(World Building) What Effects Would Affordable Anti-Gravity Have?

Bran The Bean

Swarm of Bees
We've all seen it in a bundle of different settings.
Anti-Gravity. The ability to hover. Repulsors. Invisible, forceless thrust.

So I was thinking that if you have affordable, accessible technology like this that it is a fundamental thing. Like, we're talking as affordable as an internal combustion engine. It's relatively simple to make and use. For the sake of not fussing over the details of the tech but giving it a basis...

Lets say that it's a special element. When you apply electrical current to this element it spatially stabilizes the element, creating an opposing force equal to the force placed upon it. The greater the force, the greater the required power to resist.

What effects do you think the availability of technology like this would have on how the cultures and peoples of a planet would develop?
 
I hope I don’t come up with anything too obvious for this, but forgive me if you do!

The first thing I think of, after transportation, that is, would be to use your brand of anti-gravity to create a few perpetual-motion machines. Say, switching the anti-gravity on, then off again, then back on would be able to accelerate an object without investing any energy into increasing the speed, if that makes sense? Someone with a better grasp of physics could come up with a better explanation, but if you’re trying to go for super science, I feel like an infinite source of clean energy would be a fantastic place to start. I would recommend that such an engine be either very large or illegal, in order to ensure they aren’t created by anyone who wants to use infinite energy to blow something up, but I’m sure you’ve got a plan. Good luck with your writing!
 
I hope I don’t come up with anything too obvious for this, but forgive me if you do!

The first thing I think of, after transportation, that is, would be to use your brand of anti-gravity to create a few perpetual-motion machines. Say, switching the anti-gravity on, then off again, then back on would be able to accelerate an object without investing any energy into increasing the speed, if that makes sense? Someone with a better grasp of physics could come up with a better explanation, but if you’re trying to go for super science, I feel like an infinite source of clean energy would be a fantastic place to start. I would recommend that such an engine be either very large or illegal, in order to ensure they aren’t created by anyone who wants to use infinite energy to blow something up, but I’m sure you’ve got a plan. Good luck with your writing!

This is all pure hypothesis that I may use for writing at some point.
Brainstorming currently. Ahah.

Good thought on power generation. Brings up an interesting question. If, like an electromagnetic coil, you can both generate force or generate electricity... you might be able to use the module to generate electricity via force. But with electromagnets you need cyclical force and a magnetic field. With this.. well.. I haven't really come up with the details. Lol - Either way.

So, are you saying you could, for example, have four of these on four corners of a box and then have one that is angled slightly. You engage it, applying power to it, and it propels you along because of the additional weight from your own butt in the vehicle?
 
The four corners thing could definitely work, but I was thinking something like one anti-gravity generator affecting a system, then setting an object in orbit vertically, then turned off when it hits the peak, so it speeds up when it falls, then turned back on so it returns to orbit, just constantly speeding up. Does that make sense?
 
The four corners thing could definitely work, but I was thinking something like one anti-gravity generator affecting a system, then setting an object in orbit vertically, then turned off when it hits the peak, so it speeds up when it falls, then turned back on so it returns to orbit, just constantly speeding up. Does that make sense?

Hm. I imagine the amount of energy expended would be less than the energy gained? Part of the problem with power generation is that you always lose some of it as heat.
 
I may be underestimating how much energy you’re picturing the anti-gravity divide itself will produce. But my main concept is just letting it fall in order to speed it up, then using that same speed to bring it to the apex again by eliminating gravity’s effects. That way, it’s constantly speeding up, and you can just pull energy from the system before it reaches terminal velocity. Or even better, make the whole thing exist in an artificial vacuum. When you’re trying to make a perpetual motion engine, I feel like you could spring for that.
 
Hey, if you haven’t fleshed it all out yet, feel free to go a bit farther with it maybe? Like, what if the element in question directs gravity, instead of just cancelling it out? I bet you could play around with that quite a bit. Or maybe that would be a development within the story itself? Sorry, I don’t mean to hijack your idea
 
A few more ideas related to being able to turn off gravity: by turning off gravity for an object, it wpuld take next to nothing to accelerate it, no matter how large it is, so you could have planes, ships, and cars all take about no fuel. You could probably also turn off gravity in large areas, maybe making it normal to have a whole building under anti-gravity, just for convenience’s sake?

