Is Artificial Gravity Really Achievable? | Answers With Joe

I'm about to show you something that can only be done here on Earth, as far as we know, there is no other planet in the entire universe where you can do what I'm about to do. Are you ready? It's pretty surprising, so wait. in your ass, here we go, uh, I mean, to have combustion you need oxygen. Now we find oxygen on other moons in our solar system like your OPA Ganymede and Rhea around Titan, but Earth is the only place that has it at the necessary pressures. make this happen and of course we evolved to breathe oxygen, we also evolved for the specific air pressure we have here on Earth, air pressure which is remarkably rare.

Mars only has 1% of the air pressure we have and Venus is the air pressure. So strong it would crush you like a can. The Titans' atmosphere is close to 1.5 bar, but it is at a sunny negative 180 degrees Celsius. We have not evolved for that, the fact is that we have evolved for the specific conditions of this extremely strange planet. we live in, which means that if we want to travel off Earth, around the solar system or beyond whatever, we have to be able to simulate those conditions and bring with us things like a pressurized oxygen-rich environment at a temperature of approximately 50 degrees. range, but there is something more unique to Earth that we are specifically adapted to something that we simply are not going to find anywhere else nearby and something that is not remotely easy to simulate and that is

gravity

, space is a dangerous place and hostile, at least according to NASA's human research program website, adapting to different gravitational environments is one of the biggest challenges astronauts face here on Earth.

Each part of our body is dragged downward at a constant speed of 9.8 meters per second squared with variations due to elevation. Measure this as an equivalent gravitational force or g-force; Well, what you're experiencing right now is a g-force of 1 or 1 g, unless you're watching this from the International Space Station, in which case one awesome and two guys return to Astronauts working in low Earth orbit experience zero

gravity

not because the Earth has stopped attracting them but because they are synchronized with their spaceship. This is a common misconception that much of the general public has and I will confess it.

I also had the same misconception for much of my life, but when you are in space the Earth's gravity still acts on you, if you flew directly at the height of the ISS you would fall back almost the same amount. of force as if you were standing on the ground, the only reason astronauts on the ISS or on the waiting list is because they are traveling horizontally at 17,000 miles per hour, they are traveling fast enough that their speed basically matches the force that pushes you down, so basically you are constantly falling and this has nothing to do with outer space.

If you were fast enough from the top of a tall building you would circle the world the same way, the problem is you can't do that. because atmospheric friction would slow you down and a lot of people don't realize that the only reason we go up is to get out of the atmosphere, everything about going into orbit is horizontal motion, now this is also an argument against space planes. because if you travel horizontally through the atmosphere to get to outer space you lose so much energy just pushing against the atmosphere, so it's actually more energy efficient to use rockets and go straight up, which was now a bit of a rabbit hole if you would have simply traveled directly away from Earth and not gone into orbit, you would still have to deal with microgravity because the G-force would decrease according to the inverse square law as you travel further, either way, whether you are going to enter orbit.

Orbit or traveling to Mars and beyond weightlessness is a problem you will have to deal with or microgravity. I know someone is writing that in the comments right now. The thing about weightlessness is that it sounds fun, especially you know once you get used to it. but it actually has some advantages too, especially in the tight spaces of a spaceship or a space station because you can actually use all the space to seriously look at whatever room you're in at the moment, even if you're just kind of sitting in the bathroom toilet see how much empty space there is in the room you are sitting in and how much we are not using how much is completely wasted because we are stuck in one plane thanks to gravity imagine if you could just sit on the wall or in the corner there , imagine how much storage space you could have, you could put shelves along the ceiling, in fact being in a large room space could be an issue because you could be stuck floating in the middle with nothing to hold on to, the problem Of course, this is not designed so that our bodies contain up to 5.7 liters of blood that moves nutrients to give energy to our various organs and function the way it needs to.

