5 ms·
A skinny person's magnets will be less close to the walls than a fat person's magnets. Tall versus short, even just body shape will affect the rate of descent.
by jerf 2y ago
A skinny person's magnets will be less close to the walls than a fat person's magnets. Tall versus short, even just body shape will affect the rate of descent. And electromagnetism is inverse-square, which is not something you can just gloss over.
And I sort of cheated by mentally running through the designs myself, like, yes, you could build a constant thing you just put people in, but, why would people want to go in the thing rather than on the thing? It is intrinsically going to be more claustrophobic in any container than being on it. So you put people on it. Then you do this, and do that, and a whole lot of safety work... and like I said, you honestly just get back to, why would anybody want this at all? Who cares if it's "really" magnets anyhow? And you just end up back at "It's a platform that descends slowly using standard elevator technology." at the end of the design process.