Eventually lab-on-a-chip technology may make the equipment inconspicuous and cheap.
However, delivery is still a problem, since whether or not your mods will take is always a game of chance. I think that a small shop would do germline modification, and then implant the embryos into clients who paid for the superbabies.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the funding is going into gene identification and mapping, licencing technologies like Human Artificial Chromosomes and systems to uptake the genes into cells. These are R&D, and so if the information is discovered, it does not need to be discovered again.
Once techniques come out of those projects, there might be little to stop people just stealing the technology and using it.
Or maybe we might get really lucky and have an open-genome movement where a body of techniques and data is released to everyone, and so progress goes forth at a much increased pace.
Good points. I was being a bit extreme with the identical babies and ford broncos image.
I imagine that the thin end of the wedge would be a lot more subtle: In australia, deaf rights people are in a terrible debate over selective abortion. No child that learns sign while hearing will ever speak it as a first language. You could argue that the deaf are a people unto themselves and native sign speakers who are prevented from bearing deaf children are undergoing a genocide of sorts. concerns like this are echoed around the world.
It's possible that genetic drift may change directions and whole kinds of people who would have survived under normal breeding would be annihiliated by fashion and popular taste.
After all, something as trivial as a nose can be an important cultural marker of identity. Many people have nosejobs. It's a ritual in some families. Imagine if that family was offered the promise of no wadding ever again, if they had their germline altered so that the very genes which had been passed down from their ancestors would be replaced by genes from somebody with a smaller nose?
The death of a culture need not be dramatic, nor swift.
The only solution to this that I can see is to bank the genomes of everybody on the planet, and hope that we can record their cultures on paper as fast as possible. Maybe resurect their people at a later date...
But you're right, even if the preservation process was free, not eveybody would go for it.
And if the enhancement process was cheap and painless, then it might prove very popular indeed.
Putting the power to manipulate genes into the hands of the consumer is going to radically alter the genetic balance in the population which uses it.
There will be creative people, holdouts and pockets of resistance but (unless the technology is and remains prohibitively expensive, which is unlikely due to moore's law and its easy application to this technology) most people are going to just go with the flow and choose the baby that their neighbour wants.
Maybe racial pride might prevent wholesale conversion to the one genotype, but even then you might get people choosing children who look like idealised visions of their race... or weigh 350 pounds, are smart as hell and are built like bulls so that nobody will give them a hard time.
Ultimately I worry for the minority, especially the children of eccentric parents. In the past, there was oceans of weird and wonderful people to hide in. In the future, conformity may make discrimination far more extreme than it has ever been before.
Just ask the only coloured person moving into an all white town.
Good point. My bad to suggest that Hind III is present in your cells. I meant things like DNA Pol III which every human uses to make more DNA for cell division. It's not as good as Taq polymerases for PCR but it has its uses.
On the other hand, a ban on certain types of bacteria (to make it hard to make Taq Polymerases), or equipment used to purify the proteins, or equipment capable of synthesising the proteins from scratch could drive the prices up... but only if they are enforced effectively.
Unlike a other technologies like oil refining or microchip fabrication which must be a sprawling industrial complex, a person can physically set up a pretty good lab in an ordinary office or even a well constructed garrage. Genetic engineering technology is legal right now and getting cheaper. Hopefully it will be producing products that the average person can afford. If the technology isn't legal, it would still be affordable enough for the underground... but I'd hate to see that happen. Can you imagine what kind of children crime bosses might find handy in the family business?
well, human cryogenics is usually the freezing of embryos, zygotes, eggs and sperm. I don't know the proportion that don't make it, but I'm pretty sure that a four cell embryo cant sustain very much damage and survive. ok maybe 75% losses worst case. Thawed out embryos still implant, and cryobabies are still born.
How I wish they hadn't axed that show when James Cameron called for aprocalyptic plagues and multibillion dollar military hardware.
I mean it had everything - a genetically modified superheroine, up to date politics, good creepy villains who had human sides to them. And pretty good science. To top it off, the final episode of season two features what I think might be a SAR 21 bullpup rifle for all the gun nuts out there.
It even had a good explanation for the obligatory characters with funny foreheads which the makeup artists union make crop up in the story: they're modified humans which are used on "special missions" by a shadowy government agency.
MOLE (to Luke): These Arctic Division guys. Always complaining.