Most of our body's energy comes from the brain, which is up here, but blood is a liquid and gravity is constantly pushing this liquid down, so without a circulatory system our blood would pool around our feet, which is not good for the old power hungry brain, but fortunately we have the whole circulatory system, one with a powerful pump and valves in the veins to constantly force blood towards the head, obviously, this is great here on earth, It helps with staying conscious, but in space without that downward force. It just adds up to a lot of unnecessary pressure which adds to vision problems, obviously circulatory problems and your body actually compensates for this by producing less blood and then there is the fact that the muscles and bones are not constantly working to stay upright. .

Even as you're sitting there watching this, there are hundreds of muscles activated and working against your bones to keep you from collapsing to the ground and without that your body starts to atrophy, basically starts to consume itself. Astronauts spend hours a day. exercising to try to compensate for this, but still astronaut Scott Kelly after his year in space experienced all kinds of dizziness and problems with his balance, as well as pain in his feet and legs that lasted for months afterward, but like I said Before, Kelly is one year old. in space would have nothing compared to a trip to Mars, astronauts will spend up to nine months just arriving at Mars and then will be on Mars for at least three months before leaving for another nine-month trip home;

In other words, your body would have to adjust to 0g, then 2.3g, then back to zerog before finally returning home to the crushing discomfort of 1g, we're talking joint pain, weakness like never before. He had never felt in his life, constant vertigo and dizziness while his body tried to restructure itself. How pumping that dangerously low amount of blood to your head is like imagining the worst hangover you've ever had in your life while having the worst flu you've ever had in your life for months. I hope you now have a comfy bed for Let's be fair, astronauts will be totally into this, they're not normal people and they're perfectly fine risking life and limb in the name of science and the chance to maybe do a TED Talk or two, but if we are

really

going to colonize other places in our solar system at some point normal people are going to have to make this trip and we are going to have to start taking the idea of ​​

artificial

gravity seriously and don't take that away from me Andy, we are the author del Martian agrees that most of the effects of being in long-term zero gravity wear off over time, but exactly as you say in your video, yeah, okay, you just spent several months in zero gravity and now suddenly You are at point four.

G, you know, on Mars you just react, Foom, yeah, you can't just start a mission to Mars with like two weeks of recovery, so I honestly think the solution is just

artificial

gravity now, before you say anything. I know many of you. Right now they're like, "Oh my God, he's

really

going to squeeze this Andy, we're interviewing him for all he's worth" and my answer is yes, yes, I expect more of this, so if we're going to get serious about artificial gravity In the short term, there are really only a couple of options for us: imagine you are an astronaut floating in orbit at a constant speed and then you fire the engines and accelerate the rocket forward, you would be pushed back against the back of the rocket. rocket similarly if you fired. the engines in the other direction and slowed down the rocket, that would also push you down.

This is the idea behind the 1g rocket: accelerate at 1g for half the trip and then decelerate at 1g for the second half of the trip. works according to Einstein's equivalence principle, which basically means that acceleration gravity is indistinguishable from reality, so the boom problem is solved, except there are many problems with this, on the one hand, this means that the engines have to start during the entire trip and this immediately. rules out chemical rockets, for example, burning for a couple of minutes at a time, which leaves us with ion engines, our nuclear propulsion, none of which can come close to 1g acceleration, of course, we don't have I have to travel completely at 1g to avoid the worst. effects of weightlessness, but to even get to a significant 1g you would have to scale these engines much further and then there is the issue of fuel ions and nuclear thrusters are efficient but you still need fuel and to some extent point, the fuel runs out. so heavy that it cannot accelerate its own mass, not even the Orion machine concept boom boom, well you can reach incredible speeds, but at some point you would run out of nuclear bombs, plus there is a problem that when you turn around to decelerate to 1g, you would be flying directly into nuclear explosions, so not ideal.

