Body and Soul by James M. Hines

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Lester Curtis
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Body and Soul by James M. Hines

Post by Lester Curtis »

Way too much telling and not enough showing. Characters with little discernible personality. Too many things that just so coincidentally make everything work just right. I could go on, but I'll let someone else take over.

Not satisfying.
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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Lester Curtis
Long Fiction Editor
Posts: 2736
Joined: January 11, 2010, 12:03:56 AM
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Re: Body and Soul by James M. Hines

Post by Lester Curtis »

One question I had was regarding low-grav effects on the body. Doesn’t a person get bloated? And isn’t low-grav bad in a number of ways? If anything, I would imagine someone living in that environment to have a shorter lifespan.
I wondered about that, too.

To my knowledge, you don't get bloated. What is known for a fact is that you get taller; without gravity vertically compressing you, your skeleton stretches out. Astronauts in low-g have suffered back and neck pains from this.

Also known is that your bones lose calcium and become brittle. You might think, "So what, they're in low g," but brittle bones can break from a lot of things besides gravity, like say, an accidental impact with a piece of furniture or a fall downstairs. Also, all of your skeletal muscles would atrophy along with the bone-thinning. There are other known deleterious effects as well. Internal organs and systems -- including the circulatory and digestive systems -- are made to work best at one standard gravity.

This is pretty enlightening, at least about the experience of microgravity:

http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/l ... e-on-earth

It's anyone's guess how we would adapt to low-g over a span of generations. Maybe bone would get replaced with cartilage. That would seem to make sense for that kind of environment, though I think the gravity would have to pretty low for that extreme. The species would adapt, and we'd quit looking familiar.

In the short term, gravity, or a substitute exercise regimen, is necessary, and even the exercise -- which you need a lot of -- only slows down the degradation.
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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