Gravity Tech: The Power To Reshape Our Civilization... And The Cosmos Themselves
today we think of gravity as a force one of the four primary forces in our universe in the future however we may see it not just as a force of nature but a tool for Humanity to forge an awesome [Music] Destiny a couple months back we explored how gravity could be used for spaceship proportion from Modern methods like slingshots to the overw worth effect as incredible as spaceships are they just one category of technology that could benefit from Advanced control over gravity today I thought we'd dive into some of the other possibilities everything from its role in ter forming planets to its impact on constructing Mega structures both in terms of the building process and the structures themselves we'll also examine how gravity might enable us to settle giant planets or small moons create or mine Stars manipulate time fold space and even wage Wars after all gravity plays a crucial role in weapon performance from deflecting impacts to shattering entire planets but let's begin with a few spaceship applications as gravity isn't just useful for moving your ship probably the best known use of gravity technology in science fiction is essentially to create artificial gravity on board ships where people live and work ironically this is perhaps the least essential usage as we can already simulate gravity through spin or rotation while large protein sections are necessary for artificial ecosystems a habitation drum or ring doesn't need to take up much space on a ship plus there is little reason not to rotate a ship spin On's aess offers added protection since attacks from the sides won't hit the same spot repeatedly due to the rotation making it harder for an enemy to pound away at a in your armor the concept of artificial gravity in spaceships is more of a concession to practical film making after all you can't simply turn off Earth's gravity during filming prec CGI models of spaceships also acquired simpler static designs where moving parts were not feasible however artificial gravity has some unique advantages for instance with precise control different areas of a ship could feature varying gravitational conditions you might have high gravity calisthenic Gems or low gravity acrobatic Arenas gravity levels could be adjusted in a single room as easily as adjusting a therat a gravat if you will or even with the Casual Simplicity of a Dimo switch for lights Beyond intensity you could also control the direction of gravity enabling rooms where every wall and the ceiling had gravity maximizing usable space this raises intriguing possibilities about how gravity might be generated would it create a large sphere of gravitational pool akin to a massive object where Force diminishes with a square of distance or would it shape a gravitational field around the entire ship pointing downward to the bottom of the vessel if you found down an elevator shaft on such a ship many of which might have dozens or even hundreds of decks would you plummet to your death at high speed or would gravity flicker on and off as you pass between floors each generating its own field if the former is true then why limit ourselves to elevator shafts we could repurpose them as gun barrels where projectiles fall down the length of the tube propelled by gravity instead of chemical explosions or electromagnetic linear Motors there was an enormous fictional ship called mra's honor in the novel no no fear by Dan Abnet a Gloriana class Battleship described with various loose size estimates a commonly accepted scill is about 20 mi long and 52 Mi wide or roughly 32 km by 8 km in each Dimension it's hard to estimate the number of decks especially since the ship was built to accommodate genetically engineered Giants over 2 m tall however assuming an average deck height of 5 m the ship would have around 1,600 decks there was a me able scene where the ship's bridge is blown out into space taking its Master and Commander with it everyone assumes he's dead but thanks to his borderline demigod status from extreme genetic engineering and the ship rtin a small atmosphere held in place by its artificial gravity he managed to reach an airlock and re-enter the ship to continue the battle against treacherous Invaders aboard his Flagship it's a fun novel but some readers objected to the idea that the ship could retain any atmosphere through its own gravity they are correct that even a solid metallic asteroid of that size wouldn't have enough gravity to hoard an atmosphere and ships are far less dense since they are mostly Hollow however if the ship is equipped with an advanced artificial gravity system creating earthlike gravity on its decks it's not surprising this gravity might leak adding the ship Shields and the fact that it was parked in the plant's upper atmosphere at the time and the scenario becomes more plausible I've thought a lot about that scene over the years and even Incorporated similar ideas into the Juggernaut scale ships for a video game project I worked on years ago Hades 9 though the game was sadly never completed we still occasionally use footage from it our designs featur ships of a similar Gloriana class scale with hundreds of thousands or even millions of crew members set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia these ships had main guns miles long and their immense scale included cracks and crevices that Spann hundreds of meters wide and kilometers long entire unintentional ecosystems could develop in these spaces sustained by air and water leaking from the ship and held in place by artificial gravity gun ports in particular were key areas where gravity manipulation was used to launch projectiles these massive weapons relied on gravity capacitors to store and release