The Effect of Transhumanism on Space Habitat Design
In the design of large space habitats (especially those fantastic in scale or technology), the unspoken assumption is that the people who would inhabit them would be practically equivalent to contemporary humans. Considering the temporally distant nature of such structures along with the increasing pace of technological advancement in the areas that may spur human control over our own makeup and evolution, I propose that the condition of the human species at that time may render some of the fundamental assumptions of such habitats irrelevant.
Space is a hostile environment to most life as we know it under most conditions. Radiation in the form of galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events kill cells and mutate others into the seeds of cancerous tumors. The absence of the effect of gravity wreaks havoc on the bones and muscles of humans and other animals over time. Without pressurization, the vacuum of space would violently evacuate our lungs before asphyxiating us and boiling our fluids away. In short, space is a death sentence without special accommodation and engineering. However, humanity might yet make strides to dull some of the harmful effects of space on the human body in such a way that may change the assumptions we make about the inevitable qualities of prospective space habitats.
Null Gravity
Harmful Effects:
Bone density loss
Muscle deterioration
Visual impairment and intracranial pressure syndrome
Traditional Habitat Design Countermeasures:
Dwelling on a massive body
Rotational acceleration
Transhuman Countermeasures:
Drugs or genetic/cybernetic modifications to prevent or reverse aforementioned harmful effects
Habitat Implications:
The assumption that humans will always need a certain level of gravity (natural or simulated) in order to be healthy has lead to most long-term habitat concepts revolve around (no pun intended) the application of rotational acceleration. In other words, habitats could not rotate and simply exist as agglomerations of habitable volumes. Habitats could be made with less complexity, less structure, and fewer moving parts. The result would be a less-massive habitat with greater integrity and fewer failure modes.
Radiation
Harmful Effects:
Radiation sickness
Cancer
Death
Traditional Habitat Design Countermeasures:
Mass shielding
Magnetic shielding
Transhuman Countermeasures:
Cancer immunity / anti-cancer drugs
Rapid cellular regeneration
Habitat Implications:
The mass shielding requirement has contributed significantly to the design of large space habitats thus far. If humans were resistant to radiation, habitats may not require the extent of shielding that is normally seen or perhaps may require none at all, and therefore the final mass requirement may be reduced significantly.
While it may (in time) be possible to modify humans in the ways described above, it would not likely be undertaken without a reason to do so. In this case, one might reasonably assume that large space habitats could be constructed to accommodate unmodified humans. The problem here is that the design and construction of large space habitats requires an immense investment of time and resources (both physical and intellectual). The question then becomes this: given the options, which will be more cost-effective:
1) build complex and expensive habitats for unmodified humans
or
2) build somewhat less complex and less expensive habitats for modified humans
Put another way, will developing the technology and methods to modify humans be more expensive than the difference between the two construction methods?
It is no more than ignorant speculation to say for certain one way or the other at this point in time, but we are not completely without tools to estimate and reason even for this¹. While it may seem that successfully modifying humans for space habitation is a daunting task, it will undoubtedly be less daunting in the far future when humans begin to seriously consider the construction of space habitats. Additionally, even if it is found to be more cost-effective to build the more expensive habitat, this may not be the case if more than one habitat is considered; what if there are two habitats on the table? five? twenty? At a certain point, humanity's desire to remain unmodified will not pass muster with the actuaries, and may even seem old-fashioned or even regressive.
It is not my position that the traditional habitats designed to accommodate basic humans will not be built (in fact I hope I am completely wrong). I simply suspect there is a decent (even likely) chance that the capacity of human self-modification will outpace the need/desire to construct large space habitats. This is not necessarily something to lament, nor a notion to celebrate. It is merely a consideration and conceptual contextualization for the field of designing space habitats belonging to the far-future.
¹ Of the two, the resource costs of constructing space habitats is likely easier to estimate in terms of energy and time than the same for human modification.