However, the possibility of flying at 1g is quite interesting because after a few months of that constant acceleration it builds up and you can actually reach relativistic speeds and by relativistic I mean that you know a significant percentage of the speed of light and as We all know, when you start reaching those kinds of speeds, time starts to do some interesting things. A genetic nuclear rocket could easily reach nearby stars. In fact, in theory, we could cover the entire width of the Milky Way in 12 years. constant acceleration of 1 g, that's 12 years on the ship back here on Earth for the rest of us 113,000 243 years of passage, a 1 g ship could reach the current edge of the observable universe in a human lifetime, of course By the time it gets there, that edge would have receded quite a bit and the Earth would be gone, as would the Sun, the Milky Way, most things really, but ultimately it's the fuel that's the problem with the 1-speed rocket. g, even if we had an engine that could perfectly convert matter to energy, say through an antimatter matter annihilation engine it would still need 62 metric tons of fuel for every kilogram of mass to reach the black hole at the center of the Via Milky as a reference, the SpaceX spacecraft is expected to weigh 120 thousand kilograms without fuel or cargo or anything, that ship would require seven billion 440 million kilograms of 100% perfectly efficient fuel to make that trip and that with a perfect efficiency that of course it doesn't exist now there are some ideas like the boussard ramjet that would use a giant electromagnetic funnel 6000 kilometers wide to collect errant hydrogen in the interstellar medium and then use it to drive a fusion engine so you don't have to carry everything with you, no need Saying there are a number of design challenges for something like this, let alone you.

We would still need to perfect fusion power, so unless we have some kind of massive breakthrough and plasma propulsion technology, a 1g accelerated ship is actually more science fiction than future science, which brings us to the other possible approach to creating artificial gravity, which is the OL you spin. I spin, baby, spin like a record, baby, spin, spin, focus, today's physics lesson presented by Pete Burns, it's much more efficient with today's technology anyway, simulating a G-force spinning a spaceship , a rotating body can provide artificial gravity by changing the direction of a motion rotationally and what is another word for a change in the direction of a moving object, acceleration so that you experience a constant acceleration in directions that add up to feel like if you were being pushed away from the axis of rotation emphasis on the word feelBecause rotational gravity is not exactly the same as normal gravity, such as in a 1g ship, the downward acceleration force would feel exactly like the gravity you and I experience every day, not exactly the same in a rotating habitat when the most extreme and popular was proposed.

Habitats that use rotational gravity are O'Neill cylinders. Physicist Gerard O'Neill first proposed this design, suggesting that it would be 20 miles long with a diameter of four miles, requiring 28 rotations per hour to reach 1 g, but even at this insane scale that rotational gravity would still be I feel different from what we're used to, especially for a nun, a climate visitor who just stands still, you might be fine, you might be fine, you might not really feel any difference, but as soon as you turn your head, the fluids in your ear would splash. move differently than they normally do thanks to that rotational angular momentum, which means that at best you could lose your balance.

Worst case scenario, you could miss lunch. Even nodding your head might be enough to upset your balance, but if you really want to scare yourself, try throwing a ball at someone or by juggling when you throw the ball into the air closer to the axis, take that horizontal momentum, which is a graceful way. say you throw the ball up, it will still curve and land next to you this is the Coriolis effect and again these are the effects that are felt with a four mile diameter rotation, which is a ridiculously huge structure, they get smaller and the effects get even worse.

Rotational gravity falls in proportion to how far it is from the center of rotation, meaning that in any type of structure. that we could build with today's technology, the gravity on your feet would be different from the gravity on your head, basically your head would feel like a balloon tied to a concrete block, regardless of the fact that there are many speculative designs online, including one called interplanetary ship Agamemnon with unrealistically robust Ion Drive and telescopic arms that could rotate at an angle to obtain both linear and rotational gravity. NASA has a design that rotates a small habitat around a central axis balanced by a counterweight called the Nautilus X design.