energy and the sheer size of the ships meant gun Crews were like small towns living near or even on the Colossal guns themselves this highlights something I always find fascinating when conly advanced technology whether in serious discussions or science fiction ition the secondary and unexpected effects of the technology for instance artificial gravity could be used not just for crew Comfort but also to accelerate projectiles this might apply to giant ship mounted weapons vehicle mounted guns or even personal sidearms as I recall the Mass Effect video game franchise uses this concept for its weapons if artificial gravity works for weapons why not for body armor sci-fi often depicts anti-gravity suspensors or massive power arm more but rarely combines the two imagine a nlike warrior encased in tons of metal able to charge freely not because of Pistons servos or synthetic muscle fibers but because artificial gravity or reduced inertial Mass makes the suit lighter and easier to move Mass itself seems to have three distinct effects it resists being pushed or pulled inertial Mass it's put on by other masses passive gravitational mass and it exhorts a pull on other masses active gravitational Mass normally walking around in Low Gravity while wearing a massive space suit is exhausting because while the suit isn't heavy its inertial mass still resists movement ships capable of manipulating inertial Mass would have an easier time moving themselves this idea is often implied in science fiction with artificial gravity systems otherwise when a captain ORD take us to half impulse or take us to Half Light Speed we would expect the crew to be squished against the bulkheads by the sudden acceleration for example accelerating to half the speed of light in 1 second would require approximately 15 million Gs of acceleration thousands of times more than would instantly kill a person under normal conditions just as importantly if you can control gravity you can change directions more easily without fleeing the crew around otherwise when two ships fly past each other at a decent fracture of light speed firing broadsides and one attempts to swing around for a second attack run it would need to spend months accelerating at high speed to make that maneuver leaving the crew glued to one wall of their ship gravity Technologies also open up new defensive possibilities in addition to applications in weapons and propulsion for instance a gravity beam laser or Spotlight could serve as a tractor beam or a mechanism for launching Fighters it could also be used to manipulate large chunks of metal positioning them several miles from your ship as a shield these metal barriers could absorb damage and if something does break through it would scatter in the space between you and the Sheep Shield rather than ricocheting around inside your ship as it would if it pierced your armor something like this might work for defense on small scale vehicles or body armor too but that's not the only way gravity technology or grav Tech could enhance defense for ships planets or individuals imagine if you had a weak fluctuating gravity field around you on the ground such a field could cause bullets aimed at you to miss their target if it had an anti-gravity function it might even push bullets aside or slow them down gravity also affects energy light blue shifts gains energy as it falls into a gravity well just as objects like Bullets speed up and anti-gravity field could reverse this red shifting light to weaker frequencies or slowing incoming projectiles this assumes a simple push or pool gravity device if a gravity field could push sideways it might deflect objects entirely much like a far distant electromagnet between Earth and the Sun can deflect charged particles better than Earth's Own magnetic field a long focused gravity cone could potentially deflect incoming weapons fire bullets lasers or even energy weapons with minimal energy use while these ideas are exciting for spaceships they are equally applicable to space stations habitats planets and stars but before diving into those applications we should ask how does this gravity Tech actually work the answer of course is that we don't know not just how it works but even if it's possible that's why we classify it as clock Tech a term derived from arthos Clark's famous quote any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic we recently did a comprehensive episode on clock Tex exploring Technologies ranging from biological immortality likely easier to achieve than Fast Night travel despite sci-fi often suggesting otherwise to those that seem plausible but have no clear developmental pathway and others outright forbidden by known science gravity technology mostly falls in the category of plausible but currently inaccessible under known science however we do have some basic gravity related Technologies today spaceships use gravity for slingshot Maneuvers and the oorth effect spin gravity is employed in space habitats and even washing machines and gravity Powers mechanical systems like water wheels pulley and counter ways somewhat ironically while gravity was the first of the four fundamental forces to be discovered and its basic Behavior understood and utilized it Remains the least understood overall the other three forces are electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces gravity is incredibly weak trillions or trillions of times weaker than even the weakest of the other three and appears to be strictly attractive unlike the others which have both attractive and repulsive components in some ways our incomplete understanding of gravity is precisely what keeps the door wide open for grav Tech as you simply don't yet know what can and can't be ruled out unlike the other fundamental forces