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Could We Make Artificial Gravity?
universetoday.com ^ | Fraser Cain

Posted on 07/30/2015 1:41:07 PM PDT by BenLurkin

The only way to get gravity is with mass. The more mass, the more gravity you get. Without mass, you can’t have gravity.

...

The force of gravity that we feel is actually just an acceleration towards the center of the Earth at 9.8 meters per second squared, or 1G.

If you were in a spacecraft and it was accelerating away from Earth at a rate of 1G, it would feel exactly the same if you were standing on the ground.

... Want to fly to Jupiter? It would only take about 80 hours of acceleration, and then 80 hours of deceleration. At the halfway point of this journey, you’re going more than 2,800 kilometers per second, which is close to 1% the speed of light.

Want to travel a light-year? Accelerate for about a year, then decelerate for a year. At the mid-point, you’ll be going the speed of light.

Uh oh. There’s the problem. As you probably know, as you approach the speed of light, it requires more and more

There’s an idea that I’m sure you Arthur C Clarke fans know, which requires way less energy: artificial gravity from centripetal force…

To make this comfortable, you need a ring-shaped spacecraft with a radius of 250 meters. This ring would need to turn about twice a minute for astronauts within the spacecraft to experience 1 G.

Building a spacecraft like this is an engineering challenge, but it’s probably within reach of our current technology.

Something like this would help us explore the Solar System without the health risks of microgravity.

...It’s going to be huge rotating rings for the foreseeable future, sadly.

(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...


TOPICS: Science
KEYWORDS: artificial; artificialgravity; gravity
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1 posted on 07/30/2015 1:41:07 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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To: BenLurkin

Sure. Add water and stir, don’t shake.


2 posted on 07/30/2015 1:42:35 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: BenLurkin

Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.


3 posted on 07/30/2015 1:46:34 PM PDT by prisoner6 (Unmutual and Disharmonious)
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To: BenLurkin

Have the Supreme Court declare its “right” to existence, and it will be so.


4 posted on 07/30/2015 1:47:30 PM PDT by fwdude (The last time the GOP ran an "extremist," Reagan won 44 states.)
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To: BenLurkin

The space station in 2001 A Space Odyssey had the gravity problem solved. This should have been the way the International Space Station should have been designed.

5 posted on 07/30/2015 1:54:35 PM PDT by xp38
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To: BenLurkin

No problem...just spin the space station you are visiting.


6 posted on 07/30/2015 1:54:51 PM PDT by EagleUSA (Liberalism removes the significance of everything.)
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To: BenLurkin

Manned rockets accelerate at roughly 2G for 8 minutes to reach orbit. To do this requires about 6,000,000 pounds of Saturn 5 rocket, most of it discarded/burned during the process.

To SWAG the “160 hours to Jupiter” trip, we’d need something on the order of 7.2 billion pounds of rocket ... and that’s just for a single one-way trip.

I’d compute the mass required (assuming perfect E=mc^2 conversion) for a 1G 100 light year trip, but for the moment I’m fried.

Suffice to observe that space travel, at speeds fitting comfortably into human lifespans, is EXTREMELY expensive.


7 posted on 07/30/2015 2:02:06 PM PDT by ctdonath2 (The world map will be quite different come 20 January 2017.)
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To: Louis Foxwell
Sure. Add water and stir, don’t shake.

(God): Get your own water.

8 posted on 07/30/2015 2:04:52 PM PDT by Quality_Not_Quantity (Liars use facts when the truth doesn't suit their purposes.)
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To: BenLurkin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VBex8zbDRs


9 posted on 07/30/2015 2:08:48 PM PDT by ameribbean expat
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To: xp38

The EA ships in B5 had spinning sections. I’m not counting the White Stars, Excalibur and others built with alien technology.


10 posted on 07/30/2015 2:11:32 PM PDT by wally_bert (There are no winners in a game of losers. I'm Tommy Joyce, welcome to the Oriental Lounge.)
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To: Louis Foxwell
I misread....thought he meant artificial GRAVY.

