Are you tired of cramped city-living?
Then anti-gravity might be for you!
Do you want to soar effortlessly
over traffic jams,
while other drivers below you lose their minds?
Then anti-gravity might be for you!
We haven't exactly perfected the technology yet,
but if we do,
it would completely revolutionize our world.
According to NASA,
gravity is the "the force by which a planet
or other body draws objects toward its center."
We don't really know why
gravity behaves this way;
we just know that it does, and that's about all
we need to know for this video.
And hey, while we're on the topic
of things we don't know everything about,
let's bring anti-gravity into the mix.
Anti-gravity, as the name suggests,
is a hypothetical means of counteracting the effects of gravity.
While a lot of scientists say that it's impossible,
it's not stopping us from trying.
But if we're ever going to figure it out,
we're going to have to delve into an even more mysterious part of our universe:
anti-matter.
To understand what anti-matter is, and
what it has to do with anti-gravity,
we're going to travel back in time to the Big Bang.
When the Big Bang happened, it created matter and anti-matter.
Matter is made up of atoms,
the building blocks of chemical elements such as helium, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Inside atoms, you will find particles such as protons,
which have a positive electrical charge,
and electrons, which usually have a negative charge.
For anti-matter, the electrical charge of these particles is reversed.
This has led to some speculation that other properties would be reversed too,
such as the way they react to gravity.
We haven't been able to test how anti-matter reacts to gravity
yet.
Still, some theories say that when we do,
we'll find that anti-matter particles fall up instead of down,
giving us our first real-life example of anti-gravity.
If this is the case, it could lead to a scientific and technological revolution.
We could theoretically use the anti-matter to develop technology that shields people,
or objects, from gravitational forces.
In other words, we could make a lot of stuff float in mid-air.
So what would we do with this crazy technology?
Well, first up would have to be hoverboards,
right?
And no, I'm not talking these things
I'm talking real hoverboards that don't touch the ground!
We could even create hover-boots to help with our slam dunk game,
and flying cars to help with our morning commute.
We could build floating cities, to accommodate our ever-expanding population.
Massive structures could be suspended over bodies of water,
or rocky terrains where we wouldn't otherwise be able to build.
But maybe we'd see the biggest implications of anti-gravity technology
when we look even further up
to the stars.
Space travel would become a lot safer, and a lot less expensive.
Our spacecraft wouldn't need rocket fuel to launch out of our atmosphere.
Instead, we could just stop gravity from affecting them.
Anti-gravity wouldn't only help us get to space; it could also help us find a new home out there.
We'd no longer have to worry about planets having gravity
too strong for human habitation,
since we could just use anti-gravity to shield ourselves from it.
Yes, we realize there are a lot of unknowns
and hypotheticals with this one, but hey,
that's what happens when we're talking about something as mysterious as anti-matter.
If you think this stuff is crazy, just wait until I tell you about dark matter!
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.