- [Narrator] The effects of weightlessness
on the human body are pretty heavy.
(pulsing music)
In space adventure movies, everyone is always walking.
What's up with that, I mean in a microgravity environment
there's actually a lot more floating and flailing
and general weirdness than walking.
Without gravity, life forms like us
can get seriously messed up.
About half of all astronauts undergo
what's called Space Adaptation Syndrome.
That means that when they encounter
a microgravity environment,
for those first few days they feel nausea and dizziness.
It's kinda like watching Cloverfield on
an IMAX screen for days a time.
And if you stay there longer,
some really serious health effects can
come into play, like deconditioning.
That's when you lose one to two percent of your bone mass
for every month you spend in microgravity.
Now to combat this, astronauts aboard the ISS
are required to do 120 minutes of vigorous exercise
every day using machines that look
like a Klingon torture device.
So what is gravity anyway?
Well, technically it's the force of acceleration
that pulls us toward the earth's center
at 9.8 meters per second squared
while the Earth pushes back up against us.
Seems simple enough, so why don't
we just make artificial gravity in space?
Let's start with an experiment.
Take a bucket of water and swing your arm
as fast as you can in a windmill-like fashion.
Now at the top of the circle,
the bucket is upside down but the water stays inside it.
Let's take the same principle and apply it to space,
where instead of counteracting gravity,
we're actually simulating it.
Imagine a space craft in the shape of a wagon wheel.
The circumference of this wheel is a torus,
meaning it's a hollow doughnut.
Now the outer edge is the floor that you walk on,
and the inner edge is the rotating side
that faces the center of that wheel.
It's kind of like one of those rides at the county fair
and I don't mean that it smells
like popcorn butter and funnel cakes.
I mean that these rides spin around and around
and pin you to the outer edge of the ride.
But that outward force depends upon two factors:
the size of the space craft, and the speed of rotation.
So if you have a small space craft,
it actually has to rotate very quickly,
and that could mean that you could have
a much stronger pull at your feet than you do
at your head, which is bad news.
So really what we need is a large,
slowly rotating space craft,
but that has its own challenges.
For one thing, you have to get all those parts
up into space and that's really expensive.
For another, you have to build it
while you're in orbit and that's really dangerous.
Once again, it'd be really nice
if we had some way of getting stuff into space
besides just putting it on a rocket.
Other ideas for artificial gravity
involve things like energy hungry magnets
or forever accelerating vehicles
or exotic high density matter
but none of these are really practical
right now and may not even be safe,
and let's put this on the table folks.
I'm not going to talk about gravitons, okay?
You can't solve all the world's
problems with hypothetical particles.
We still have to find a way in the short term
to battle deconditioning, so what about a special suit,
like a gravity loading countermeasure skin suit?
It actually uses elastic pressure to squeeze you
and simulate gravity in that respect,
and that way the pressure you feel and the strain you make
keep your body in good shape.
Now in the long term, artificial gravity is something
we're going to have to figure out,
because weightlessness could impact everything
from human reproduction to the way we grow crops in space.
So it's not just about making space travel
more like it is in the movies.
We need to do this because it could
really impact the future of our species.
Now I've got a question for all of you guys out there.
What is your favorite explanation for
artificial gravity in science fiction?
Let us know in the comments below.
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They're pretty heavy.
(pulsing music)