Maybe even father, whole cities have gravity turned off as the default, so pedestrians can fly around easily, or maybe it’s only like that in the rich neighborhoods, depending on how you want it to develop.

You also have a full liscense to get around the cube/square law, meaning giant robots, space elevators, or even oversized species are now viable, so long as there’s some kind of protection from it getting turned off.

This actually might be more interesting, exploring who would have the ability to turn it off, who would control the resource, how the economy would be affected. Might think about it like the new oil, where a regime that holds enough power will stay there, so long as they continue supplying the world. This would let you throw the focus on just about any region or country you cared to.

Sorry, that’s a lot of ideas at once. Just started thinking about it some more.
 
Problem: if you turn off gravity you end up with a plot hole - What is drawing matter together in the first place, then? Gravity helped create the universe as far as we know. Mass effect used Element Zero for the easy production of Negative Matter to get around relativistic limitations on speed and the square cubed law.
Hell, even mass effect using the most sciency method of stuff they could posed a *really* problematic set of ideas that were never addressed such as the negative side effects of lowering the mass of an object to below 0. (It would not be able to exist)

But I was thinking more along the lines of a "less plot-holey" version of repulsor technology from Star Wars. It was an excuse to make things float.

They created a tech that was, apparently, so low power that you could just leave it running silently but then they never really explored the uses of that in... culture... economics... etc. It's a massive universal plot hole so I am seeking to brain storm on what something like that could do beyond make things float in cool ways.

Power-generation is a good thought so if you did have a culture that had endless energy because of this deus-ex-machina element then you can imagine that the power efficiency might not have ever crossed their minds. Everyone has unlimited electricity. We'd likely have a bigger focus on the miniaturization of high voltage technology. Hell, acquiring enough energy to cause absolute mayhem would be easy as pie so either they would develop a culture of "do no harm" or it would be intensely regulated.

Beyond that, having the ability to easily make things float would most definitely favor small, lighter people, though.
 
Hmmm... Well I did read somewhere that people who would be born and raised in low to no gravity would have organs of different sizes compared to earthling organs. Like hearts that are too big and would be unable to withstand earth's gravity. Because a lack of gravity has such an affect on the body, would physical therapy involving short term exposure to total zero gravity be a thing? Maybe it could alter blood flow and help with chronic pain? These would be expensive big chambers but I think it could be a health fad one would see in a sci fi world.
 
Hmmm... Well I did read somewhere that people who would be born and raised in low to no gravity would have organs of different sizes compared to earthling organs. Like hearts that are too big and would be unable to withstand earth's gravity. Because a lack of gravity has such an affect on the body, would physical therapy involving short term exposure to total zero gravity be a thing? Maybe it could alter blood flow and help with chronic pain? These would be expensive big chambers but I think it could be a health fad one would see in a sci fi world.

Oh that's a really interesting thought. Using antigrav tech for health therapy. Good fucking thought, Okami. I love it.
I wonder if you could use this for helping to treat skeletal disorders as well.
 
It vastly depends on three things: how portable it is, how easy it is to use and how affordable it is. Also, let's suppose that power is a non-issue.

Assuming the answer to all of these is "as much as possible", levitation would become like second nature. The world would be changed fundamentally; a time where humans couldn't fly would become unthinkable.

Buildings would no longer require stairs of elevators, roads would cease to be concept and even floors would become an obsolete concept. What you're essentially creating is a world where humanity is no longer bound to a two-dimensional plane like the Earth's surface, but free to move three-dimensionally in every direction. not only that, but without gravity there doesn't even need to be a "down", per se; entering a room through one side would by no means imply which side is the floor and which is the roof. Hell, they all could be floors; space becomes infinitely easier to manage when you can just stick stuff to the ceiling and be done with it.

There wouldn't be floating cities as we'd imagine them; it wouldn't be a bunch of buildings stuck to a flying platform. Instead, every building would be floating; a like debris field suspended in mid-air. Restricting forces would still exist, of course; you can't build a settlement so high up that breathing starts to be a problem, nor do wear and tear or inertia or friction stop. However, you could still have a city built vertically enough that one should pack a coat to float up to the upper sections, or a merchant city where every building acts as a ship in a fleet.

