How many breaths?

One very cool aspect of this project is all the stuff you are forced to think about. It helps to mindshare. Lately, I've been looking into hydroponics. Do you know how hard that is to do without resorting to drug humor?

I stumbled upon an article from the Arizona Star, http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/163564, which led me to the University of Arizona Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, here: http://ag.arizona.edu/ceac/

I love this stuff! Here are people going to the freaking south pole and figuring this out. Here, we've been talking soy and tomatoes, when these smart folks already figured out that lettuce will give you more air for your space and nutrient investment. Also, they've been friendly and responsive to my dumb emails. Hopefully, one of the students or staff can direct me to some information about how much space these systems need, or rather, how much system a person needs.

In other news, we've reduced the dome drastically. It's gone from 25 mile diameter (about 490 square miles and a hell of a lot of volume) to a tenth of that. We know the human programming will fit within 6 square miles, and be much more efficient to establish and maintain.

We have to think about the human factor very carefully. Even considering that initially, the inhabitants of a lunar colony would be healthy, able-bodied, and well-educated, we need to be very careful about their emotional health. Healthy, able and well-educated people can suffer from emotional distress and depression which exacerbate social conflict.

In societal studies in disparate places, such as the traditional societies in Africa as well as American suburbia, there seems to be a limit to how many individuals a person can have in her sphere of societal influence. This is the range of people with whom one is very close, such as immediate family and close friends, to facial recognition, or "nodding" acquaintances. This number is about 300. Basically, we can only care about around 300 people before dehumanization of and by others sets in.

We think it would be a good idea to break up the organization of the colony into pods of about 300-350 people, then cluster these pods into "neighborhoods" of 1000 to 2000 individuals in order to make common services, such as medical services and transport, more efficiently deliverable. We also think that it would be a good idea to treat each of these neighborhoods very differently, architecturally. This would allow a) societal studies of how the residents react to different factors, b) experimentation of various forms, systems and materials, architecturally, while c) providing unique and close living situations, encouraging the residents to bond and take care of one another. This neighborhood differentiation would also help residents form identity bonds with the location, and encourage residents of verious pods and neighborhoods to mix. Different spaces will stimulate interest in a limited environment, and perhaps encourage "tourism". It also presents residents with environmental choices, which is a major factor of satisfaction with the built environment.

Questions we might want to address with different answers might involve organization of social spaces, compactness of living spaces vs public spaces, regular grid layout vs irregular grid, etc.


Another heavy psychological factor is that of daylighting. The lunar day is 27-29 days long: 14 days of light, 14 days of darkness, with some polar craters being in constant shadow. People can be adversely affected by this diurnal disruption.

Any green spaces or plantings would need careful selection, and would be an additional opportunity for study. Do arctic plants fare better? Will some strains adapt to the strange light cycle? (I believe, though, that the food-producing hydroponics would need to be kept inside controlled environments otherwise they wouldn't flower or produce fruit.)

We'd like to introduce factors that help the residents with this. Can we have shadow shelves which illuminate to simulate a more earth-like 24-hour cycle? We don't like the idea of enclosing everything. Would this kind of mitigation be effective?


Another consideration is: how do we get around? Scaling down the experiment to more of a human scale, the overall area of the colony would be very walkable. If there is an underground tram, as proposed in the initial PowerPoint, a secondary above-ground method might be more efficient. Maybe a cable pull system, combined with a rebounding membrane (trampoline) would accomplish rapid short-jaunt transport while encouraging aerobic and strength-maintaining upper and lower-body exercise. And come on. Tell me that wouldn't be a lot of fun.

Communities

Each Community is formed by multiple structures, that form communal space for that community.

Individual units settle on the community structures.

Lunar Location

Locating the communities in higher land makes sense. So assuming that we have interpreted the topography of this are correctly, then we are going to use this area as our city.

Maybe we should just concentrate our communities in a smaller part of the dome: resonably efficient.

We are colonizing Crater YOUNG D, which is about the size of our 25 mi dome. (Red circle)

The Green circles show the size of a 2 mi radius community

The yellow circles show a community half of that green's size (1mi radius)

The arrangement of each community, is based on a logical relation ship with the site, but otherewise random.