I sometimes forget stuff.
Nice I got a cool message on social media in response to my blog Successful Space Species.
Here’s the link to that blog.
https://www.murryrhodes.com/our-place-in-space/2022/10/7/successful-space-species-nbsp
In case you want to skip reading the linked article above. The gist of that article is that we need to do better in our science than having 80-90% dark matter in our universe formation theories/models if our species is to survive in deep space. Currently, the gravitational collapse of nebula dominates our modelling of how things form. It also mentioned that our DNA might need to be engineered to suit to the long periods of travel in the no-gravity environment of deep space.
Trying to solve the gravity problem has not been easy and it has quite an interesting history. So the message sent to me reminded me of what we all do and don’t know about stuff until we do and the fun we can have by learning stuff about stuff from more than just how Hollywood or commercial science fiction tries to resolve problems about stuff.
The Message.
Friend.. “Haha, cool. interesting theory, but, that’s why nearly all sci-fi shows have them in artificial gravity if we’re going to spend a long time in space we would need to do that, and it’s not as hard as you think, it’s simply as easy as spinning the ship in a circle lol that’s why they have models of that type of ship in lots of sci Fis such as the recent one passengers so bone density decay and other problems, wouldn’t be a problem and we’d still function and evolve as regular humans would in gravity.”
I sometimes forget just how influential our movies and mainstream media are when it comes to educating us. I love seeing the big spaceships burn their retro rockets to get spaceships rolling so everyone can party in space and live and work some sort of semi-normal lives around the script writer’s narratives. The first time I learned the concept of centripetal motion as a way of solving the gravity problem I learned about the solution of spinning a ship long before I even knew there was a problem.
I remember Stanley Kubric’s 2001 A Space Odyssey was my first cool moment of seeing artificial gravity in space with someone jogging laps around the ship. It was very cool, super cool and yep, for me, spinning a ship and generating centripetal motion was the answer to artificial gravity in space. For sure..
Many Sci-fi shows present the same solution and I recall watching several space documentaries and reading about it in textbooks showing various theories of solutions to making artificial gravity so with that type of reinforcement being educated to us all it seemed like a no-brainer that artificial gravity wasn’t going to be a problem. Simply get the ship to start spinning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_wheel_space_station
I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I put that scenario to the old grey matter test many years ago and considered, beyond Hollywood and special effects just how this process might work in space. Indeed centripetal force of a rotating ship creating acceleration through circular motion wasn’t a problem, that’s just normal classical physics and we can test that down here on Earth by looping a bucket of water around in verticle circles. Yep, it’s real enough. What was bothering me though, was how the ship would respond if you moved stuff around as you would if you were living and working in space.
We balance car tyres with tiny leads to stop them from wobbling and breaking off and rolling down the street or a piece of rolled-up blue tack to balance out a wobbly squeaking ceiling fan to avoid it wobbling and possibly flying off and making a mess of things. Consider what might happen If you move a 1kg block around one of these spinning spaceships or maybe 10 Kg or even 100 Kg since some people might have that kind of mass and so we as people doing our day-to-day things like to move around. Can you picture it in your mind’s eye? Or perhaps take a look at the top picture and consider how a spinning spaceship might respond if the dude at C decided to move sideways toward the edge of the wheel?
How did you go? Did your mind’s eye see the whole thing out of balance and start wobbling? Nice, yeah me too. If you don’t have a precise counterweight to maintain the balance say at (A) in the picture above then the whole spinning motion starts to wobble. It wobbles and wobbles and wobbles and because it is in free space without any kind of anchor such as where its apparent axis is at (B) and in Zero-G then it wobbles completely out of control and sends the wheel into a rotating squabbling wobble with moments of momentum and 360 degrees of freedom up, down and all around.
Perhaps your mind’s eye can see what happens to all the stuff inside that ship. I picture some kind of a Super Space Smoothie if the ship didn’t break apart. So some serious tech would be needed to counter this type of thing. The tech would likely cost us heaps in energy just to maintain the balance. Energy consumption for long-term deep space might not be affordable.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130121-worth-the-weight
Expensive is a word. Especially when something goes out of balance and blows stuff up. Is it possible to make a spinning wheel in space? Yes. Will it provide some artificial gravity? Yes. If someone shifts their weight in the system will everyone else go flying around and make a spaceship smoothie? Yes.
A tubular structure has been suggested and yet the same distribution of weight problem exists. It’s a spinning wheel and if the wheels aren’t balanced then they shake and brake stuff. Up in space the ship will twirl and swirl away from its balance very quickly because unlike here on Earth there are no anchors or axles to absorb and partially influence the momentum as it moves stuff around.
Is it doable for a long-term mission? Yes as long as the balancing technology can counter everybody’s movements all of the time. Can we spare that energy? Hmm. maybe but maybe not. Perhaps some gravity-type machine can be installed for temporary treatment of no gravity effects on our biology but for the safety of not wobbling the ship into a spin and very possibly everyone into a space smoothy or the ship into smithereens then everyone would have to be strapped in and strapped down so nothing moves while undergoing the gravity treatment.
That was my spin on the spinning ships of gravity.
