People Carry

This article is tagged for relocation to Scientifiction.org.

A Personal

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

Cell phone
Calculator with professional software
Health and environment monitor
- Automatic SOS signal in case of loss of consciousness or heart attack
Vocal or hand signal computer interface, as most keyboards are gone
- Really big memory stick
Camera
Personal digital assistant with calendar, scheduler, timer and to do list
A home for your Avatar (See Types of Robots)
GPS
(your idea here)

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.

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 enthusiasts on Earth help out by organizing and taking part in games and tournaments.

Building Normal Gravity

Eating and sleeping within a centrifuge sized to accommodate 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 centrifuge 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 constantly 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 downward 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 operation of a lunar base.

Saving Power

Before many irate readers lambaste this idea for wasting energy consider these power saving features. To reduce air resistance 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 asymmetric loading. So don't write any more articles claiming that settlers on Luna would be stuck with one sixth g gravity.

Why Bother?

A centrifuged living quarters, as above, could accommodate perhaps 600 people on apartments on two floors with the exact number of residents depending on various matters such as how much space is taken up by providing utilities with liquids being shipped in and out by tank. So why not stay on Earth where 1 g gravity is one of the few things that one can depend upon as being provided with no extra charge? The big draw here is that the industries which will employ people on Luna will ship out their products by some or another kind of electric propulsion and reach customers throughout the solar system. That can not be done from Mars (except in perhaps some qualified sense); and setting up such industry on asteroids would be very difficult because of the lack of the ability to use remote control devices with a response time of 3 seconds. Luna is the key to the solar system. This is why it is so important to get ground truth from the lunar poles. If hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen are available to be extracted from frozen volatiles at the poles using reasonable industrial processes, the race is on. If only hydrogen can be reasonably extracted, we will still squeak by. If the lunar hydrogen is just a flash in the pan, we go to plan B. Hydrogen will need to be shipped in from a source such as Mars or the asteroids. Expansion into the solar system will be tremendously delayed.