People Carry

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What will People Carry on the Moon?

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The Moon is a dangerous place. All people on the Moon will have to carry with them a few things to support their well being.

A Personal

In our stories, a Personal an electronic device resembling a cell phone that functions as:

• A cell phone
• Calculator with professional software
• Health and environment monitor
• Vocal computer interface, as most keyboards are gone
  • A really big memory stick
• A Camera
• A Personal Assistance and scheduler
• A home for your Avatar (See Types of Robots)
• (your idea here)
• and any thing else you can think up.

The functions of your Personal are a personal statement of who you are.

The interface with the Personal is by voice. Most people have an avatar appear on the Personal's small screen and converse with it. Usually the avatar appears as a person but can be a pet or even a dinosaur. The Personal's power is limited but it normally interacts with a base computer system which gives it enough power to support an artificial intelligence for the avatar.

When you are outside, your Personal plugs into your spacesuit. It provides a number of functions supporting the suit and providing emergency communications.

When you are inside, the Personal can be carried in your backpack, in a pocket, in a purse, or in a shoulder holster James Bond style.

A backpack with an emergency spacesuit

When not outside in a full environmental suit, everybody carries a back pack containing an emergency space suit. It is made from all soft materials and folds up compactly. It can be entered quickly, but only contains enough air to last only a few minutes. The extra weight of the pack actually helps people walk in the Moon's low gravity.

The backpack also has room for personal items and a special pocket for your Personal.

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Architecture as Mole Hills, Gym track

Daily exercise

To stop excessive bone and muscle lose in the Moon's low gravity, each person will have to take calcium supplements and exercise for and hour or more each day. Everybody's lives on the Moon will be organized around work and exercise. The more important it is to a person to return to Earth, the more strenuous and long their exercise program has to be. The miners do the least. Astronauts do the most.

In our stories, there is a special exercise hall in the shape of an oval track with exercise machines along the inner wall. Lunar enthuses on Earth help out by organizing and taking part in games and tournaments.

Building Normal Gravity

Eating and sleeping within a centrifuge sized to accomodate living quarters could provide most of the exercise that people need without requiring much extra time from their schedules. Since much power per person will be required to provide air, food and water, the additional power to keep a centrifuge running is unlikely to make the difference between an economic and a noneconomic settlement.

It's Physically Possible

To provide people with one g acceleration by cetrifuge on Luna, there needs to be
about 99% of a g radially outward added to the existing one sixth g.  If the
centrifuge rotates at a reasonable angular velocity of 2 revolutions per minute,
the radius must be 220 meters.  To avoid providing a room for the centrifuge with
an open space (no pillars) of 440 meters in diameter, the hub of the centrifuge is
left out and the living quarters are built in a section of a cylinder between 220
meters and 210 meters in radius and between 0 and 15 meters in height.  The
centrifuge would run constatly except when maintenance requires a shut down. 
Access to the living quarters would be not by elevator, but by rotavator.  People
would approach the rotavator on their way home after work, moving through the
nonrotating corridors of the lunar base.  They would enter the rotavator through a
door and start it moving along its circular track just above the centrifuged
living quarters.  When the rotavator is matched in velocity with the proper
portion of the living quarters, people would enter the living quarters through a
door.  The transition from one sixth g vertical to one g radial would be smoothly
accommodated by the floor of the rotavator compartment swinging from downwrd to
radially outward.

Don't Hold Your Breath

Since this plan calls for a bit more than a one and a third kilometer length of
living quarters, it would probably not be built in the first year of opperation of
a lunar base.

Saving Power

Before many irate readers lambast this idea for wasting energy consider these power saving features.  To reduce air resitance from the floor of the living quarters moving at a speed of 103 miles per hour, the centrifuged living quarters would be built within shell A which would be built within shell B which would be built within shell C.  Shell A would carry the axles for dual tandem wheel sets.  The living quarters would ride on the tops of the wheels and the bottoms of the wheels would ride on shell B.  Similarly shell C would carry axel sets.  The result is that the air resistance loss would be about the same as for a similarly sized doughnut rotating at 26 miles per hour.  The drag from the living quarters would pull along shell A and the torque would be passed down to shell C.  The savings on air resistance should handily exceed the increased rolling resistance.  The rotavator would automatically rendezvous with each shell in turn and transfer to that shell by longitudinal tracks before continuing on circular tracks within each shell.  Matched rotavator cars would always operate in synchronization from radially opposite points to reduce asymetric loading.  So don't write any more articles claiming that settlers on Luna would be stuck with one sixth g gravity.  

--Farred 17:54, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

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