ARCTIC GUY (to Luke): Would you listen to him? With his little space heater over there.
MOLE: When we took out Saddam, we did fifty clicks across the desert in one day.
ARCTIC GUY: Siberian campaign, we did sixty clicks through the snow in one night.
MOLE: I'm talking 115 degrees.
ARCTIC GUY: Wind chill 30 below.
MOLE: Baking sun.
ARCTIC GUY: Driving snow.
(They both look to Luke.)
LUKE: What do I know? They designed me to dig trenches.
The lefty types, being the minority, are scared not in spite of choice, but because of it.
How many parents in America want a brunette child with a stocky figure in a girl? I'm not sure if you're a parent yourself. If you are I'm pretty hopeful that you would tell me that you wouldn't trade your baby for anything. But suppose you were not a parent yet, but about to become one. the doctor shows you a gattaca style menu of possible babies and one of them is the cookycutter bobbie model from snowcrash. And you think to yourself "Nobody will ever call her fat. Or demean her for her appearance. She will fit in in every way. And there's no way in hell I'm going to chose the one with glasses."
And thus, in nine months time, you look down your street at the identical babies in identical prams being pushed out of identical houses into identical ford broncos and realise that the Madison Avenue types who booked 30 seconds during the superbowl outsmarted all of you... except the family down the street who are new here and could only afford a No-Diseases package.
Now imagine if that was true, imagine what it would be like if you were the only UNmodified girl in your class. Would the teasing over being different get easier, or worse? Imagine if your parents had modified you for brains rather than looks and the side effects involved a hairy neck and small horn-like protrusions on your forehead.
Never underestimate the herd mentality. You'll find as many barbies walking the streets as there are people drinking coke today. The pepsi generation will be populated entirley by ken.
God help those whoes parents decided to choose something unpopular or obscure, because your birth-body is one thing you can't throw away when it becomes unfashionable.
Sure restriction enzymes are costly, but at least they're legal enough to give to 2nd year biochem students like me. Also you can buy a gene printer (known as an oglio synthesiser) from Bioron or ABI for about $12,000.00 used. That can print up arbitary DNA sequences for you without much fuss, and then you can DNA ligase them together into whatever you want.
All this is legal, and getting cheaper (Moore's law... blah... Blah...).
Whether the rich or the poor or both get the benefits and/or curses of the technology depends on the laws and the cultural aspects, not the science.
Unlike plutonium which is a relatively rare and dangerous element, the the chemicals that this technology uses exist in every cell of your body. You didn't think that your cells went and sliced and diced DNA without the benefit of restriction enzymes did you?
Furthermore, are your gender politics assuming that all the rich people who go for this technology are male? I find your logic there rickety at best.
Not to mention your ability to stand up without assistance, resist skin cancer and avoid breaking in half in a stiff wind... all qualities which the designers of Barbie took as secondary or tertary requirements when they wrote up the spec.
Intertribal Sea Platform blasted as waste of beads.
The tribespeople blasted the Intertribal Sea Platform today, saying that it achieved nothing that unmanned lobster pots could do for less and that there was nothing of value over the ocean anyway.
Likewise the replacement for the ageing sea-canoe is looking like it won't make the next funding round since the wood is needed to build more huts.
I guess that the main reason why people want an hourly rate is so that they can estimate how much money they'll have at the end of the week.
I mean, unless you have projects which are really, really small (ie, normal person can complete in less than 3 hours work) then it becomes hard for people to get enough small jobs to get a track record and fill the gaps between big projects. Better yet, if you could get the cash to run wall to wall huge projects then there would be no gaps and everybody wins. But you need to get the cash from somewhere, and cash in this global economy is scarce.
Imagine if you're a young engineer who knows that you can complete a six week $25,000 project in two weeks, because you've done it a few times and not broken a sweat, so you decide to get a mortgage to finally buy that house.
then there's a war or something, consumer confidence goes through the floor and every project you enquire about has been snapped up by the employer's trusted few.
jobs are thin on the ground, the payments are due. you get a few gigs which just cover payments but very few people want to write software at the time and there is a huge surplus of people more qualified and experienced than you.
you take out a classified ad. You learn new skills. But every time you turn around you're doiong a six week project in two weeks, and then sitting idle - improving yourself - for up to three months.
