by Matthew Cobb
After Jerry’s post of 1950’s LSD experiments, here are a couple of NASA “experiments” involving weightless cats in the “vomit comet” – a plane flying in a parabola, so you get zero gravity (this was also the way they did the weightless scenes in the film Apollo 13).
The first is from the 1960s, and I don’t bristle too much, though the cats are clearly distressed and I cannot see the point of it.
[Sadly you can watch the video only on Youtube… CLICK HERE]
The second video, from the 1980s seems just plain dumb, and I hope the kitteh scratched them…
I think there’s some serious potential for good research to be done on cats in microgravity, but not by just taking them for a ride on the Vomit Comet and tossing them around.
Gradually and gently acclimate some cats to flying, then to longer and longer periods of increasingly reduced gravity. Especially work with kittens.
Once you come up with a formula to get a cat to be relaxed in weightlessness, then start to study how it deals with the situation. Does it try to maintain a grip on things? How well does it leap and otherwise maneuver?
Now that you’ve got a cat that’s comfortable in sustained freefall, how does it react when being dropped from a great height (onto a safe landing spot, of course)?
Finally, send one of the stars of the cat program up for a stint on the ISS. (The cat will probably need to be diapered.) The crew can continue the study…and I’m sure they’d appreciate having a cat friend. When the cat comes back home, how does it re-adapt to Earth-normal gravity?
Humans are firmly anchored to the ground. Most birds (and bats) are comfortable in the air. (And studying birds in microgravity would also be a good study). Cats straddle the two environments; they’re great leapers, and they’ve got good adaptations for dealing with freefall. Do those adaptations help or hinder them?
Cheers,
b&
I agree. It would be fascinating to see how a cat deals with microgravity after it’s had a chance to get used to the idea. The cats in the videos are experiencing this very unusual situation for the first time, and microgravity on the vomit comet only lasts a few seconds, so the cats never get past the “holy crap what’s going on?” phase.
A kitteh on the ISS would be excellent.
I must confess, I’ve never thought about a bird in zero gravity… Now you’ve got my mind going.
How about this instead — take a young kitten (or any small domesticated animal) to the ISS — to grow up in that environment, and live out its life there. That might give us some insight into how humans would adapt to life on interstellar journeys — when several generations would pass before the craft reached its destination.
It’s a romantic thought, but interstellar generation ships simply ain’t never gonna happen.
You need enough energy to keep a highly-advanced industrial civilization going for tens, if not hundreds, of millennia. That means storing a non-trivial fraction of the total annual energy output of a star. If you can store that much energy, you’re not going to waste it on a slow boat to Centarus; you’re going to use a similar amount of energy to get there at relativistic speeds.
And you’re not going to be doing either until your civilization can afford to do so, meaning that the energy for the trip is no more than a small percentage of the civilization’s total energy budget. (Compare the energy spent historically on exploration with the total human energy consumption of the time, and it’s a surprisingly constant and very small ratio.) That pretty much means a Dyson Sphere, or at least a Niven Ringworld with massive Vinge-style antimatter factories inside the orbit of Mercury.
And, at that scale…a civilization won’t be going on any adventuresome jaunts for the halibut. They’ll be doing it because their central star isn’t providing them with enough power, and they need to expand by absorbing neighboring stars. Planetary life likely wouldn’t be any more on their intellectual radar than intestinal bacteria is on ours.
You know how the human mind has a hard time dealing with the very large numbers associated with the evolution of life on Earth — the timescale, the numbers of individuals and generations and the like? Interstellar travel is, if anything, even bigger. Getting the Shuttle (about the size of a schoolbus) to the nearest star in a decade would require the entire energy budget of the entire species for a year. Right now, we can’t even afford the energy to send a postage stamp there in a century on a flyby mission.
Cheers,
b&
I’d argue that “highly-advanced industrial civilization” is an oxymoron. If it’s sufficiently advanced to contemplate interstellar travel, it will likely be post-industrial, with the ability to fabricate complex machinery directly from raw materials, without a lot of heavy industrial infrastructure.
As to whether they’ll “be going on any adventuresome jaunts for the halibut,” we have no way of knowing what the collective motivations of such a civilization might be, having never seen one. But one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that there will be a wide variation in individual motivations. If it ever becomes possible for future Richard Bransons or Paul Allens to fund starship development out of their own pockets, then it will likely happen (just as Branson and Allen are funding development of space tourism today).
While you make a valid point about individual variation…I’d still point out that, when it’s only an individual involved, the energy budget is an even smaller proportion of the species’s total.
To put it in perspective: when a jetsetter who lives on Titan can have lunch with his in-laws who live in a cloud city over Venus and be back home in time for dinner — the same way a similar jetsetter who lives in New York can have lunch in Paris and catch the Met today — then somebody like Branson can afford to make a trek to Proxima Centauri.
Cheers,
b&
Reading the comments here is better than most science fiction these days… (moar please! This is *fun*!) :-))
For a cat, being dropped from a great height is not equivalent to freefall; cats reach terminal velocity very quickly (in a second or two) and can survive falls of pretty much any height. Their behavior when falling is dominated by orientation to the airstream and will not bear much relation to true freefall behavior.
Cats fall from buildings all the time–apartments and so on–and
get broken bones and sometimes die. Terminal velocity within a second or so is true of insects and creatures with a very large surface-area-to-mass ratio, but for an animal the size and mass of a cat, terminal velocity often occurs when they hit the ground.
Well, it appears opinion is divided on this (link).
Nevertheless the point stands that falling from a height in atmosphere is not the same as freefall experienced during spaceflight or Vomit Comet rides.
…and free-fall after even one second is about 25 mph. Imagine yourself in an all-out sprint on a bike (or a slow cruising pace if you’re an olympian) and running straight into a brick wall. Two seconds? Now you’re up to freeway speeds.
