The time has come for us to design an orbiting space habitat where 500 families can work and live. This station will begin our program to colonize the moon or mars. On this space station, efforts will include performing tests impossible to perform on earth and controlling non-autonomous or semi-autonomous robots with less time delay than would be possible from earth. The kids on station will still need to go to school, but this school will be adapted to life in space, optimizing for different resources, different career possibilities, and of course, a different living environment. Once students get to middle school, they will know enough about space to help the space station and learn a lot from their experiences and community.
In the “First Space Generation Middle School,” we would still learn the basics: Reading, Writing, Math, Science, Social Studies and Physical Education. However, some subjects would benefit from special programs:
Virtual Reality:
- Many of our subjects would be taught through virtual reality, because then we could use as much paper and have as many projectors as we want, and teachers could supervise many different environments.
On a space station making every piece of paper and every pencil last longer is important, because bringing supplies from earth would be very expensive. In virtual reality we could have as many papers and pencils as we wanted and also our “home” and “school” spaces could be bigger and we could explore a larger variety of places.
So in our school we would do a lot in virtual reality. That is where we would write our homework, interact with our class pets, and complete resource intensive projects.
- Middle schoolers’ brains are more able to adapt their body maps than most adults. This means that in virtual reality they are better fitted to learning how to use extra limbs or other devices.
Since middle schoolers are still growing, their brains’ representations of their bodies are constantly changing. The Penfield homunculi and other body maps in their cerebrum and elsewhere are constantly adapting. Anyone who has used a pencil frequently has in some ways incorporated a pencil into their body maps. For example, if you’re holding a pencil and it hits a surface, you know that there is a hard surface about two inches in front of your pointer finger. You know this because receptors in your fingers carry the information to body maps in your brain. And whatever the length of the pencil, your brain can interpret signals from the receptors in your fingers to imagine what is happening at the tip of the pencil.
In space, it might be useful if we could double the length of someone’s arm, or give them prehensile toes, so the person would be better at moving around in low gravity where there is little to easily grab onto. We could achieve this if we could have a person, when working in virtual reality, believe their arms were twice as long, or that they had long prehensile toes. If they practiced with these adjustments for a few days, they could learn how to maneuver around the space station without bumping their new toes into anything. They could practice grabbing onto things with their adjusted toes and arms. Overall, if middle schoolers practice with these adjusted limbs in virtual reality and then for real, they should adapt more quickly and easily because their body maps have greater plasticity. Middle schoolers could learn to use all sorts of altered limbs and devices that might be useful for later life in space.
- In virtual reality we could also have pen pals from earth who would be learning the same stuff, but on earth.
Our pen pals would help us learn more about earth culture while we would help them and scientists on Earth learn about troubles we have with culture and/ or growing up in our space habitat. Also, in virtual reality we could share our ideas for different adaptation in our body maps, involving new limbs and more. Our pen pals could try out the extra limbs in virtual reality on earth, but they would not be able to actually use them and their practice would be in earth gravity. We would be able to see if our body maps were more plastic because we had to adapt to living in microgravity and trying out some designs for real.
We would not only share with our pen pals what we learned in class, but we could also tell each other about our fieldtrips in our different environments, so we could learn of earth society, and they could collect tips for possibly later working in space. When our pen pals later came to work in space, we could see how well their body maps adapted even if they had only practiced in virtual reality while they were still growing.
Robotics:
- What’s the point of being able to control limbs we can only have in virtual reality? Designs could be entered in a contest, and the winners’ designs would actually be built!
We would learn about robotics so we could design and try out practical and useful limbs in virtual reality. Every year our middle school would have a virtual add-on science fair. Everyone would display their best idea for an extra limb or adaptation they have been trying out in virtual reality. The winners would have their designs made by the next the year’s middle school students! Then everyone, once they’d practiced using the new add-ons in virtual reality, would get to try out the real thing!
Also, building these actual robotic devices would help us learn about problems for some sorts of robotics in space, like joints freezing, parts wearing away, and various points breaking. This experience would help us better understand robots and design more practical things in virtual reality for later use in space.