You'd love to start your own software house but you know next to nothing about marketing and brand development and sales, so you get a job on a help desk, or at golden arches or something because that at least pays the bills.
in Hong Kong it's called the Octoupus Smart Card, and it is a non-contact system working on RF. You can leave the card in your wallet or purse, and leave your wallet in your jacket or your purse in your handbag. Just approach the gate and swipe the garment/luggage over the proximity reader and it figures out whether to let you through.
One thing: when the battery dies, could you just use the bird when it's in sunlight? what's the orbit period like up there? would you have the content dropping out in the middle of the transmission, or could you hand it off to another old bird that just passed the daylight terminator?
Once, JJ Baudrilard came to speak at my university. He spoke in french to the largely english speaking audience through a very talented interperter.
When it came time to answer questions, he started to answer the first few through the interpreter, and then he mysteriously shut up and the interpreter just kept on answering the questions.
So the father of the hyperreal became a simulacrum himself.
(When the other speakers found out how much he was being paid, they all got on the staff telephone and made long distance calls until they'd rung up a bill equal to the difference between his fees and theirs.)
You raise good points. I sincerely hope that the idea of electronic parking tickets that they floated on the website is replaced in most cities by an entirely software solution. (Email you your parking fines. no more paper tickes on your windscreen which the local hoods can steal for pranks)
On the other hand, what if you use pressure sensative paper as the worlds's most portable scanner? Write your meeting notes on normal paper, with the smart scanner paper underneath like that old fashioned pressure activated carbon paper that people sometimes use to duplicate reciepts.
the pressure sensative paper stays blank. At the end of the meeting, file your handwritten notes and plug in your pressure sensative mat to your laptop/desktop/whatever. the dozens of pages that you stored in it are copied across, and the handwriting recognition goes through in a few minutes. presto!
(if you're really adventureous, you could get the pad to have a built in wifi antenna. then you'd never have to leave the meeting. when you run out of paper, just use an inkless stylus on the pad directly, and hope you remember where you've written... or maybe make the top layer smart colour change paper.)
Might be handy for those business people who don't want heavy laptop bags or bulge inducing pdas ruining the line of a good suit. (on the other hand, most people like that who I know just get their PAs to carry all their junk for them. oh well. maybe the new tech might still sell on early adopter chic.)
The other posters have said that when nasa gets slammed it has nothing to do with whether nasa engineers are smart or dim, and I totally agree with them.
I'll respect their answers to this question: where is the ISS?
I'm thinking that in the event of the crew cabin of the space shuttle having a creeping failure which didn't immediatly kill the crew, it might be nice to have a contingency plan to go someplace else for shelter.
Would it be possible to build an "Abort to ISS" option into the flight plan so that the shuttle can use its remaining fuel to go to the ISS and dock, instead of deorbiting?
There are already alternate landing sites on this side of the upper atmosphere, why not in space too?
as far as food and oxygen goes, most shuttle missions are actually shorter than the maximum supplies of food would last. Why not pack a few emergency oxygen supplies and dock with the ISS and stay there while rescue is arranged. Space would be cramped but it would be better than staying aboard a craft with a leaky cabin.
Of course if the crew is fine, but cannot re enter the atmosphere wasn't the plan to stay in space?
If some missions can have punishing spacewalks to repair hubble etc, why not each mission end with a wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail cone inspection space walk, before being pronounced safe to reenter the atmosphere?
I know that the people working on this most complex of all endevours are smarter than me. I know that they have considered the possibilities above and even designed equipment for them. What surprises me is that the flight plans did not let the astronauts use their orange space suits this time, or any of the other equipment, to save themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Both good points. I've seen some interesting work on controling electroosmotic flow so well that you can perform single molecule sequencing on dna.
Eventually lab-on-a-chip technology may make the equipment inconspicuous and cheap.
However, delivery is still a problem, since whether or not your mods will take is always a game of chance. I think that a small shop would do germline modification, and then implant the embryos into clients who paid for the superbabies.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the funding is going into gene identification and mapping, licencing technologies like Human Artificial Chromosomes and systems to uptake the genes into cells. These are R&D, and so if the information is discovered, it does not need to be discovered again.
Once techniques come out of those projects, there might be little to stop people just stealing the technology and using it.
Or maybe we might get really lucky and have an open-genome movement where a body of techniques and data is released to everyone, and so progress goes forth at a much increased pace.
