Artificial Gravity

If you've read my previous article “The ill-effects of space exposure,“ you'd probably know that most of the problems related to long-term space flight could be resolved by introducing ‘artificial gravity' into manned space-capsules. You might have at least heard about this term in movies, like ‘Guardians of the Galaxy', which made it look so unobtrusive. But, trust me, scientists have been, and still are clueless about how to create artificial gravity. In this article, I shall, to the best of my abilities, explain how it can possibly be created in manned space-vehicles that are completely bereft of any external gravitational influence. By ‘external gravitational influence’, I mean those gravitational forces due to nearby celestial bodies.

    The exploitation of centrifugal force present in rotatory motion to emulate the gravitational force experienced down here on Earth paves way for artificial-gravity environments aboard manned spacecraft. Both centrifugal and gravitational forces have an acceleration, and come under the same classification of forces, namely, pseudo forces. I wouldn’t want to describe what pseudo forces are here, so this is left to the reader to find out.

If the spacecraft did not have any crew, but only immobile parts attached rigidly to it, then its rotation would continue indefinitely, as long as there aren’t any external forces acting on it. But with all its crew present on board, and with various torques being developed by the movement of crew-members between different parts of the spacecraft, the rotation would be dampened a bit. So, occasionally, a shear force needs to act on it to keep up with and sustain an acceleration of 1g.

      If we managed to build an immensely powerful and arduous engine which, when fitted to a spacecraft, would be capable of producing a constant acceleration of 1g, then there’d be no need for a rotating spaceship which would cause substantial motion sicknesses amongst on-board crew members. I wouldn’t say anything about this more, and the only problem with such an engine is fuel.

But what I've really been longing to mention here is something about the ‘Graviton’. A Graviton is a hypothetical and abstract entity that has been supposed to give rise to and mediate the force of gravity experienced by all objects in the universe. This abstract particle is just a theoretical construct, and a consequence of the Quantum Field Theory, whose existence is completely unknown to us. But in the near future, its discovery would turn out to be one of the GREATEST achievements in the history of achievements. We could incorporate these particles into manned spaceships, and when flooded with gravitons, a gravitational force would be kindled inside this spaceship. But as of now, we are totally oblivious and clueless of its existence, and is a mere speculation and a first attempt to reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.

Shreyash