It was imagined as a scale. station where astronauts could refuel and get some exercise on the way to Mars. I would like to say that private companies are taking on this challenge, but any plans they have now are very far in the future, even though Jeff Bezos was a student of Gerard O'Neill at Princeton, he has talked about using Blue Origin to build rotating structures and O'neil cylinders in space, but they seem more aspirational and generational, and the time scales on the SpaceX side there are some designs and ideas for using the starship. do some kind of rotation to create gravity there, but none of them are really from SpaceX that I've been able to find and of course it doesn't stop speculation from SpaceX fans like blogger Chris Pete Barons and YouTube or little stars. of which he has ideas for joining several starships to create artificial gravity barons he basically wants to rotate two ships that have docked in the refueling configuration the small stars he wants to attach them via armor to a third central unit the small stars made calculations and proposed a 100 meter radius that would provide 1 g at three rotations per minute, but is large enough to avoid the worst orientation problems.

Does this introduce many points of failure where things could go wrong? I have my concerns, but it's a good idea, it's possible that SpaceX is working on things like this behind closed doors, but in the past Elon has been quite dismissive of the gravity problem, since for the Space Station there is a private company which is working on a 1g rotational design called Gateway Foundation, their ultimate goal is to build a large spaceport called Gateway, but before that they intend to build a much smaller orbital hotel called the von Braun Rotating Space Station. What's unique about their approach is that they want to play with different rotation speeds to create variable gravity and then eventually at the gateway. spaceport, they want an inner ring to provide lunar gravity and an outer ring to simulate the gravity of Mars.

So far, their plans only boil down to a couple of interesting concept videos and a Kickstarter program, but hey, at least they're starting the orbital conversation. The reality of gravity is so boring. Can't we just build a machine that simply turns gravity on and off? No, we can't, but what if we could manipulate gravity itself would it solve much more than just the problem of weightlessness? It would be the holy grail. of propulsion like let's say you are flying through space and you can create a gravity well about a kilometer in front of your ship, your ship would be pulled into that gravity well and if you can manipulate it to stay about a kilometer in front of your ship like a carrot dangling in front of a horse, you would constantly be falling towards it and you would be propelled that way or if you could create antigravity like that, it would be an easy way to get off Earth, whether you are going into space or just giving a jump across town, this is obviously in the realm of science fiction, but scientific fact has a few tricks up its sleeve, scientists have been able to levitate small objects, including frogs and mice, living creatures simply by using really powerful electromagnetics.

Belgian theoretical physicist Andre Foofa proposed a method to warp spacetime similarly to gravity using electromagnetism in 2016, although this has not been tested and is also expected to produce only a very small effect and then there is antimatter. We know how regular matter interacts with gravity. Would antimatter react the same way or would it have an antigravity effect? In theory, antimatter is basically matter with some properties reversed like spin and charge, but we've never really been able to determine how an antigravity particle reacts to gravity. I mean, strictly speaking, we don't know how an antiproton or a positron could fall, whether it would go up or down, how fast, we don't really know at the moment that there is a project at CERN called the Alpha G experiment that intends to discover which is designed to precisely measure the gravitational effect on antimatter, this could lead to a completely new understanding of gravity that could force us to re-evaluate the position of gravity in the standard model that it was shoehorned into anyway. the other fundamental forces. a carrier particle associated with it, but gravity has always eluded us the theoretical name of the particle is a graviton, if it exists it would be so weak that no detector we can imagine would be able to detect it, but if we saw the behavior of antiparticles of a strange way that could prove the existence of gravitons and perhaps give us a way to bend them to our will over the centuries, science has been able to figure out how to manipulate the other fundamental particles to our benefit, such as by the fact that we can create photons using electrical currents if we could do the same with gravitons we could just turn gravity on and off whenever we wanted this would be a game changer right now this all sounds like science fiction but who knows what. what the future holds for us right now gravity is still a mystery but if we can unlock its secrets it could open up the entire universe to us let's see where things take us thank you for watching this video and a big thank you to the patreon followers who support this channel, my answer files, who are helping me build a team and build a great community around this.

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