Good points. I was being a bit extreme with the identical babies and ford broncos image.
I imagine that the thin end of the wedge would be a lot more subtle: In australia, deaf rights people are in a terrible debate over selective abortion. No child that learns sign while hearing will ever speak it as a first language. You could argue that the deaf are a people unto themselves and native sign speakers who are prevented from bearing deaf children are undergoing a genocide of sorts. concerns like this are echoed around the world.
It's possible that genetic drift may change directions and whole kinds of people who would have survived under normal breeding would be annihiliated by fashion and popular taste.
After all, something as trivial as a nose can be an important cultural marker of identity. Many people have nosejobs. It's a ritual in some families. Imagine if that family was offered the promise of no wadding ever again, if they had their germline altered so that the very genes which had been passed down from their ancestors would be replaced by genes from somebody with a smaller nose?
The death of a culture need not be dramatic, nor swift.
The only solution to this that I can see is to bank the genomes of everybody on the planet, and hope that we can record their cultures on paper as fast as possible. Maybe resurect their people at a later date...
But you're right, even if the preservation process was free, not eveybody would go for it.
And if the enhancement process was cheap and painless, then it might prove very popular indeed.
Exactly my contention:
Putting the power to manipulate genes into the hands of the consumer is going to radically alter the genetic balance in the population which uses it.
There will be creative people, holdouts and pockets of resistance but (unless the technology is and remains prohibitively expensive, which is unlikely due to moore's law and its easy application to this technology) most people are going to just go with the flow and choose the baby that their neighbour wants.
Maybe racial pride might prevent wholesale conversion to the one genotype, but even then you might get people choosing children who look like idealised visions of their race... or weigh 350 pounds, are smart as hell and are built like bulls so that nobody will give them a hard time.
Ultimately I worry for the minority, especially the children of eccentric parents. In the past, there was oceans of weird and wonderful people to hide in. In the future, conformity may make discrimination far more extreme than it has ever been before.
Just ask the only coloured person moving into an all white town.
Good point. My bad to suggest that Hind III is present in your cells. I meant things like DNA Pol III which every human uses to make more DNA for cell division. It's not as good as Taq polymerases for PCR but it has its uses.
On the other hand, a ban on certain types of bacteria (to make it hard to make Taq Polymerases), or equipment used to purify the proteins, or equipment capable of synthesising the proteins from scratch could drive the prices up... but only if they are enforced effectively.
Unlike a other technologies like oil refining or microchip fabrication which must be a sprawling industrial complex, a person can physically set up a pretty good lab in an ordinary office or even a well constructed garrage. Genetic engineering technology is legal right now and getting cheaper. Hopefully it will be producing products that the average person can afford. If the technology isn't legal, it would still be affordable enough for the underground... but I'd hate to see that happen. Can you imagine what kind of children crime bosses might find handy in the family business?
I guess the solution would be to prepare by surgically implanting cooling tubes in our bodies to rapidly shoot liquid nitrogen through.
that way we have more surface area to lose heat, and smaller volumes to cool.
I guess the problem of removing the tubes can be left to future generations.
well, human cryogenics is usually the freezing of embryos, zygotes, eggs and sperm. I don't know the proportion that don't make it, but I'm pretty sure that a four cell embryo cant sustain very much damage and survive. ok maybe 75% losses worst case. Thawed out embryos still implant, and cryobabies are still born.
An unknown suspect, or suspects, rammed the Rockstar Games server, waited for the admin to get out and then reversed over them several times.
police suspect slashdotting...
It's called James Cameron's Dark Angel.
How I wish they hadn't axed that show when James Cameron called for aprocalyptic plagues and multibillion dollar military hardware.
I mean it had everything - a genetically modified superheroine, up to date politics, good creepy villains who had human sides to them. And pretty good science. To top it off, the final episode of season two features what I think might be a SAR 21 bullpup rifle for all the gun nuts out there.
It even had a good explanation for the obligatory characters with funny foreheads which the makeup artists union make crop up in the story: they're modified humans which are used on "special missions" by a shadowy government agency.
MOLE (to Luke): These Arctic Division guys. Always complaining.
ARCTIC GUY (to Luke): Would you listen to him? With his little space heater over there.
MOLE: When we took out Saddam, we did fifty clicks across the desert in one day.
ARCTIC GUY: Siberian campaign, we did sixty clicks through the snow in one night.