Speaking of buildings, they would no longer be limited by internal structure nor gravity, so the architecture would probably start to go crazy. Settlements would start looking like galleries of giant abstract sculptures, and geometry that would make no sense to us would be incorporated regularly.

the main problem, as you brought up, is that without gravity, nothing is keeping anything on Earth, and people would very quickly start drifting off into space. One way to counteract this is that, instead of making it anti-gravity, you could make it controllable gravity; you don't really need to defy it, you just have to make it weak enough to allow you to float. It would also make moving a lot easier, since you'd just fall in a given direction instead of having to pack a jetpack or whatever else.

All that said, this kind of society supposes the three point I made at the beginning; it could very quickly change given any of those do. if it isn't affordable, the rich would literally be above everyone else, living in the aforementioned floating cities only they can afford. Aside from that, anti-gravity would become a large-scale utility, used for government projects and similar things but unlikely to be accessible to the common schmuck.

If it isn't portable, I'd imagine it would be used more for vehicles than anything else; it could be incorporated in stationary objects like statues and the like, and it would still be used for construction work, but the "floating cities" would likely be the stereotypical ones with buildings on floating platforms. That said, I wouldn't really see the point of such a metropolis; it has no resources and is on no trade routes, so it would have no reason to exist.

If it isn't easy to use, it'd become a specialist technology. It would probably find more military application as soldiers are specialized anyway, but on a day-to-day basis it would be seen less of an essential and more as a commodity.


Also, this is my first post outside of introduction thread. Hi, I'm Sour Rocks.
 
So. Now we can defy gravity? Go against it? Or can we create motion in any direction? Or does it have to be against gravity?

I figure that the most direct answer to this problem is the manipulation of the graviton. At this point, I figure we'd have the ability to directly apply force to anything in whatever direction we want at whatever speed we want depending on the energy we have to expend. This could redefine every aspect of mechanical motion. Not to mention vehicular travel most obviously, but say, surgical tools would be potentially able to manipulate the human body from the outside, or a machine from your garage could direct airwaves in such a way that would simulate perfect headphones without the need to wear anything.

But you say anti-gravity. And your example suggests something more like a reverse gravity magnet in nature. So now we can push against gravity waves, and climb them in a sorts, still based on available power. Well flight gets a lot easier I suppose. I don't see a whole lot that I can add that hasn't already been suggested. I think a lot my depend on the cost of making extremely precise movements with anti gravity. Can we say, smash to atoms together? If so, how fast? Can we manipulate quantum particles in complex and consistent motion as invisible logic circuits cable of being re-organized on demand?
 

Quantum computing is, well, not useful in that regard but... in the development of microprocessors? Hmm. An interesting thought. Hmm hmm hmm. :) Computation is a direction I had not considered.

As for gravitons, that was not something I had thought much on. Being someone who does not subscribe the speculative theory of gravitons I had not really thought much on it! Gravitons might be a lot more useful to Science Fiction than the Higgs particle because of how much more... simple... the proposed mechanism is! I like. Hm. Even more fun thoughts.

Thank you for your contribution. <3
 
I can into science, so let me ponder a few of these. (Also will include citations.)

To answer the anti-gravity question: We'd have fundamentally changed our understanding of physics if we found a new element that could nullify the effects of gravity within contained spaces. It would lead to a new scientific golden age atop a plethora of criticisms about "science's prior assumptions" by religious fundamentalists.

To explain: Gravity is a force in the universe that warps space and time. 3D Example, 2D Example. To be able to nullify gravity in a particular spot costs a fuckton of energy. In physical principles, it would require at least an equal amount of energy to produce an anti-gravity field per square meter you wanted to affect. You would have to combat the entire gravitational pull of the Earth. Theoretically speaking, you'd have to be able to produce a gravitational "bubble" that "keeps out" Earth's gravity, whilst simultaneously producing no gravity whatsoever inside the bubble. The only way you are going to accomplish this is to be able to change mass, because mass is what produces gravitational fields. (The heavier something is, the more gravity it has, generally.) If you have a device that can effectively nullify mass, you have a God device, because that's the ability to casually manipulate matter and energy on a whim. Nothing else--not magnets, especially--is going to help you with this.