Of course, kinetic energy equals half the mass times the square of the velocity. Housecats have much less mass than adult humans, so they don’t take quite as much of a hit…but the exponential increase in energy from the velocity is still a real bitch.
Some back-of-the-napkin math…a ten-pound cat after two seconds of freefall has a kinetic energy of about 50 Newtons. A 150-pound person after a half second of freefall (rough guess of a fall from a three-story building) has a kinetic energy of about 150 Newtons. Imagine falling (or jumping) from a third-story window; a trio of cats hitting the ground after two seconds of falling will make just as much of a dent in the ground.
Cheers,
b&
Nevertheless, the best data we have (see link above) indicates that cats can and often do survive falls from extreme heights.
And people survive parachute jumps with a spoiled ‘chute…but probably not quite at the same rate as cats from similar terminal velocities.
Cheers,
b&
> “not by just taking them for a ride on the Vomit Comet and tossing them around”
I think the astronauts in the 80s video were just having fun, though at the expense of the hapless kitty. Certainly there are a host of objective measures that the astronauts/scientists could have been doing with the felines – but which don’t make for interesting YouTube clips. Those measures include myogenic potentials of limb and neck reflexes in response to tilt, the vestibular-ocular reflex in response to rotation, etc. Plus, from my understanding, a lot of the research would have been done later on the ground, to monitor recovery of vestibular function and adverse symptoms. That’s an important issue with astronauts on extended flights.
My own Ph.D. advisor conducted vestibular studies on the vomit comet (on people), that ultimately lead to experiments on Spacelab 1. He always spoke fondly of his experiences with the parabolic flights, but admitted to feeling pretty ill. 🙂
Will a kitteh land on its feet if it can’t tell which way is up?
No, that was the point of the first video — although it was sadly demonstrated somewhat more vividly by the second video, which I agree with Matt seems a bit gratuitous.
I agree with Ben Goren that there could potentially be some interesting research here. Even the first video, it seems to me to be a reasonable experiment. It confirms the hypothesis that a cat’s landing-on-its-feet ability is almost (if not completely) exclusively determined by inertial data rather than visual data. Of course, it would have surprised us if the outcome had been different, but not so much that I think the experiment wasn’t worthwhile.
Sorry. No audio at work.
There were some studies, well, maybe articles is a better term, I read about in Scientific American in the late 70’s early 80’s on how cats land on their feet. They dropped cats, feet up, from a series of heights and filmed how the cats oriented themselves in free fall.
I noticed that the one guy was tossing the cat towards the wall and how the cat torqued itself around.
Kink the Cat would have made a very poor candidate for this kind of study as he has a tendency to shit himself when scared, although it would have been fun to watch the researchers dodge cat turds. Serve them right!
Pointless experiments with animals – reminds me of this beauty with hamsters – they were trained to go to a sound, left or right, then blasted in one ear with a loud tone, after which they went in the direction of the damaged ear – thus showing they had tinnitus…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15998194
I feel bad for the full gravity control cat. 🙁
What a colossal waste of NASA funding. Is that what we pay them to do?
What on Earth makes you think this was a waste?
First, considering the informal nature of the videos, I can guarantee you that this wasn’t the primary purpose of the trips on the Vomit Comet. That thing is going up and down regularly with all sorts of experiments, training missions, and the like. Clearly, these two examples were hitching a ride on a trip that was going to be made for some other purpose.
Besides that, a huge amount of useful knowledge could be gained from the sorts of experiments I outlined above. Understanding non-human physiology has done wonders for medicine; I wouldn’t be surprised if, for example, effective treatments for certain kinds of human vertigo could be discovered from such research. And, further out still…humanity, if it survives, will colonize the asteroid belt in the next few centuries. When we do so, I guarantee you we’ll be taking other vertebrates with us. These NASA experiments are essential baby steps in paving that future. Taking cats for a ride on the Vomit Comet is as essential to that future as putting songbirds in cages millennia ago was to modern cattle ranching.
Cheers,
b&
>> Clearly, these two examples were hitching a ride on a trip that was going to be made for some other purpose.
Ah, I totally agree (see my above post).
We pay them to do basic science. Not to ferry satellites into orbit, which can be done much more efficiently by commercial launch vehicles.
Kitties in space, I like… but how would a zero-G litterbox work?
I believe the technical term is, “diaper.”
Cheers,
b&
Geez, these people in the video are NOT cat lovers. I would NEVER throw a cat around that way.
The poor thing must be scared out of his mind. The humans don’t seem to realize or sympathize with that. They only seem to think of having a “good time” at the expense of the cat.
I think figuring out how cats react to weightlessness is important.
Quality of life will be so much better for astronauts when they can bring along kitties to orbit.
Well, if we are considering long manned flights to Mars, perhaps the inclusion of a pet will prevent homicide.
There’s a great alternative to using floating cats: use rats instead!!
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v1/n1/full/nn0598_10.html
Very interesting! But was anything ever published? I had a quick mooch on PubMed and could find nothing. Does anybody know? Nb they have also taken flies, spiders and all sorts of stuff into space. There are also rumours of couples being encouraged to have sex in zero gravity to see what happens. But not in the Vomit Comet – too many people and VERY quick!
Not sure about the McNaughton work with rats (he’s well known, though, for his hippocampal studies with rats in mazes). But Steve Highstein’s work was in toads was published:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11600668
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10448169
Playing pinball with a cat in zero-gravity. Seems a bit cruel, that.
Cats in space? What about fur floating everywhere, tummy upsets, eating (a cat can’t suck food out of a pouch), drinking, grooming (with a diaper on??). Frankly, I think that’d be cruel.