Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Fitness

I figured wearing something close to that of Skins (Eg, images.sportsshoes.com/product/S/SKI5/SKI5_400_1.jpg), laced throughout with iron as you mentioned, would give an evenly distributed amount of weight throughout your entire body covered by said garment.

If you think about this for a bit – or try a little experiment with the help of friends and/or lots of thread – I think you’ll see the problem with this.

The magnetic artificial gravity will be pulling the fabric of the skinsuit. Imagine tacking (sewing a small loop of thread through the fabric) lots of threads evenly over a skinsuit, passing them though holes in the floor, and attaching them to weights totaling the weight you want to increase by (eg: if you want to train in 2 gs, equal to your weight). What will happen?

I think you’d find that, as far as it can, the suit will stretch, “puddling” around your waist, wrists, and ankles (if the neck is stretchy enough, it will just pull off over your shoulders and slip down to lie on the floor around your feet). When it stops stretching (which, if you intentionally used very inelastic fabric, say something with long nylon or carbon fibers in it), you’ll be feeling nearly all of the downward force where the fabric crosses you shoulders.

You could try to overcome this by effectively gluing (ouch!) the suit to your skin like a second skin, but this would just transfer the effect to your skin. Worst case, the skin of you shoulders splits, and you literally get skinned in something reminiscent of the ”Hellraiser” movies, less bad, it would feel like the moment during a full-body wax hair removal treatment between when the pull starts, and the wax pulls free with your body hairs stuck in it.

The basic physics problem here is that the force of gravity affects all of the mass in you body equally, and most of your mass is inside you, not concentrated on the surface. Any sort of system where the force-generating rig is worn outside of you is an attempt to simulate gravity using just this surface layer, and is doomed to fail.

What you’re left with is the possibility of somehow lacing your entire body with something magnetic, such as tiny iron particles in your blood that lodge in all you tissues, but this sounds like trouble to me.

Better, I think, to simulate the acceleration of gravity via an acceleration that acts almost exactly like gravity, centrifugal force. All you need is a room suspended from arms or cables that allow it to be spun around like a bucket on a rope – a significant bit of mechanical engineering, but nothing that’s not already been done on a smaller scale with aerospace g-force trainers. With such a system, you’d be able to “dial in” whatever rotation speed you wanted, up to the limits of the machine. I’d estimate the power requirements of such a machine to be about that of a large truck at highway speeds, the space requirements, a large warehouse/hanger. Several people could use it at the same time.

With such a system, I believe you’d be able create either people with super-strength, or people with the worst chronic hamstring injuries in the history of sports training (ouch!). The success and popularity of such a system obviously depends on which of these outcomes you get.