As humans, it is in our nature to want to explore and grow. Space, being one of the most mysterious wonders is definitely at the top of the list for a lot of our STEM people and in general is a pretty cool endeavor. Like have you ever thought how cool it would be to spend a few days in space? Unfortunately, that probably wont happen anytime in the near future and if it does you'll probably have to be a billionaire to do so. However, there are scientist and engineers working on a solution right now to potentially house people in space. That leads to the most important feature at the moment, creating artificial gravity. So far this has been our biggest obstacle. You may be thinking it's easy, just spin a huge disk around to create centripetal force. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. You may be fine walking in parallel with the spinning disk but as soon as you turn your head sideways or start walking diagonally the the fluids in your ear would flow differently thus making you unbalanced, dizzy and maybe even vomit. So? What's the next idea? There are a few, but before we start talking about all of that lets first dive into what exactly is gravity? And don't worry, I'm not going to just tell you gravity it what keeps us planted to the earth
As many of you already know, gravity holds all parts of our body to the ground at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared(m/s^2) with variations due to elevation. This is called gravitational pull or G force with the nominal earth gravity being 1G. In other words, we are constantly being pulled down at a rate of 1G. So therefore the gravitational force in space is 0G, which our bodies are NOT built for. In fact, adjusting to 0G is one of the biggest challenges astronauts face. Without the downward gravitational pull that our cardiovascular system needs in order for the heart to properly pump all that blood our bodies will start to have all sorts blood circular problems, and you can only image what that will lead to. Another issue with 0G is that our bones and muscles will start to atrophy. Our bodies have hundreds of muscles you don't know about that works to hold you up against gravity, or 1G. Without gravity, those muscles start to decay which is why astronauts have to workout for hours a every single day. Would you want to workout for hours a day? Probably not. Thankfully, you may not have to with artificial gravity.
Now let's get into the main topic, artificial gravity. As you may have guessed, artificial gravity is the simulation of gravity. We absolutely need artificial gravity in order to house people in space other than astronauts. There are many ideas as to how we can achieve this. One the most popular ones include a spinning disk. See figure one below.
Even though this looks to make the most sense there are still many problems with it. As stated above, The liquids in your ear aren't use to that kind of angular rotational momentum and you may be fine just walking straight but as soon as you turn your head or start walking diagonal you'll start to feel dizzy or fall or throw up or all the above. This idea of a spinning disk is used in many SiFi movies but it's just not realistic. Plus it'll take way too many resources to make something big enough to comfortably spin. The reason you would want this disk as big as possible is so that the gravity at your feet wont be different from the gravity at your head or else your head would feel like a balloon. I assume no one wants their head to feel like a balloon. This is do to the rotational gravity dropping off in proportion at how far away it is from the center of rotation.
Even though this idea will not work, there are still some other pretty cleaver ideas. So let's dive into them. Some of these ideas include plasma ion engine thrusters, gravitational affects of antimatter, and graviton manipulation(though a graviton have never been found).
Lets start with the plasma ion engine. You are probably wondering, what is a plasma ion engine? Well, I'll do a whole other article on that but basically it ejects positively charged ions and directs them using a magnetic field creating a thrust. This is a very efficient method for space travel and can be used for years at a time. See figure two below for a cool visual of a ion propulsion engine.
This idea is efficient and could work. However, the ion propulsion engine to this date can only thrust the equivalent force of a coin on your finger and will take a very long time to generate forces enough to simulate 1G and once you get there the thrusters will just keep going accelerating until to eventually you reach 4G which is black out for humans. If you were to turn the thrusters off at 1G then you'll start floating around traveling at the same speed of the containers you're in bringing you back to 0G. This idea is better for travel to Mars or other far space travels instead.
Another method to simulate gravity is by using antimatter. Antimatter is the opposite of matter. It's equal in mass but opposite in charge. See figure three below.
The reason behind studying antimatter is because antimatter falls upwards while matter falls downwards due to gravitational pull. Antimatter is essentially ignoring gravity. Even though antimatter and matter have the same mass with the only difference is they have the opposite charge and spin direction. This leads to the question, does anti-gravity exist? As a result, new studies of antimatter have been launched and scientist are exploring how antimatter just ignores gravity. Eventually when we have better idea of what antimatter really is we could then create sort of a gravitational capacitor in space thus forming, artificial gravity. It's an idea I don't have enough knowledge to get into but I do know scientists and physicist are working on this theory.
This last idea is going to seem weird to you but because it hasn't been discovered yet. It's called the graviton, basically a quantum of gravity. I'm not sure why scientists haven't discovered the graviton yet, probably because the particle is too small. However, it theory this really should exist and when scientists discover this graviton it could open up a whole new understanding of gravity as we know it and we can maybe even create artificial gravity with it. This would truly be a ground breaking discovery with lots a possibilities.
So needless to say, artificial gravity isn't something we are going to solve anytime soon. However, I do like the antimatter idea and personally I think it has the most potential to figuring out how to ignore and create gravity. But that also is a long way from actually happening.
That concludes this article for now! I hope you enjoyed and if you did don't forget to subscribe!