On top of this, as an added piece of entertaining food for thought: If you had a gravitational force equal to that of Earth outside of the bubble, everything inside of the Bubble would very rapidly lose momentum and then fall off of the Earth. The Earth is flying through space at around 67,000 MP/H. (It gets great gas mileage.) The main thing that keeps you moving at the same velocity as the Earth is the fact that Earth's gravity keeps you on it. Counter Earth's gravitational effect, and you'll start to lose momentum due to the friction that's in the air. You'll slowly float off of it and out into space.

Same would happen if you "turned off" gravity in the universe--we'd all float away from each other, planets would careen off into oblivion, galaxies would immediately fall apart, so on.

The closest you could get to real anti-gravity would be to have a sufficient amount of physical force constantly projected so as to allow you to just overpower gravity--IE: Thrusters. That being said, all thrust is a matter of energy input to output, but nothing is 100% efficient, as I'm about to go over...

I hope I don’t come up with anything too obvious for this, but forgive me if you do!

The first thing I think of, after transportation, that is, would be to use your brand of anti-gravity to create a few perpetual-motion machines. Say, switching the anti-gravity on, then off again, then back on would be able to accelerate an object without investing any energy into increasing the speed, if that makes sense? Someone with a better grasp of physics could come up with a better explanation, but if you’re trying to go for super science, I feel like an infinite source of clean energy would be a fantastic place to start. I would recommend that such an engine be either very large or illegal, in order to ensure they aren’t created by anyone who wants to use infinite energy to blow something up, but I’m sure you’ve got a plan. Good luck with your writing!
... Here!

No, you could never make a perpetual motion machine, even if you had anti-gravity. The reason for this is because 100% energy conversion is impossible--you will always spend more energy than you get back. This is why cars require fuel, and why humans need to eat. Law of Conservation of Energy. The amount of energy you would spend to turn on any machine will, by necessity, need to be partially utilized by the machine in the process of transforming that energy into another type of energy. In this case, we can assume that electrical energy is being converted into kinetic energy, and as part of that process, some of the electrical energy is being spent by the machine itself.

Again, if you can somehow create energy from nothing to do this, you have a god device, and its uses would go far beyond anti-gravity. :p

Hm. I imagine the amount of energy expended would be less than the energy gained? Part of the problem with power generation is that you always lose some of it as heat.
Oh good, you got it!
I may be underestimating how much energy you’re picturing the anti-gravity divide itself will produce. But my main concept is just letting it fall in order to speed it up, then using that same speed to bring it to the apex again by eliminating gravity’s effects. That way, it’s constantly speeding up, and you can just pull energy from the system before it reaches terminal velocity. Or even better, make the whole thing exist in an artificial vacuum. When you’re trying to make a perpetual motion engine, I feel like you could spring for that.

What is creating the artificial vacuum in your hypothetical scenario? I bet it costs energy... :cool:
It vastly depends on three things: how portable it is, how easy it is to use and how affordable it is. Also, let's suppose that power is a non-issue.

Assuming the answer to all of these is "as much as possible", levitation would become like second nature. The world would be changed fundamentally; a time where humans couldn't fly would become unthinkable.

Buildings would no longer require stairs of elevators, roads would cease to be concept and even floors would become an obsolete concept. What you're essentially creating is a world where humanity is no longer bound to a two-dimensional plane like the Earth's surface, but free to move three-dimensionally in every direction. not only that, but without gravity there doesn't even need to be a "down", per se; entering a room through one side would by no means imply which side is the floor and which is the roof. Hell, they all could be floors; space becomes infinitely easier to manage when you can just stick stuff to the ceiling and be done with it.

There wouldn't be floating cities as we'd imagine them; it wouldn't be a bunch of buildings stuck to a flying platform. Instead, every building would be floating; a like debris field suspended in mid-air. Restricting forces would still exist, of course; you can't build a settlement so high up that breathing starts to be a problem, nor do wear and tear or inertia or friction stop. However, you could still have a city built vertically enough that one should pack a coat to float up to the upper sections, or a merchant city where every building acts as a ship in a fleet.

