[ExI] the right stuff

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:13 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] the right stuff

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:42 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
> Subject: [ExI] the right stuff
>
>>...If monkeys are to travel, they should strive to be like
>
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4001832/2ft-tall-Jyoti-Amge-is-the
-worlds-smallest-woman.html
>
>> The mass of a pressure vessel scales as the cube of the linear dimension.
> Repeat it like a mantra.

>...The problem of getting people into space has far more to do with the
efficiency of thrust than the mass of the payload...

For any reasonably large payload, the cost is always going to be roughly
proportional to the mass.  If the payload is very small, the cost per unit
mass goes crazy high as we found out, unless you can use a getaway special.
But for missions requiring humans, less human is better.  If we had one
third scale humans, it saves mass like crazy.  Not a factor of 27, but saves
a lot of payload. 

>Any effort toward making people smaller, will have a far higher effort to
reward ratio spent instead in improving telepresence and robotics.
...

We don't make people smaller, we choose smaller people.  Actually they
already do that in a sense.  The reasoning behind using fighter pilots for
the first space missions is that they tend to be small guys: they need to
pull a lot of Gs and fit into a fighter cockpit.

But I can think of only one logical space mission left for humans: they
would go into Mars synchronous orbit and guide semi-autonomous robots on the
surface.  For that task, we need one very small person, possibly two.  Two
has some big advantages, but it waaaay more than doubles the weight of the
payload.

spike