MOLE: I'm talking 115 degrees.
ARCTIC GUY: Wind chill 30 below.
MOLE: Baking sun.
ARCTIC GUY: Driving snow.
(They both look to Luke.)
LUKE: What do I know? They designed me to dig trenches.
The lefty types, being the minority, are scared not in spite of choice, but because of it.
How many parents in America want a brunette child with a stocky figure in a girl? I'm not sure if you're a parent yourself. If you are I'm pretty hopeful that you would tell me that you wouldn't trade your baby for anything. But suppose you were not a parent yet, but about to become one. the doctor shows you a gattaca style menu of possible babies and one of them is the cookycutter bobbie model from snowcrash. And you think to yourself "Nobody will ever call her fat. Or demean her for her appearance. She will fit in in every way. And there's no way in hell I'm going to chose the one with glasses."
And thus, in nine months time, you look down your street at the identical babies in identical prams being pushed out of identical houses into identical ford broncos and realise that the Madison Avenue types who booked 30 seconds during the superbowl outsmarted all of you... except the family down the street who are new here and could only afford a No-Diseases package.
Now imagine if that was true, imagine what it would be like if you were the only UNmodified girl in your class. Would the teasing over being different get easier, or worse? Imagine if your parents had modified you for brains rather than looks and the side effects involved a hairy neck and small horn-like protrusions on your forehead.
Never underestimate the herd mentality. You'll find as many barbies walking the streets as there are people drinking coke today. The pepsi generation will be populated entirley by ken.
God help those whoes parents decided to choose something unpopular or obscure, because your birth-body is one thing you can't throw away when it becomes unfashionable.
Sure restriction enzymes are costly, but at least they're legal enough to give to 2nd year biochem students like me. Also you can buy a gene printer (known as an oglio synthesiser) from Bioron or ABI for about $12,000.00 used. That can print up arbitary DNA sequences for you without much fuss, and then you can DNA ligase them together into whatever you want.
All this is legal, and getting cheaper (Moore's law... blah... Blah...).
Whether the rich or the poor or both get the benefits and/or curses of the technology depends on the laws and the cultural aspects, not the science.
Unlike plutonium which is a relatively rare and dangerous element, the the chemicals that this technology uses exist in every cell of your body. You didn't think that your cells went and sliced and diced DNA without the benefit of restriction enzymes did you?
Furthermore, are your gender politics assuming that all the rich people who go for this technology are male? I find your logic there rickety at best.
Not to mention your ability to stand up without assistance, resist skin cancer and avoid breaking in half in a stiff wind... all qualities which the designers of Barbie took as secondary or tertary requirements when they wrote up the spec.
"I'm gonna join the USAF and get a big Frikkin Laser!"
Intertribal Sea Platform blasted as waste of beads.
The tribespeople blasted the Intertribal Sea Platform today, saying that it achieved nothing that unmanned lobster pots could do for less and that there was nothing of value over the ocean anyway.
Likewise the replacement for the ageing sea-canoe is looking like it won't make the next funding round since the wood is needed to build more huts.
In other news, the tribal chiefs dismissed claims of "Tall Ship" sightings and wild rumours of so called "white people" or "haoles" kidnapping islanders and selling them into slavery. In spite of all the sightings, no conclusive proof of "white people" has ever been produced...
so you claim that the french revolution was lead by a non-frenchman, and mostly fought by Americans?
How quaint.
I always knew there was something wrong about the whole thing.
I guess that the main reason why people want an hourly rate is so that they can estimate how much money they'll have at the end of the week.
I mean, unless you have projects which are really, really small (ie, normal person can complete in less than 3 hours work) then it becomes hard for people to get enough small jobs to get a track record and fill the gaps between big projects. Better yet, if you could get the cash to run wall to wall huge projects then there would be no gaps and everybody wins. But you need to get the cash from somewhere, and cash in this global economy is scarce.
Imagine if you're a young engineer who knows that you can complete a six week $25,000 project in two weeks, because you've done it a few times and not broken a sweat, so you decide to get a mortgage to finally buy that house.
then there's a war or something, consumer confidence goes through the floor and every project you enquire about has been snapped up by the employer's trusted few.
jobs are thin on the ground, the payments are due. you get a few gigs which just cover payments but very few people want to write software at the time and there is a huge surplus of people more qualified and experienced than you.
you take out a classified ad. You learn new skills. But every time you turn around you're doiong a six week project in two weeks, and then sitting idle - improving yourself - for up to three months.
