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 cant 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, youre 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, youll be going the speed of light.
Uh oh. Theres the problem. As you probably know, as you approach the speed of light, it requires more and more
Theres an idea that Im 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 its probably within reach of our current technology.
Something like this would help us explore the Solar System without the health risks of microgravity.
...Its going to be huge rotating rings for the foreseeable future, sadly.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Sure. Add water and stir, don’t shake.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.
Have the Supreme Court declare its “right” to existence, and it will be so.
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.
No problem...just spin the space station you are visiting.
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.
(God): Get your own water.
The EA ships in B5 had spinning sections. I’m not counting the White Stars, Excalibur and others built with alien technology.
# Yeah, Ive done that gravy thing...............the dog still refuses to eat any food I put out for him.
B5 - great scifi
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?
What they don’t tell you about rotating rings are things lie vertigo and the Coriolis effect that make them next to worthless.
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.
If you have anti-matter do you have anti-gravity?..................
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.
Like the Higgs Boson who walked into church and said you can't have Mass without me! (Bada-bump)
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.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/does-antimatter-have-a-negative-mass.408957/
Post 12 ,for an explanation of why not. :)
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