It is difficult to say what they will call it in the future, that is, baseball. After all, if you’re playing baseball in a space colony, is it really baseball or space ball? Imagine hitting the ball in zero gravity, there would be nothing to slow the ball down once you hit it. In other words, every time you hit the ball, you hit it out of the park and hit a home run. Obviously, you’d run out of balls quickly, therefore it’s time for futurists to consider how to play baseball in space.
Since it is one of America’s favorite pastimes, and since the United States is at the forefront of space exploration, you know that one day we will have colonies, and those colonists will want to play baseball. They won’t be satisfied just watching televised baseball games on Earth on the surface of Mars in their space colony. I was considering this the other day and trying to figure out how stadiums would be built to play baseball on a lunar colony or a martian colony.
Large stadiums could not be built because they would take up too much space and it would be very difficult to fill them with oxygen. Players could play outside, but they’d need special breathing apparatus, and with low gravity, they could certainly hit the ball farther, so the baseball field would have to be bigger, wouldn’t it?
What if they played in a smaller environment? What if they played inside a small dome, not much bigger than the actual diamond in the center of the baseball field? Perhaps the dome could record the speed of the ball hitting the flank, determining if the ball would have gone out of the stadium by calculating the speed of impact and the kinetic energy behind the ball at the moment of hit, and also the angle. . That could be one way to play it, and now we have that technology.
Some people believe that the future of baseball will be more of a fancy Wii or Kinect game in an augmented reality situation. Yes, that is another option. Putting up baseball cages wouldn’t be difficult, and plugging it in with augmented reality would give space colonists the feeling they were playing baseball. But somehow I suspect that humans will want to play a full game of baseball on a full field.
Will the space colonists be happy with a different arrangement, or will they want to play outside on the planet’s surface on a level playing field with an actual baseball diamond? In fact, I hope you will please consider all this and think about it.