Word: united
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Army, the idea was especially attractive : it was hunting for a safe, simple way to anesthetize battlefield patients without the use of bulky, expensive gas equipment. With Army funds, doctors at the University of Mississippi, experimenting with dogs and monkeys, set out to construct a cheap mobile unit that could be used to shock human patients to sleep...
...enable at least part of humanity to beat this rap, Cole proposes the development of giant spaceships, each of which would contain at least 10,000 individual humans who would function rather like the cells of a multicelled animal; collectively, they would constitute what Cole calls a unit of "macrolife." Stowed along with the humans in the vast body of the macroorganism would be domestic animals, plants, raw materials, machines and computers, as well as microfilms of all the books in the Library of Congress. A fully developed unit of macrolife would have rocket propulsion to enable it to move...
Feeding on Asteroids. As Cole envisions things, the human cells inside the unit would be both male and female, and they would multiply in the normal human way. But the unit itself would multiply asexually, like an amoeba. As its human population increased, its internal machine shops would turn out parts for a new unit, using ingested asteroid material. After 40 or 50 years a fresh unit of macrolife would separate from its parent and look for a place in the sunlight and an asteroid to feed...
...should come first-to give practice. One useful transitional form, he believes, might be an underground missile base that could be sealed off for years. Self-contained underwater bases would provide useful experience, too, especially if they could cruise around like giant nuclear submarines. Perhaps the most practical training unit would be an underground city stocked with enough people, supplies and equipment to survive a nuclear war and recolonize the earth's devastated surface after postwar radioactivity had fallen to a tolerable level...
Cole admits that people who become cells in a unit of macrolife will have to surrender many cherished human freedoms. But so, he insists, will people who stay behind on the jampacked, atom-threatened earth. Except for unprogressive folk who insist on clinging to individual identity and the traditional attributes of humanity at all costs, Cole feels that a space-cruising, inside-out world with its controlled gravity and an artificial sun should prove a delightful place to live...