So I replied to the message in a shorter version of the above and in return the response to my reply was something about Star Trek and other wonderful sci-fi stuff using special technology to generate gravity and how the G forces of alien spaceships and anti-gravity type machines and devices might produce gravity. I love that stuff. Aliens or just backyard science folks tinkering with antigravity stuff is all awesome, it’s the stuff that makes life such a joy to be a part of. Are we alone? can we go at light speed, find wormholes or make artificial gravity?.. Yep, love it.
By now you probably realise that in my world every card remains on the table of possibility regardless of popular opinions or other influences because until they can be ruled out then the possibilities always remain possible regardless of any associated probabilities or popular beliefs or sadly even the mandated beliefs. That I haven’t got any video footage of aliens or found any souvenirs or artifacts from space proving they did or do exist doesn’t mean we close our eyes and pretend that they can’t, don’t or never did.
After all, if we do succeed to become a successful space species then our great great great great great X 10^10 grand kiddies may prove to be aliens to some other form of inquisitive outward-looking sky watchers like we are now. What they will do and how they respond will be a question for them to answer. So anyway, back to the artificial gravity stuff. Is it possible?.. Yep, it’s still on the table of possibilities..
The next few papers I’m writing look at our space stuff with much less fluff. It’s going to be called Successful Space Stuff. I may pop a link here when they’re done. We’ll be exploring stuff that may have been overlooked in our rush to advance in science and so it presents a sequence of stuff that may have started this whole universe of stuff. Amidst that stuff is a look at the possibility of deactivating a free neutron decay process. It touches on Dark Matter and Dark energy and possible suspects of non-material stuff with properties of mass like gravity. Interesting stuff.
It’s all related to gravitational stuff so a method of making artificial gravity is also a card on the table of possibilities but even before making some kind of artificial gravity device one might consider what it might mean in deep space If you had one. All of a sudden you make a gravitational field with the same gravitational pull of our planet Earth. Our atmosphere shields us heaps from falling rocks and stuff so if you are going to cruise around space with that gravity field on then you want to spend some resources on figuring out how to shield your ship and if you can make such a shield while in deep space because you’ll need to keep replacing the old ones a lot more than normal.
Between protons and rocks and other particles and radiations, those shields need to do some pretty insane shielding already then if you add a gravity field attracting moons and rocks and other things accelerating toward you and or your ship toward it then our shields will wear out pretty quick. It will play tricks on our navigation too. Or at least they might, I wouldn’t know for certain myself as I never had a gravity machine so never needed a shield.
So ultimately, before we get to have cool things like warp drives or wormhole generators or even gravity accelerators then we can only really make preparations on the stuff we do have. Then we use every bit of the deep space environment of space as best we can to utilise assets and survive longer. There are quite a few assets out there if you know what to look for and how to exploit them, like turning kinetic collisions and proton radiations into usable energy. It’s a bit like bush tucker but in deep space.
And doing it all in some old bunky retrofitted pyramid cube kind of way. It doesn't have to be Hollywood but perhaps more like the old Biblical NOAH’s Ark. Focussing on what might be more successful than just something that’s shiny and goes really fast. I mean the bible story wasn’t Noa’s ski boat. Something cobbled well enough together to go the distance and get us to where we’re going.
So as much as I’d love to see the engineering of energy-efficient solutions to some of the problems we face biologically in no gravity, it might be wise to also invest in further DNA research to see if our biology can be engineered to better survive deep space.
DNA engineering is one tool we have developed quite well but the ethics of such research in engineering us to better suit deep space is what it is. It’s dangerous and may cause all sorts of experimental suffering to subjects. Our continued research and refinement on nuclear weapons and other articles of war might guide us toward our ethical reasoning in comparison to tinkering with our DNA but of course, one is for preserving Earth’s life for a future in the universe and the other is about blowing up as much stuff as we can. Our social ethics and ethics of war seem to be as fickle as a pickle in a pie. It’s one of the aspects of why I question if we may ever become a Succesful Space Species.
Anyway, it was nice to get a message like that. There’s heaps of stuff about all this stuff I write that may not be fully right or wrong so getting feedback helps clarify stuff about stuff and learn other stuff or remind me about stuff I’d gorfotten.
The next series, Successful Space Stuff delivers the beginning of the universe from a cold start rather than the all-popular Hot Big Bang and the cold one even has a thermal signature and some other very cool stuff going on even beyond Zero degrees Kelvin. It also explores the gravitational nebula applications a little more and delivers an alternative approach where the vectors resolve with less uncertainty, and dark matter and dark energy also get a bit more consideration for the what, where and how too. :) Some energy stuff and maybe even an expansion of the engineering stuff with the vessel.. This stuff is fun, I hope you enjoy it too..
I just watched a cool recent video on some stuff. 18 October 2022.
I see the old nebula theory is still influencing things perhaps more than it should so it will be interesting to write this and see how things develop. With the James web space telescope up and running and with dozens of others already up there we should really be able to start pricing and piecing this puzzle together. The quantity of high-definition data is amazing and so I only hope that our interpretations aren’t gonna remain adhered to old theories for no other reason than funding or pride or politics of some sort. Getting this tool in our belt sooner will mean finding more advanced problems to solve with plenty of other jobs for folks to carry on with once it’s in the bag. The longer we have the tool then the longer we can practise and hone our skills at asset prediction for improving our chances of deep space success.
Anton does a great job of delivering some up-to-date stuff about the official science stuff. Enjoy
Cheers
Muz
P.S Leave a message if you like. :)