Artificial Gravity

Classical Mechanics Level 3

You decide to set off on a voyage to another star. To stop your muscles from atrophying, you want to generate artificial gravity by having your ship constantly accelerate at 1 g from your reference frame.

Ignoring fuel requirements, is there a problem with generating artificial gravity this way over very long time frames?

Yes, 1 g isn't enough to prevent your muscles from atrophying Yes, you can't accelerate at 1 g when you've left earth No, this can be used indefinitely to generate artificial gravity Yes, eventually the ship would need to go faster than the speed of light, which is impossible Yes, this setup would not work to generate artificial gravity

William Whitehouse by William Whitehouse , 22, United Kingdom

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1 solution

Relativity is based on the idea that you can't tell how fast you're moving without being given a reference frame. This means that you can accelerate at any rate without worrying about the speed of light barrier. Of course you would never reach the speed of light from any reference frame as due to time dilation your time would move slower the closer to c you got. This means that any external observer would say you're acceleration was decreasing.

4 Helpful 1 Interesting 0 Brilliant 0 Confused

At first I thought that what you wanted us to think is that the correct solution to artificial gravity is a circular station with a centrifugal acceleration equal to 1g...but now I understand your solution so,nice problem mate!

Αχιλλέας Σνόου - 4 years, 6 months ago

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