which have well-defined curio particles like photons for electromagnetism and and gluons for the strong nuclear force gravity's curio particle the hypothetical graviton remains undiscovered while we hypothesize its existence the graviton compatibility with Einstein's theory of relativity is deeply problematic for more detailed discussion of these issues see our String Theory episode from last month where we delve into the conflicts between quantum mechanics and general [Music] relativity gravity is the Unseen architect of the cosmos shaping planets Stars and perhaps even the size and potential of alien life forms and while at first we might think gravity limited the size of aliens we also have reason to believe most aliens who could parallel us on other worlds would also be much bigger in the big alien Theory our monthly nebula exclusive episode we dive into the fasinating connection between the physics of size gravity and the mysteries of the firmy Paradox could the very forces that govern the universe also explain why we haven't encountered other intelligent species explore these captivating questions and more only on nebula the largest Creator owned streaming platform every episode of sfia airs early and adree on nebula alongside a universe of exclusive content from myself and many other amazing creators like real engineering real science the science Asylum up and atom and more including classes available on nebula sign up at go. nea.org plan making it $3 a month nebula also offers lifetime memberships and gift options so you can share incredible content like the big alien Theory with friends and family head over now to go. nebula.com the possibilities of gravity
[Music] Tech that said we've made some significant process in understanding gravity in the past decade we conclusively detected gravitational waves a prediction of general relativity observations suggest that these waves generated by extreme binary sources like merging black holes are not emitted uniformly in all directions instead they vary in strength depending on the direction implying that a directional gravity emitter could be possible if true this could allow us to project gravity in specific shapes like cones rather than spheres enabling applications like tractor beams or even launch corridors for spaceships departing planets manipulating gravity in a localized area of the atmosphere could also provide a straightforward path to weather control a topic we will visit when discussing grav tech for planetary applications interestingly almost every fast and light ft travel concept under serious consideration today such as warp drives or warm holes relies on the existence of negative matter or negative energy personally I'm skeptical about the existence of such phenomena but if they do exist they could provide a pathway developing grave Tech by enabling the creation or manipulation of gravitational fields using negative matter or energy we also know that mass generates gravity but that doesn't mean gravity can only be produced omnidirectionally or solely by mass a deeper understanding of quantum gravity might reveal that gravitons do exist and can't be generated as easily and mundanely as we currently produce photons if so the possibilities for controlled directional gravitational fields and the Revolutionary Technologies they could unlock would be endless gravity control could significantly influence other Technologies and the p our civilization might take for example we have to consider creating rotating habitats to house vast populations in space using rotation to simulate gravity if artificial gravity eliminates that need habitats could be designed flatter and simpler furthermore structures could be built much larger without requiring super materials or an energy intensive active support systems interestingly gravity control also allows for smaller scale Innovation moons or dwarf planets which struggle with low gravity could have their gravity enhanced comfortably at least within bases and settlements toring could be far more practical enabling adjustments to gravity on heavy planets maintaining atmospheres and oceans on smaller celestial bodies like moons or asteroids or even supporting life on asteroids themselves the concept of Terror forming by the way originates from Jack Williamson's short story Collision orbit in that story The termer Force to a small asteroid that someone claimed and AIT with an artificial gravity field making it capable of retaining an atmosphere and providing earthlike gravity whether such grave Tech is viable depends not only on how complex it is but also on whether it requires energy to operate Mass naturally generates gravity with no energy cost of course energy is involved when objects move up or down in a gravitational field but the field itself is a constant similarly spin gravity doesn't inherently consume energy once established a hollow cylinder spinning in space will keep spinning indefinitely aside from minor frictional losses even in a vacuum there are some particles to bump into if artificial gravity operates like these systems it could be practical for large scale continuous use however suppose it required energy to maintain say 1 watt per square foot or about 10 watt per square meter in that case something like the International Space Station would need around a 5 kwatt generator or solar panel to maintain gravity while that not insignificant it suggests you could feasibly limit artificial gravity to specific areas like work spaces or sleeping quarters or activated only when people are present much like we do with lighting the power requirement is purely arbitrary I chose it because it's comparable to the energy used for bright room lighting the actual requirement could be much higher or lower using that