Artificial Gravity Concepts

I wanted to share some artificial gravity concepts.

Natural Gravity

The best gravity would be natural gravity. What if we took engines and fuel and strapped them to a very large mass (ice, rock, or ballast metal)?

To get a modest 1/10th gee (1 m/s/s), we'd need :

• a water ice (1 g/cm^3) block 3,750 km in diameter and massing 2.1E+23kg
• a uranium block (19 g/cm^3) 200 km in diameter and massing 1.4E+20kg
• an osmium block (22 g/cm^3) 166 km in diameter and massing 1E+20kg

So, there is an advantage to using denser material: you need less of it.

Accelerated Mass

What if we took less mass, but accelerated it in a ring collider to relativistic velocities to boost it's mass?

CERN says they can get a beta of 0.5.

That would reduce our base mass down to 5E+19kg, (which isn't much) and the mass energy required to do it is about the same amount of mass in matter+antimatter.

Boosted Mass

What if we changed the value of the Higgs field? Gluon-gluon fusion is the primary way of generating Higgs quanta, but all we need to do is modify the value of the Higgs field.

If I have this right, doubling v doubles mass: W_mu+/- = gv / 2.

A rough estimate of the energy used by the Large Hadron Collider to produce Higgs bosons is 13 TeV, or about 2 microjoules per encounter.

Obviously, it took more power for LHC to get there: an estimated 500 megaWatts.

But this is far better than planet-masses of antimatter.

Direct Graviton Production

The most energy efficient way would be to somehow produce gravitons (if they exist) directly. This would get the energy cost of artificial gravity down to (hopefully) the minimum : P = mass x gee (or 9.8 kiloWatts per ton).

posted 28 days ago

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James McLellan‭

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