Some Call It Neutronium

Bush Plans To Nuke Iran! Fooled you all, haha.

Alright, the human body deteriorates in zero-gravity so quickly that within a year a person may suffer physiological damage so bad that he must live in space the rest of his life...which I'm guessing would be short. Zero-g is a fun place to visit, but not to live. We must live on a planet which provides healthy gravity levels to promote longevity, or under acceleration while in space.

www.physorg.com...

The Moon's gravity is not sufficient to stop the trend of deterioration, nor is Mars'. Short of some breakthrough in gravitic science, Man is going to live in space in one of these two scenarios; under thrust to provide perceived gravity, or in a rotating space station or ship which provides useful centripedal force.

Dang I forgot the link, but an article I just read by that guy that bashes NASA all the time, that ex-space historian guy, says that rotating space stations that could A) keep it's occupants healthy permanently gravity-wise, and B) able to manufacture all its needs self sufficiently, would take so many billions it'd be unspeakable to the point of impossibility for us as a race to accomplish in a long, long time. But in space, power is free, is my point...once you get the infrastructure for power generation set up in space you can use it for umpty years...solar cells have no moving parts, and do not wear out, do they?

Why are we flirting with the idea of a permanently-manned lunar colony? The crews would have to be rotated back every six months. There's no place to permanently GO out there, if Mars' gravity is unhealthily weak for the lifetime of a man...unless it's either under thrust the whole way, or in a rotating spacecraft. Flashback to that movie, uh, what was it's name...

I think the answer's neutronium, that collapsed neutron-star material. That stuff weighs twenty tons a teaspoonful. A foundation slab of that made under a lunar colony would provide a controllable gravity, depending on the thickness.

Seems to me that the future of Man in space depends on harvesting energy for self-sufficiency, and gaining control over practical gravitics. NASA, set up a huge solar-powered robot-run factory on the Moon, to make useful materials which don't have to be lofted out of Earth's gravity well. And push hard to get us some of that condensed neutron-material, I can think of all sorts of uses for that.

NASA's sole and penultimate goal is to put Americans into space, permanently, so they not only survive but prosper, in the proper realization that at some point in America's future this world will suffer major overcrowding.

Gravitic Drive Idea

In a one-gravity situation you'd be falling at 32m/s2...but you experience zero g while falling.

In a 2g situation you'd be falling twice as fast, but you'd experience zero g. You're falling.

If you were falling into a gravity well of twenty gravities, you'd be accelerating at a hellacious rate. But would you feel fine, and not all stretched-out?

A drive using this concept might incorporate neutron-star material.

I imagine it's pretty hard to work with. How could we harness this aspect of physics to provide accelerations to the human body (which we like to preserve) at potentially amazing rates? I'm thinking if you could shoot gravity in a beam, that'd be nice...whether it's attraction or repulsion, you'd still experience zero-g.

Somewhat rambling post, sorry.

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[edit on 12-4-2006 by Dyno25000]

Well, I give you brownie points for trying .

Yeah, Zero-G is not where humans are meant to be. It's not that we age faster or anything, it's that our bones and muscles, so used to having to work so strenuosly under the weight of our atmosphere and the weight of our body, are suddenly thrust into an environment that simply doesn't need it.

As such your body, being the lazy thing it is, simply doesn't build muscle tissue or bone tissue, or rebuild the tissue that's lost. It's not like the astonauts aren't drinking enough milk, it's just that their bodies' are going "you know what, we don't need to grow stronger bones... so we'll just stop right here".

Essentially, staying in space for 3 months puts about as much strain on the body as staying in bed for 3 months... which is to say so little strain that your body simply stops working as hard as it ought to.

In truth, people would live longer in space though, since their bodies (under less strain) will be able to function longer. It's just that their bones will be become frail and their muscles weak.

On the moon or mars, although staying in those different gravity amounts will still change how their body's work, the higher than zero, but lower than 1G of gravity, will mean their bodies will adapt to a different equilibrium of muscle mass and bone strength. On the moon or on Mars this amount would be just right for what they need - but somewhere else it would be very different.

If a baby were born on the moon, and lived at moon-like gravity for their life, lifting a 40lb object on the moon would probably be just as difficult for them as it is for us here on earth. Put us on the moon then, and we'll be able to lifting tons more (it would appear that we had super-strength). Put them on earth, and their bodies just might break under their own weight.


Apply this to aliens coming to earth. Why don't they walk around on the grass? Why are they probably not coming into our rooms? Well, probably it's that they come from a world where the gravity was less than 1G, and so it hurts them to stand up in our gravity. Militarily invasive species would have an easy time on earth, since their greater gravity would mean on earth they would appear to have super strength - flipping cars like we would toss a bag of golf clubs.


As for Neutronium. The only problem with the stuff would be that it would be SO massive, you run the risk of it "sucking" all the other matter around it onto itself (and then that stuff explodes since it's not part of the neutronium, and it suddenly undergoes fusion or fission depending on what it is). And then there's the question of how you actuall harvest or produce the stuff.

Neutronium is not an option.

Making space colonies, where people don't have to worry about visiting other planets - or making specialty excersizes and rooms - or even using genetic modification to counteract the effects of a low-G environment, would be an option.

In the end, I think space colonization will become more of modifying ourselves to suit the environment, instead of modifying the environment to suit ourselves.

Adding 'floors' of the stuff to the moon would serve the same affect as increasing the mass of the moon. Also, how would that work, to have a shell that has a stronger gravitational pull that the insides? That would wreck the moon I'd think?

Besides the fact that there is no way we could get to a Neutron star to get the material. It just doesn't seem like the best option as already stated above. The simplest thing to do would be what they do now. Exercise, and do it a lot. I also wonder if wearing very heavy clothes would work too? Just add some heavy weights to the arms and legs, enough to feel like your lifting a limb in a 1G environment. Could work?

Neutronium slabs would sink into the moon's crust.. quite quickly I would imagine. You wouldn't have a good foundation. Especially not over time.

How would you prevent that shortcoming?

Secondly, I think the gravity issue is alot deeper than simply weakening the musculature system. Need to do some research on it.

Steve

A neutron stars density is approaching the density of a black hole, not quite just one step this side of it.

Even if we could travel to a neutron star, the gravitational forces would so intense that nothing we know of could withstands its crushing force.

A neutron star has the mass of a billion Earths and is being held together by its own cohesion, if it were posible to get even several tons of this material from the star, it may undergo stress that may cause it to rapidly expand(I mean cause an explosion) destroying the spacecraft and its crew in an instant.

Maybe we could create an artificial gravitational field by reversing the Miessner effect found in superconducting materials.

Don't ask me how this will be accomplished as I haven't got the slightest clue.