Bountapalooza is up!

@JasonClyde "We only censor when you talk against our preferred protected classes."

Hmm, so say you were on a generation ship on your way to a super earth with a surface gravity of 2 or 3 g, and the ship was slowly rotating faster and faster to simulate heavier gravity, so that by the time it gets there, everyone alive would be used to it. How many generations would it take to adapt, or would something more drastic like CRISPR be needed to make it possible?

@AndyD273 Unless your generation ship is going to take hundreds of thousands of years at an absolute minimum, you're going to need CRISPR. Especially in a generation ship where presumably natural selection is very slow since people aren't dying from predators or starvation.

@Gryphon-ReinstateMonica I'm just curious if being born and raised from an infant in a higher G would cause some adaptation. Like how Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy and The Expanse talk about people born on Mars or in the asteroids would be much taller, thinner, and weaker than those born in 1 full g

I mean, it would probably be a long time till you bred a Dali horse, but still

@AndyD273 It's... theoretically possible. But if that's how it works, you might as well just start off at the intended gravity, since it's a one-generation adaption, not an evolutionary process.

Evolution doesn't work very quickly in a situation where people don't die from starvation or predation.

@Gryphon-ReinstateMonica Well, a reason to start of a little slow is so that the people born on earth would have some time to adapt. You'd probably get heart attacks and other health problems if you went from living full time in 1g to living full time in 2g over night

Maybe it would happen over the first 5 years of the 100 year voyage, or something

That's true. I suppose there is a reason to do it gradually then.

And there is a reason I said "adapt" and not "evolve".

Hmm... I bet we could test this by making a small centrifuge on the ISS for rats. Start by spinning it up to 1g, then over a few rat generations speed it up to higher simulated gravities.

@AndyD273 ...most expensive world building question ever. (at least to date)

@James I kinda find that hard to believe... I mean, yeah, we're talking on the order of a few million... $90M for a Falcon heavy. Lets say $10M to design and build a new module with the spinning rat habitat... Maybe that's low, but at ~$100M, I find it hard to believe that's the most expensive, considering some of the other things we've talked about

I mean, if you take inflation into account, and adjust for currency exchange, and the rising price of gold, then the cost of the spoon pigeon breeding program, the catapult network, wages and benefits, losses to plague, and all the other things involved might get kinda close.

$100M is a ton and a half of gold at today's prices

So, about a 18 inch cube of gold.

hey everyone

@AndyD273 Ok I should have been more precise. This is the most realistic/actual plan we have ever come up with...which is also the most expensive but now I think about it, sample size of 1 so...

@James I find this hard to believe somehow. Off all the crazy stuff we've come up with, $100M seems kinda low.

hey there @Green