# Yeah, Ive done that gravy thing...............the dog still refuses to eat any food I put out for him.

11 posted on 07/30/2015 2:15:42 PM PDT by capt. norm (The best things in life are not thingsv<P)
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To: wally_bert

B5 - great scifi


12 posted on 07/30/2015 2:16:33 PM PDT by NativeSon ( Grease the floor with Crisco when I dance the Disco)
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To: BenLurkin
I get barbequed every time I mention this, but as Sallah and Indiana Jones said in Raiders: "They're digging in the wrong place!"

Gravity is not a state property. It is a happenstance, merely a result of other processes. Solve those processes (well, one of them) and you have the ability to control a gravitational field. I even developed an experiment to test the hypothesis. Anyone have a billion dollars I can borrow?

13 posted on 07/30/2015 2:20:54 PM PDT by lafroste
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To: BenLurkin

What they don’t tell you about rotating rings are things lie vertigo and the Coriolis effect that make them next to worthless.


14 posted on 07/30/2015 2:22:43 PM PDT by DaxtonBrown (http://www.futurnamics.com/reid.php)
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To: xp38

It doesn’t need to be a ring at all; it just needs to rotate. A cuboid spacecraft with a counterweight at the end of a long tether could be just as effective.


15 posted on 07/30/2015 2:27:17 PM PDT by eclecticEel ("The petty man forsakes what lies within his power and longs for what lies with Heaven." - Xunzi)
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To: fwdude

If you have anti-matter do you have anti-gravity?..................


16 posted on 07/30/2015 2:38:22 PM PDT by Red Badger (Man builds a ship in a bottle. God builds a universe in the palm of His hand.............)
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To: lafroste
Gravity is not a state property. It is a happenstance, merely a result of other processes. Solve those processes (well, one of them) and you have the ability to control a gravitational field.

The ability to control gravity like this was a premise in Chris Nolan's SF film, Interstellar (2014). It is based on some speculative physical theories and conjectures currently being tossed around by Kip Thorne at Caltech (the scientific advisor for Interstellar) and other physicists.

It goes something like this: Quantum strings have endpoints that end in Dirichlet boundary conditions (the so-called 'D-branes'). Almost all the physical particles in the Standard Model are conjectured to be made of open quantum strings, and therefore they are constrained to only move along the paths of these D-branes. However, the conjectured force mediator particle for gravity - the graviton - has the vibrational states of a closed string, not an open one. That means that gravitons have no such limitations on their movement: They are not constrained to follow only the paths of the D-branes.

In other words, certain gravitational effects could in theory take place that defy Newtonian laws. This could be exploited (in principle) to create essentially a form of anti-gravity. And that, once achieved, could be used (again in principle) to move arbitrarily large objects up into outer space, including (for example) a rotating space habitat that could support thousands of people.

All of this is purely speculative, of course. Anyway, it's a cool film and worth watching.

17 posted on 07/30/2015 2:54:18 PM PDT by Gideon7
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To: BenLurkin
Without mass, you can’t have gravity.

Like the Higgs Boson who walked into church and said you can't have Mass without me! (Bada-bump)

18 posted on 07/30/2015 3:05:59 PM PDT by ichabod1 (Spriiingtime for islam, and tyranny. Winter for US and frieeends. . .)
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To: Red Badger

If you have anti-matter do you have anti-gravity?........

We haven’t discovered it...yet.

We also don’t understand the properties of Dark Matter, and why we believe it holds galaxies together.

We are still the equivalent of mice to men, in our true (not theoretical) understanding of the nature of the Universe.


19 posted on 07/30/2015 3:06:01 PM PDT by rikkir (You can lead a horde to knowledge but you canÂ’t make them think. (TnkU ctdonath2))
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To: Red Badger

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/does-antimatter-have-a-negative-mass.408957/

Post 12 ,for an explanation of why not. :)


20 posted on 07/30/2015 3:09:09 PM PDT by moose07 (DMCS (Dit Me Cong San ) - Nah)
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