A good night's sleep

Clare complained this morning that she had not slept well last night,

"Lying on my side my hips ached, then it was my shoulder. Just couldn't find a comfortable position."

On our way to the shops this morning, I ran some suggestions by her.

"We could replace that expensive new mattress we bought recently with a neutral buoyancy flotation tank?"

"You know, breathing isn't optional with me."

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My second thought was more inspired.

"You know those vertical wind tunnels? They shoot air up a tube at high speed and it supports people. They learn how to sky-dive. It would be the ultimate air bed!"

I thought I ought to mention a few minor difficulties.

"The air speed is 120 mph. And I believe the four 500 hp engines are quite noisy, expensive to run and would probably occupy too much space."

Clare thought these objections reasonable.

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I finally recalled the best solution to a comfortable night's sleep - the levitating frog.

"Remember that YouTube video of the levitating frog? It's held up by a strong magnetic field. If we get some superconducting magnets we could simulate zero-g above the bed. You'd float all night!"

Clare got quite excited by this, until I remembered that it took a 10 Tesla field to levitate the frog. Clare is perhaps three hundred times heavier while the strongest sustained magnetic field ever created is around 40 Tesla.

"There is a small downside. Every metallic object in the house, including the fridge, would be accelerated to insane speeds and would smash its way into the bedroom. The house would be shredded within milliseconds of pressing the on-switch."

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We decided to compromise on Anadin Extra.

This could ruin your whole day ...

Perhaps we should start to listen to the Tesla guy and put some of our eggs in another basket (make sure the video captions are on - box on bottom right, left of settings; and you can lose the audio ).

If you followed the link you may never think about Excel spreadsheets the same way again.

Putting the 'one million people on Mars' to one side, here are some other options:

• long-duration refuge sites buried deep inside the mountains; 
• a (largely) self-sustaining lunar colony;
• asteroid or orbital habitats. 

They're all hard - but then, so is Mars. Any place where we need advanced technology to survive at all is going to be vulnerable to system crashes. All the proposed refuges need advanced, not basic technology, sustained by hi-tech societies and lots of skilled people.

I would much prefer self-maintaining and self-reproducing technologies (aka 'life') which could be engineered to thrive in these hard environments and could create an ecology in which even underskilled and numerically-depleted humans could survive and progress.

Maybe needs a similar reworking of human, though (see this post).