a Mars mission, this may not matter
> very much. It matters little what one weighs, but it matters
> greatly how much one eats, for this is a weight penalty that
> must be paid over and over.
>
> More on that later. Regarding pygmies, it is much more
> difficult to find info on this than on dwarfism, for there are
> very few pygmies online and no chat groups for pygmies
> that I have been able to find. I do not consider pygmies
> ideal candidates for Mars missions for altho they tend to
> be much smaller than most humans, there are language
> barriers. The !xhosa language has not been fully or
> universally encoded into written form, and we are a
> long way from having machines that could recognize
> and translate it. Some insight into pygmies may be gained
> >from viewing the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" which
> starred a pygmy actor whose dimensions were about 5
> ft and approximately 90 pounds.
>
> > Also--you have to feed and air-supply
>
> Air supply is not such a pressing problem, as oxygen can be
> regenerated from carbon dioxide, given sufficient energy.
> Water too can be recycled, given an energy supply.
> Of course, the energy needed is proportional to the size of
> the crew. The feed problem: also proportional to the crew
> size.
>
> Before my next post in a week or so, be thinking this over:
> What aspects of the mission scale linearly with the crew size?
> What aspects scale as the square? What scales as the cube?
> I may prepare a full paper on this topic for the engineering
> society to which I belong, the Society of Aerospace Weight
> Engineers. spike
>
John Marlow
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