You'd love to start your own software house but you know next to nothing about marketing and brand development and sales, so you get a job on a help desk, or at golden arches or something because that at least pays the bills.
in Hong Kong it's called the Octoupus Smart Card, and it is a non-contact system working on RF. You can leave the card in your wallet or purse, and leave your wallet in your jacket or your purse in your handbag. Just approach the gate and swipe the garment/luggage over the proximity reader and it figures out whether to let you through.
here's the official site in english.
ERG Australia has signed a contract to use them in the land of OZ.
The octopus card is in no way anonymous.
good points.
One thing: when the battery dies, could you just use the bird when it's in sunlight? what's the orbit period like up there? would you have the content dropping out in the middle of the transmission, or could you hand it off to another old bird that just passed the daylight terminator?
One thing that would be interesting is if the ePaper could have a biometric scanning device in one corner - and "Ink" that it could turn on or off.
If you had proper access to the sheet - then the ink would display - and only while you were holding your thumb on the scanning square.
even better, have it programmed to display disinformation until activated by a thumb with the proper clearance!
Once, JJ Baudrilard came to speak at my university. He spoke in french to the largely english speaking audience through a very talented interperter.
When it came time to answer questions, he started to answer the first few through the interpreter, and then he mysteriously shut up and the interpreter just kept on answering the questions.
So the father of the hyperreal became a simulacrum himself.
(When the other speakers found out how much he was being paid, they all got on the staff telephone and made long distance calls until they'd rung up a bill equal to the difference between his fees and theirs.)
You raise good points. I sincerely hope that the idea of electronic parking tickets that they floated on the website is replaced in most cities by an entirely software solution. (Email you your parking fines. no more paper tickes on your windscreen which the local hoods can steal for pranks)
On the other hand, what if you use pressure sensative paper as the worlds's most portable scanner? Write your meeting notes on normal paper, with the smart scanner paper underneath like that old fashioned pressure activated carbon paper that people sometimes use to duplicate reciepts.
the pressure sensative paper stays blank. At the end of the meeting, file your handwritten notes and plug in your pressure sensative mat to your laptop/desktop/whatever. the dozens of pages that you stored in it are copied across, and the handwriting recognition goes through in a few minutes. presto!
(if you're really adventureous, you could get the pad to have a built in wifi antenna. then you'd never have to leave the meeting. when you run out of paper, just use an inkless stylus on the pad directly, and hope you remember where you've written... or maybe make the top layer smart colour change paper.)
Might be handy for those business people who don't want heavy laptop bags or bulge inducing pdas ruining the line of a good suit. (on the other hand, most people like that who I know just get their PAs to carry all their junk for them. oh well. maybe the new tech might still sell on early adopter chic.)
amen
The other posters have said that when nasa gets slammed it has nothing to do with whether nasa engineers are smart or dim, and I totally agree with them.
I'll respect their answers to this question: where is the ISS?
I'm thinking that in the event of the crew cabin of the space shuttle having a creeping failure which didn't immediatly kill the crew, it might be nice to have a contingency plan to go someplace else for shelter.
Would it be possible to build an "Abort to ISS" option into the flight plan so that the shuttle can use its remaining fuel to go to the ISS and dock, instead of deorbiting?
There are already alternate landing sites on this side of the upper atmosphere, why not in space too?
as far as food and oxygen goes, most shuttle missions are actually shorter than the maximum supplies of food would last. Why not pack a few emergency oxygen supplies and dock with the ISS and stay there while rescue is arranged. Space would be cramped but it would be better than staying aboard a craft with a leaky cabin.
Of course if the crew is fine, but cannot re enter the atmosphere wasn't the plan to stay in space?
And what happened to those rescue balls?
or even the orange suits?
If some missions can have punishing spacewalks to repair hubble etc, why not each mission end with a wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail cone inspection space walk, before being pronounced safe to reenter the atmosphere?
I know that the people working on this most complex of all endevours are smarter than me. I know that they have considered the possibilities above and even designed equipment for them. What surprises me is that the flight plans did not let the astronauts use their orange space suits this time, or any of the other equipment, to save themselves.
here is a similar yet different spray on clotting agent. and more products on the site.
He plays for the users.