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If you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in orbi
by avar 10y ago
If you can block gravity you can achieve orbit at walking speeds if you turn of your anti-gravity machine some tiny fraction of the time you're spending in orbit.
Similarly with going outside the solar system, you could just jump on the planet Earth and press the "anti-grav" button, and in a few hundred thousand years you'd be outside the solar system.
- jws 10y agoI think you can dispense with the "jump". Just press the "gravity off" switch at midnight. You will be on the far side of the earth from the sun, as the earth is pulled to the sun in its orbit, you will drift away on a tangent line at 30km/s relative to the sun. Google says "9 billion miles divided by 30km/s" is a little over 15 years and you are out of the solar system. (I'm ignoring the milky way here, The sun is whizzing around the milky way at 230km/s, but it isn't very near the center so the "chord near the center is simplified to radius" which I snuck by you in the previous paragraph isn't valid. But you should definitely work this out before flicking the switch. Depending on the relative gravity/velocity magnitudes and the time of year, you could drive yourself through the sun on your way out of the solar system, which voids your warrantee.)
- avar 10y agoThanks, I didn't do any of the math, but I should have remembered better from this counteractive fact: You're already at 30km/s, it takes more energy to fall into the Sun than escape the Solar System. Even if you press the "gravity off" button at some random time during the day the odds of you hitting anything are tiny, even if you fly towards the sun most of the time you'll just fly right past it and be no worse off. Except for the part where there's no oxygen and you can't breathe of course.
- spynxic 10y ago"gravity off" is a lofty term to toss around so freely. Consider an omnipresent force or curvature vanishing one spot. I can't imagine gravity but the effects in an ocean would obviously be to fill the hole with massive force.
- jandrese 10y agoOrbit isn't about getting 160km over the surface of the Earth, it's about accelerating to 7.8km/s so you don't fall back down to Earth. Your anti-gravity pump won't help you in that regard. Getting to orbit isn't hard because you have to go so high, it's hard because you have to go so fast.