- A problem with non- autonomous robots far away from earth is that it takes too long for them to receive signals from the “brain” person controlling the robot.
Some adults in our community would probably have jobs controlling robots inside or outside of our space station, so we would know and hear about them often. Our school would have career visit days where we would get to go see (and if we were lucky, try controlling) actual robots like rovers on Mars and robots that work just outside the station so we could better understand them.
We would also practice operating robots in a virtual world where we could manipulate them by moving our own bodies. We could design and build our own small robots to direct inside the station so we could really develop conceptual and programming skills.
Earth Science:
- Our pen pal program could also help with learning earth science.
Students in our First Space Generation Middle School would still learn about earth science, because we would need a good knowledge of earth to make the best use of all the data we could collect in space. If we knew Earth better we would know which data we were collecting was the most important to consistently get (like indicators of water, etc.), so in case of difficulties we could prioritize what we needed to do.
Knowing Earth better would include learning about the different climates and the ecology. We could learn this more naturally if our pen pals shared pictures of their homes, the environments around their homes, and other places where they went (vacation or fieldtrip pictures and videos). We would also learn about how earth’s atmosphere, climate, gravity, and composition of minerals compare to other planets (Mars, Venus, Neptune, etc.) and moons.
We could describe how big space really was to our pen pals and our pen pals could try to describe to us how big the earth seems when you’re on it. We could also learn about the different habitats, geology, and weather systems of different planets.
Physical Education:
- Most of our space station would probably have only microgravity, but in a central location we would have a spinning “park” that would have about 1/6 of Earth’s normal gravity.
Most of our PE classes would be held in the spinning “park”. This would be an important exercise area for everyone because if any of the space station’s residents needed to go to earth or another environment with significant gravity, their bones and muscles would need to be strong enough. Also if people stayed on the space station for too long without proper exercise, their bones would gradually disintegrate away. Since the gravity in the park would also be closer to what our ancestors were used to, it might help our bodies avoid problems we might not anticipate.
The first generation of kids on this space station would generally come after they are at least two years old, so they would learn to walk on earth and initially develop bones and muscles of normal size. But since many kids will still be growing, they will need lots of PE to keep their bodies healthy. We would have our PE in the “park” that would spin to simulate earth’s gravity. Our “park” would also have a playground with bars, swings and more.
- In space, bones don’t absorb as much calcium and become weaker.
We would wear special uniforms all day long that put pressure or tension on bones and force them to make more calcium which would help keep us from collapsing later in the face of gravity or accidents. These uniforms might have strong elastic joining the belt and ankles or elbow and wrist to put pressure on the bones and make them take up more calcium. We’d keep improving the uniforms for what people of different ages or body types needed and maybe even have different uniforms for different days.
- In space people don’t realize they are tired because their muscles are not tired after a day has passed.
We would need extra exercise to grow healthy bodies, but we would also be encouraged to get enough sleep because a lot of brain growth and development requires good sleep cycles including REM sleep. PE and our special uniforms would help us to feel tired, but we might also learn to pay more attention to other body signals about sleep because they’re more important when growing up in space.
Benefits of having this station in space:
- Advantages in job training
Kids growing up in space would almost certainly learn to function better in microgravity. We also might learn through virtual reality and our studies of robotic to use certain space tools or mechanical body modification (like prehensile toes) more naturally than those learning as adults.
We (the kids) would learn about society and culture on earth and in space, learning earth ways from parents and pen pals but space ways from experience. Language has been shown to evolve faster among kids and teens, so this is probably true for other parts of culture and ways of doing things. We would become the bridge between different and new cultures.
We would be better prepared for designing and operating robots, planning and building space settlements, and other adaptations for life in space, which could lead to:
- Benefits to earth and changing the world for the better
More information would become available on the health effects and body map plasticity from growing up in space that would help explain the range of possible human development.
We would be able to compare our group of space kids to the group of our pen pals training in virtual reality on earth. This would allow better planning for future life and work in space and for other job training that might use virtual reality.
There would be spin off technologies, especially in fitness, medicine, robotics, virtual reality, and education.
Our diverse experiences and points of view could be shared with others beyond our pen pals to give a new perspective and cultural understanding.