Sunday, July 6, 2025

A Prediction

If mankind ever establishes a large-scale permanent colony on the Moon (as a vacation resort, I'm certain, with frequently-rotated personnel, since the radically weaker gravity would play havoc with the bodies of long-term residents in all kinds of unpleasant ways), I believe indoor flying will become a popular form of recreation.  I picture the arena to be a gigantic hangar-type building without internal support to obstruct flight, vastly loftier and wider than any that could be built on Earth.  The floor would be perforated with innumerable small apertures through which air under pressure would be pumped out, creating a permanent updraft;  the ceiling would be designed to receive the wind and recycle it.  The players would be taken up to a high platform, where they would be fitted with a "flight suit";  that is, a light skeletal frame shaped somewhat like a glider, in which they would lie prone, with movable wings whose shape and angle they could control with their arms and hands.  Thus prepared, they would then step off the ledge, and taking advantage of the Moon's weaker gravity and aided by the updraft -- fly!  Flapping the wings like the smaller birds that stay close to the ground would still be impossible -- human anatomy just doesn't allow it -- but comparison with large, soaring birds like eagles and vultures would be apt;  it would still be genuinely self-powered and controlled flight, just like birds of prey riding a thermal column, not the hapless "controlled falling" of wingsuits.



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