>It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem.
We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes.
Our bodies evolved and adapted to live in 9.8m/s2 its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
Is there an obvious reason this would not work ?
Nah, it's fine.
It's just big and expensive and we've already got gravity under our feet, so it's a very expensive way to remove one of the few reasons to do stuff in space in the first place.
We'll get around to it at some point, for sure. Just no hurry.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but generally it’s considered that the issue is more that if you’re standing on a spinning cylinder, you might have weird balance issues due to speed differences between head and feet. Also, you have to remember you don’t have gravity, so as you intuit, entry and exit are trickier.
Two broad ideas for entry/exit: do it at the center where the physical position is stable, then “spin up” some how, or alternately get up to external speed and lock on to something that you then elevator through the surface.
If cable holds you have gravity, if it fails you risk being slingshot into deep space
But also, the forces are never more than the apparent gravity times the mass, so when someone does finally end up experiencing this, it will be part of a larger pattern of bad maintenance and/or engineering that likely has other things going wrong at the same time.
I am only slightly exaggerating
Indeed, but the ISS is also zero gee.
> its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
I'm not suggesting it requires a leap of faith, merely that it is currently untested. Until we try, either hypothesis is plausible.
Two wrinkles, not really disagreements:
> Low gravity is a problem
It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem.
> Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere.
Not directly, but it does mean (1) leaks can be represurised from outside, and (2) is a source of carbon, useful for plants and ISRU fuel manufacturing.
The fuel point is useful for any initial colonisation creation, but by the time we seriously consider a million people we should be able to build a mass driver… which works better on the airless moon than the thin atmosphere of Mars.
> I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
I understand the appeal, but I strongly suspect they only seem good due to the failure modes having not yet been deeply investigated.