What Are The Alternatives To Artificial Gravity?

Dayton3

Admiral
In virtually all science fiction series set aboard spacecraft, the ships in question have artificial gravity for obvious reasons that is effectively indistinguishable from naturally occurring gravity.

Babylon-5 showed some Earthforce ships with rotating sections (and the Babylon-5 station itself) that simulated gravity.

Besides rotation, what are the alternatives for generating the effects of gravity aboard a ship?

I've wondered, could you have thousands of tiny air vents in the roof of corridors and rooms of a ship along with thousands of tiny air vents in the floor, and use a steady, uniform air flow to simulate the pull of gravity?

Of course, you could have the floor magnetized and have the crew wear metallic footwear I suppose.
 
In 2061 (as well as the Brakiri ships from Babylon 5 IIRC, and doubtless many others), gravity was simulated by constant acceleration. The decks were arranged so that the engines were "down," so the g-forces brought everyone towards the floor. Of course, it only applied when the ship was underway, and not when it was maneuvering or stationary.
 
In 2061 (as well as the Brakiri ships from Babylon 5 IIRC, and doubtless many others), gravity was simulated by constant acceleration. The decks were arranged so that the engines were "down," so the g-forces brought everyone towards the floor. Of course, it only applied when the ship was underway, and not when it was maneuvering or stationary.

Wouldn't that require way too much fuel?
 
In nanotech, there is a need to deal with the Casimir effect, and so far people are experimenting with ways of varying its strength with tricks like varying smoothness of surfaces. But this is just the beginning of playing with artificial gravity in the Trek sense on a small scale. It's hard to directionalize, but research is going on because of the needs of nanomachinery.

The classic demonstration of the Casimir effect is kind of a tease, since two metal plates are held together as if by gravity, but it's not really useful in a practical sense, just food for thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/9747

Another thing, which may not ever amount to much, is the so-called Podkletnov gravity shield. But reseach on that is going on, as well.

http://www.americanantigravity.com/podkletnov.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19225771.800
 
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In 2061 (as well as the Brakiri ships from Babylon 5 IIRC, and doubtless many others), gravity was simulated by constant acceleration. The decks were arranged so that the engines were "down," so the g-forces brought everyone towards the floor. Of course, it only applied when the ship was underway, and not when it was maneuvering or stationary.

Wouldn't that require way too much fuel?

Depends how efficient your drive is. Generally the fastest way to reach a destination is to accelerate to the midway point, then decelerate for the second half of the trip, so if they're doing that *anyway*.....
 
Create a sphere shaped vessel and place a miniature black hole at the centre of the vessel.


The smaller the black hole the greater the tidal effects. so with a 1G singularity it would drop off inversely proportionally to the distance. Me thinks it would only work for one deck if that and you may risk spaghettification or at the very least extreme nausea as your feet will experience 1G but you head might feel .001 G.
 
Just to be sure, things like velcro or magnetic shoes would seem to take away the main benefit of lack of gravity - the ability to move around effortlessly. They'd do nothing to counter the main drawback of lack of gravity - the inability of our bodies to acclimatize in a sensible manner, and the resultant skeletal and vascular losses, circulatory system disruption and possible nausea.

One wonders if the best approach for defeating lack of gravity isn't medical research, so that one day we may pop pills that fool our bodies into thinking that there's no reason to "adapt" to zero gee and start losing bone integrity. We don't really need onboard gravity for anything other than keeping our bodies fit.

...Of course, we'll eventually need anti-inertia one way or another if we intend to maneuver our spacecraft violently. And whatever gives us anti-inertia is likely to give us some sort of gravity solution as well. (Even if we fight inertia simply by placing the pilots in liquid tanks, that is already a statement on onboard gravity - such as "we don't need no stinking gravity, as it would only complicate matters for the people in the tanks".)

Timo Saloniemi
 
If we are talking Black Holes and Casimir Effect I should add in Wormholes for good measure. Put one end of a large Wormhole (or an array of tiny ones) under the floor of the ship with the other end on Earth, and Earth's gravity should pull you down towards the floor at 1G right? This of course assumes the throat doesn't stretch when you move the ends apart.

This would also facilitate instant communication and transfer of supplies (although that would be costly energy wise, and would shrink the wormhole if I understand correctly)
 
Just to be sure, things like velcro or magnetic shoes would seem to take away the main benefit of lack of gravity - the ability to move around effortlessly. They'd do nothing to counter the main drawback of lack of gravity - the inability of our bodies to acclimatize in a sensible manner, and the resultant skeletal and vascular losses, circulatory system disruption and possible nausea.


Exactly.

You have two choices under current technology:

A) Keep a constant acceleration on the ship or
B) Rotate the living quarters

There are no other solution that aren't sci-fi.
 
I've wondered, could you have thousands of tiny air vents in the roof of corridors and rooms of a ship along with thousands of tiny air vents in the floor, and use a steady, uniform air flow to simulate the pull of gravity?

That would never be effective at creating a gravity-like sensation for the crew, but it would be an excellent, even essential way to deal with dust, hairs, debris, etc. that would otherwise be a hazard to equipment. The technique is called a laminar air flow and is used in clean rooms to control dust. I've been in such a clean room in college, and the airflow is so uniform and turbulence-free that you can't even feel it.

Basically rotation and thrust are the only realistic ways of generating a sensation of weight for the crew. But a question that needs to be kept in mind is: why do we need that? TV and movies favor a constant artificial gravity because freefall is hard to simulate on an Earthbound soundstage. But realistically, what's really important is keeping the body from losing bone and muscle mass from lack of exertion. Astronauts deal with this through frequent exercise. I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke's novel Imperial Earth that had a ship with a cylindrical track on which the passengers would ride bicycles, creating centrifugal "gravity" for themselves as they pedalled around at high speeds -- a simpler alternative to the centrifuge of 2001's Discovery.
 
If you had a micro gravity environment aboard future spaceships, wouldn't it be possible to design the crew uniforms so that they required some exertion in order to move or change position?

So that the crew would be exercising everytime they moved. Fighting the resistance of their uniforms rather than fighting gravity.
 
Create a sphere shaped vessel and place a miniature black hole at the centre of the vessel.


The smaller the black hole the greater the tidal effects. so with a 1G singularity it would drop off inversely proportionally to the distance. Me thinks it would only work for one deck if that and you may risk spaghettification or at the very least extreme nausea as your feet will experience 1G but you head might feel .001 G.

Not to mention that if we're talking about a vessel, you have to figure out how to move it whilst always keeping the black hole in the exact center.

I recently finished reading a novel that, like 2061, had the ships (at least military ships) cruise at 1G unless fuel was a concern. Something that is of course a problem that most TV/movie scifi ignores is the fact that acceleration at higher then 1G for any significant length of time is not going to be particularly pleasant for the crew (imagine if you're in a hurry and so you need to cruise at 3G acceleration for a 2 day trip to get there on time...)
 
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