Speaking of buildings, they would no longer be limited by internal structure nor gravity, so the architecture would probably start to go crazy. Settlements would start looking like galleries of giant abstract sculptures, and geometry that would make no sense to us would be incorporated regularly.

the main problem, as you brought up, is that without gravity, nothing is keeping anything on Earth, and people would very quickly start drifting off into space. One way to counteract this is that, instead of making it anti-gravity, you could make it controllable gravity; you don't really need to defy it, you just have to make it weak enough to allow you to float. It would also make moving a lot easier, since you'd just fall in a given direction instead of having to pack a jetpack or whatever else.

All that said, this kind of society supposes the three point I made at the beginning; it could very quickly change given any of those do. if it isn't affordable, the rich would literally be above everyone else, living in the aforementioned floating cities only they can afford. Aside from that, anti-gravity would become a large-scale utility, used for government projects and similar things but unlikely to be accessible to the common schmuck.

If it isn't portable, I'd imagine it would be used more for vehicles than anything else; it could be incorporated in stationary objects like statues and the like, and it would still be used for construction work, but the "floating cities" would likely be the stereotypical ones with buildings on floating platforms. That said, I wouldn't really see the point of such a metropolis; it has no resources and is on no trade routes, so it would have no reason to exist.

If it isn't easy to use, it'd become a specialist technology. It would probably find more military application as soldiers are specialized anyway, but on a day-to-day basis it would be seen less of an essential and more as a commodity.


Also, this is my first post outside of introduction thread. Hi, I'm Sour Rocks.
Oh, boy. There's a lot to unpack here. Let's get started.

#1: Even if levitation became unthinkable, there would be plenty of situations wherein one would want to simply... Walk. The reason being is to maintain physical health, and that a levitation device--even if it were cheap--would still impose a greater cost ratio to simply walking. Then there are locations (such as caves, tunnels, interiors of small structures) wherein levitation wouldn't really be practical most of the time.

#2: We would still, absolutely, have stairs. For the same reason why we have stairs now in spite of having elevators: This device would require power to maintain it, to turn it on, off, to maintain the power of the field itself, so on. If you ever, for whatever reason lost power, you'd drop to the ground like a rock and die. Then, there would be the people would simply want to use the stairs to, again, maintain their physical health--if you levitated everywhere, you would stop using your muscles and become morbidly obese or frighteningly skinny. Especially given that it produces an anti-gravity field, in which gravity (and the friction it presents) is an every day, every minute phenomenon that our bodies evolved around being in. Take that away and you start doing some pretty fucky things to people.

#3: No, we would not have floating buildings. Again, power constraints. Even in the universes of Star Trek and Mass Effect--which both feature technologies that can effectively create or infinitely manipulate matter and energy, neither features floating structures for... A lot of reasons.

#4: I could totally see some arts buildings being made for their own sake, just because humans are vain like that, but the majority of infrastructure would still be purpose-designed and logical. Nobody wants to live in a house made out of structural defects that will murder them and their entire family if it ever falls from the sky.

#5: A lack of gravity would actually make it more difficult to move around. Astronauts on the International Space Station have to propel themselves off of the interior of the spacecraft to get around. tl;dr: Newton's Third Law. It's a thing. We were not made to get around in space, so, actually, yeah, we'd totally still have mini-thrusters. Probably similar to the ones on space suits, actually.

#6: Its biggest use as a technology would be for large scale construction projects. Instead of having to move around horrendously and notoriously touchy and heavy construction equipment, you'd just attach it to a steel beam weighing 50 tons and lift that shit straight to wherever you need it. Construction workers could float to wherever they need to be with the safe knowledge of knowing that they cannot fall and build in three dimensional angles. The biggest use of this technology would be construction and common schmuck jobs, as well as "rich kid toys" and arts projects. Its primary revolution would be in allowing us to expand at a rate that would be unfathomable by today's technological standards.

#7: I agree. If it wasn't portable, we'd use it primarily in transportation, though again, I think it'd mostly be seen in use in construction. Because a floating crane that can't tip over is the best crane. :p

#8: The military would shit its pants over this, agreed.