figure a USS Enterprise scale spaceship might need to burn through a megawatt to maintain its gravity possibly more if it must Supply gravity to each of its dozens of decks individually we also don't know how such gravity would diminish with distance does it remain uniform and simply stop working Beyond a few meters or does it follow an inverse or inverse Square law relative to the distance from the gravity plate if it diminishes with distance would that mean your head experiences noticeably less gravity than your feet at a planetary scale generating gravity at 10 watts per square meter would consume about 2 to 3% of the sunlight hitting the planet assuming earthlike illumination and a 100% conversion rate turning photons directly into gravitons with no lost to heat for quarter asteroids heat loss might not be a concern as any sunlight not reflected would simply warm the rock it might also be perfect for a planet like Venus where we get a bit too much sunlight and the gravity is a bit low and there will be a lot more Venus sized planets than earth-sized ones and even more at 80% Earth's gravity it's just the nature of how matter tends to Clump more small items than bigger ones though more mass in the bigger ones than all the smaller ones combined it's worth noting that a 10 km wide asteroid with earthlike gravity would not automatically retain an atmosphere like Earth we've previously discussed the idea of creating artificial black holes of arbitrary sizes for purposes like generating gravity if your Gravity Force falls off inverse square with distance than a 10 km wide object has only a quarter of the gravity 10 km up at the top of its main a atmosphere layer which isn't holding things in well at that point plus atmospheres go up a lot higher than that and inverse rather than inverse Square Force might do much better and that might be possible with artificial gravity in the absence of that Tech we could do this with a small artificial Black Hole by placing a micro black hole at the core of an asteroid moon or Mega structure you could generate gravity using abundant Mass such as hydrogen or helium rather than valuable rocks and metals dark matter with which is even more abundant and less useful for construction could serve even better if you could direct it into artificial black holes If gravity manipulation becomes possible it might enable interaction with dark matter one of the few ways we might reliably manipulate it Mass might not even be necessary to generate gravity alternatively if artificial gravity requires power to operate the energy could be used to compress dark matter or excess hydrogen helium into artificial black holes this is a point we'll return to later energy does generate gravity too so it might be that you need to dump that much energy in the equivalent of the appropriate mass energy Untold trillions of tons to make it work though that would really limit the value of such Technologies however an asteroid with earthlike gravity created via a micro black hole at its core would likely still need a transparent spherical shell to retain its atmosphere the escape velocity of a rock with earthlike gravity is far lower than Earth's and the gravity would sharply decrease just a few kilometers above the surface a shell would help maintain the atmosphere fortunately we already have materials that are as strong as steel yet transparent making such a shell feasible many plants might wrap themselves in transparent shells or construct a honeycomb of giant domes for similar purposes these structures could also house artificial magnetospheres to deflect ionizing particles that strip away planetary atmospheres as mentioned you could lower the gravity on more massive planets but maybe more importantly you you would use this to extract material for use elsewhere planetary mining or harvesting High Gravity makes extracting and transporting materials from such walls energy intensive and dangerous as machinery and human operators must contend with crushing forces by using artificial gravity to reduce or counteract the plant's natural gravity in specific mining zones equipment could operate more efficiently and work course could move safely and easily furthermore artificial gravity systems could create controlled environments that stabilize loose soils or manage the flow of excavated materials reducing the risk of collapse or equipment wear for particularly dense or high pressure environments artificial gravity could even assist in lifting mind materials off the plant surface either by counteracting gravity during launches or funly extracted resources through specialized gravity assisted Transport Systems this technology would open access to the vast mineral wealth of massive planets that are currently impractical to mind artificial gravity opens up fast ating Landscaping possibilities instead of Simply using it to hold loose soil in place it could be used to run water uphill creating spectacular M High waterfalls as it flows back down it could also enable Innovative architecture such as spiral hallways where you walk upside down or buildings with sidewalks running down the sides adorned with Gardens and trees jutting outward imagine looped Gardens on Pathways that invert as you walk or even entire floating islands suspended in the sky on a grander scale artificial gravity could allow for immense Hollow Mega structures filled with air spanning millions of kilometers Within These vast spaces floating islands of rock and water could drift by as Serene Oasis or Lush Gardens redefining the concept of Landscapes and habitats this raises concerns about energy conservation and production if I can make water run uphill I'm either expending energy to move it or violating the law of conservation of energy otherwise I could