Can We Make Artificial Gravity?
Gravity. We were all born under its influence, molded by its pull. Every human on earth knows this force. We humans have evolved to survive and function at peak levels with this gravitational pull. But will we ever be able to create artificial gravity in spaceships?
Why do we need artificial gravity?
Weightlessness is one of the biggest problems that astronauts face. As I have stated above we have evolved to survive under gravity's influence, our bodies need gravity to run our it's bodily functions at peak level efficiency. Our muscles and bone mass levels deteriorates whilst spending time in weightlessness of space. There is also the problem of losing your sense of what is up and down. Usually our body feels the gravitational pull and can quickly calculate where is up and down. Our body starts to lose this sense in the absence of gravity. Our space stations are designed with arrows pointing "This side is up" to help astronauts to sense fully navigate through the station. There are cases of problems with some astronauts proprioceptive system, meaning that astronauts had lost there sense of where their arms and legs are whilst moving. This is because of gravity that plays a crucial part to our brain where our limbs are. We can easily put food in our mouth with our eyes closed, but this simple task can be proven a challenge without the pull of gravity. It is clear that we need gravity, but how will we make it artificially? first we need to know what is gravity exactly.
What is gravity?
Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces, and is considered the weakest force. You will need objects with large masses like the earth or sun to really see the effect of gravity. Albert Einstein described gravity accurately in his general theory of relativity. We can also calculate the force that two objects attract each other with with Newton's law of universal gravitation. We will focus on this law to understand the basic principle of gravity. This law states that all objects in the universe has a pulling force to each other that is directly proportional to the products of the objects masses and inversely proportional to the distance of the objects centers squared. This is why you need large amounts of mass is needed to really see a big force.
What are our options
Our space stations does technically have a gravitational pull, but it is so weak due to its mass. This type of gravitational pull will not save our bone mass in space, We need something heavier. This is a problem when building a spaceship. To have a decent amount of strong gravitational pull would mean that the spaceship should have the mass of the DeathStar in Star Wars. That would be too heavy and too expensive to launch in space (if we even have enough resources on earth to build it!)
We are sadly not able to produce a space shuttle with enough mass to pull astronauts down with the same gravitational pull than that of earths. Well not until we find a type of exotic matter that has a strong gravitational pull with a low mass. But luckily we have other ways to make artificial gravity.
Introducing centripetal force
Centrifugal force is the force experienced by objects in a spinning or circular motion, that pushes the objects away from the center where the object is moving around of. Have you ever climbed in one of those spinning tornado rides rides at an amusement park or fair? Here is one of those rides:
You would have felt a force pushing you to the back of the side wall if you ever took a ride on that machine. that back pushing force is called the Centrifugal force. A person can stand straight up
perpendicular on the wall if we can generate enough Centrifugal force.
We see this technology in Sci-Fi movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Interstellar. The space station is one big and thin torus shaped object. This space shuttle will spin and humans will be able to push the to the space stations "floor". Here is a picture demonstrating this (Here is lady bugs instead of humans in my example picture) :
But we face another problem with this technology and that problem involves speed and size. The larger the radius the slower the space station needs to spin. The smaller the radius the faster the space station needs to spin. The optimal size space station for earth like gravitational pull and minimum spin speed is also to big to build for our amount of resources on earth. You would also experience strange force differences when standing smaller, faster rotating space station. this could lead to light headed due the the force imbalance that forces blood from your brain to your feet!
Our technology is still advancing and we are still finding new ways to achieve this artificial gravity. The cool thing is we have this technology at the tips of our fingers. We may one day we will see a near perfect space shuttle with artificial gravity!
What do you think? Will we ever get artificial gravity? let me know in the comments down bellow. Upvote and follow me if you liked what you read?
Some good reads:
Zero gravity health side effects
On artificial gravity
More on possible "Fake Gravity''
And as always
Thanks for reading!
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Just a wild guess.
I suspect that if we were to ever really understand gravity such that we can actually control it then the understanding and the technology would lead to a stardrive. Until then...not.
That is actually really true, by making waves to ride on with our gravitational manipulation technology will help us travel with stardrive!
space, to infinity and beyond :)