create a perpetual motion machine by having the water flow uphill only to fall back down a waterfall onto a water wheel continuously generating energy without any input on the one hand this is perfectly fine as we discussed before while energy is locally conserved under known processes there's no strong reason to believe it is conserved in all cases the Big Bang in the continuous expansion of the universe is driven by dark energy energy seemingly coming from nowhere both suggest that energy conservation is not a hard and fast rule in this universe it might be conserved within some broader reality from which our universe emerged but even if that's the case it doesn't preclude us from generating energy or Gravity by similar mechanisms Dark Energy itself behaves in ways that are intriguingly opposite to gravity in some respects furthermore under String Theory which we discussed last month gravity's weakness compared to other forces is theorized to stem from being spread out over extra dimensions and realities if any Force seems plausible to violate energy conservation through artificial generation gravity would likely be the prime candidate artificial gravity could also play a pivotal role in Cosmic engineering imaginable reversing Hubble expansion creating fored pockets of SpaceTime to hide civilizations or even generating Slow Time Fields similar to how time slows near massive bodies ones where time was slowed or even suspended though we might better call them hibernation Fields where time stops or nearly does this would be distinct from suspension field which might be better suited for floating objects on the architectural front gravity beams could serve as safety nets catching people who fall or jump from tall buildings or Bridges potentially a life-saving Innovation and exciting alternative to bungee jumping you could also presumably have buildings hanging in the sky or new options like upside down pyramid buildings or cylinders of reverse gravity that let you fall from the ground up to some City in the sky much depends on how much energy is required to maintain these effects if grav Tech allows for violations of energy conservation this becomes less of a concern gravity control however also opens up new methods of energy generation one of which is artificial Fusion for instance if we could increase the gravity of our sun the fusion rate would rise significantly Fusion rates scale faster than the cube of the gravitational force so doubling the Sun's gravity could result in an 8f or greater increase in its Fusion rate and brightness artificial gravity could transform form gas giants and brown dwarfs into Stars by inducing sufficient gravitational compression to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores gas giants like Jupiter and brown dwarfs which are often called failed Stars lack the mass required to trigger sustained Fusion Naturally by artificially increasing their gravity we could compress their hydren Rich cores to the pressures and temperatures necessary for Fusion to begin this process might be gradual using gravity fields to simulate the effects of additional Mass without need to add physical material such engineered Stars could serve as new energy sources light up dark regions of space or support te foring efforts on nearby moons and planets additionally these artificial Stars might be customized to burn at lower intensities or for longer durations creating stable environments for humans or alien habitats artificial gravity could also be useful for small scale commercial Fusion creating a gravity field the size of a basketball with a billion times normal gravity might be no more challenging than generating artificial gravity for a spaceship additionally it offers valuable applications for managing oversized stars for instance we discussed mining Stars known as star lifting by using their emitted energy to extract matter from their massive gravity Wells this process could be used to extend a star's Lifetime by removing Fusion byproducts cycling and fresh hydrogen or even preventing large stars from going Supernova by decreasing their Mass artificial gravity might significantly simplify these processes making them more efficient and practical supern noi are critical for producing the heavier elements that plants are made from but we could likely replicate those effects more efficiently by using gravity for example we could imagine supercolliders that create new elements powered by gravity instead of electromagnetism supern noi also give us black holes which can be incredibly useful especially if artificial gravity allows us to create very small ones we've explored using black horse for power generation and other Advanced Technologies in several episodes check out our discussions on cougle Blitz black horse black wh Tech and quazo cannons colonizing black holes and weaponizing black holes for more on these fascinating possibilities but while using artificial gravity to make black whes could be amazingly useful it is a reminder that black whes have a lot of uses including warping space and time and if we're contemplating anti-gravity not just gravity that warping might not be limited to squishing up foring or slowing SpaceTime but also to expanding or speeding it up this could open the doors to applications like fast time bubbles and reverse time bubbles along with WM holes that might open up to other places and times in the cosmos so we see a lot of awesome gravity technology options exist and doubtless far more we haven't thought of yet showing us how useful gravity might be not that isn't already pretty handy gravity is the awesome force that holds us all together and it might be then the future it's what lets us easily travel around the present or even the past [Music]
2025-03-03 09:45