Whee, science~
 
Wall of text

Bruv. This is a conversation not a lecture. I'd appreciate it if you'd treat it as such.

The problem with only thinking about the Higgs Field is that it snuffs all questions of antigravity. That is not what this is about. This about the sociopolitical / life style / new technologies that could arise from the existence of Antigravity.
 
#1: Even if levitation became unthinkable, there would be plenty of situations wherein one would want to simply... Walk. The reason being is to maintain physical health, and that a levitation device--even if it were cheap--would still impose a greater cost ratio to simply walking. Then there are locations (such as caves, tunnels, interiors of small structures) wherein levitation wouldn't really be practical most of the time.

#2: We would still, absolutely, have stairs. For the same reason why we have stairs now in spite of having elevators: This device would require power to maintain it, to turn it on, off, to maintain the power of the field itself, so on. If you ever, for whatever reason lost power, you'd drop to the ground like a rock and die. Then, there would be the people would simply want to use the stairs to, again, maintain their physical health--if you levitated everywhere, you would stop using your muscles and become morbidly obese or frighteningly skinny. Especially given that it produces an anti-gravity field, in which gravity (and the friction it presents) is an every day, every minute phenomenon that our bodies evolved around being in. Take that away and you start doing some pretty fucky things to people.

#3: No, we would not have floating buildings. Again, power constraints. Even in the universes of Star Trek and Mass Effect--which both feature technologies that can effectively create or infinitely manipulate matter and energy, neither features floating structures for... A lot of reasons.

All of these are fair points, but I had supposed that power would be a non-issue at the start of my post. Since we're suspending our disbelief for anti-gravity devices, it's not that far a stretch to also believe that whatever civilisation built them would have unlocked some method of making energy a total non-issue.

I didn't say people would stop walking; after all, having never been on a motor vehicle seems unthinkable to us today, but we don't use them every single time we move. That said, a device that is as portable, cheap and widespread as possible would be more comparable to a smartphone, but even that would probably be an understatement. Instead of stairs or elevators, one might simply levitate up or down a building since it comes at no cost to them.

I hadn't really thought of security concerns or physical health; I suppose the former would depend, but the latter (in addition to some people simply refusing to float) would limit the scope of this new anti-gravity world somewhat, I'll give you that.

I don't think neither Star Trek nor Mass Effect are realistic and empirical looks into what a post-scarcity future might look like; a lot of impossible and ridiculous things happen in them regularly, after all. The real main reason neither features a floating society as I've described is that they didn't think of it or weren't going for that kind of sci-fi.


#4: I could totally see some arts buildings being made for their own sake, just because humans are vain like that, but the majority of infrastructure would still be purpose-designed and logical. Nobody wants to live in a house made out of structural defects that will murder them and their entire family if it ever falls from the sky.

I'm not expecting every home to turn into a recreation of M. C. Escher's Relativity, I was just saying that the new architectural style accompanying floating buildings would look more abstract than its predecessors. I suppose security would once again be a concern, but people have lived in more dangerous places.

I can into science, so let me ponder a few of these. (Also will include citations.)

#5: A lack of gravity would actually make it more difficult to move around. Astronauts on the International Space Station have to propel themselves off of the interior of the spacecraft to get around. tl;dr: Newton's Third Law. It's a thing. We were not made to get around in space, so, actually, yeah, we'd totally still have mini-thrusters. Probably similar to the ones on space suits, actually.

The point you're addressing here states that it'd be easier to move if gravity were to be controllable, i.e. choosing the direction in which you fall. We're basically saying the same thing; just floating isn't a terribly useful skill if you can't propel yourself somehow. However, if you could control gravity as opposed to simply defying it, you could gently glide or float down your chosen direction.


#6:
Its biggest use as a technology would be for large scale construction projects. Instead of having to move around horrendously and notoriously touchy and heavy construction equipment, you'd just attach it to a steel beam weighing 50 tons and lift that shit straight to wherever you need it. Construction workers could float to wherever they need to be with the safe knowledge of knowing that they cannot fall and build in three dimensional angles. The biggest use of this technology would be construction and common schmuck jobs, as well as "rich kid toys" and arts projects. Its primary revolution would be in allowing us to expand at a rate that would be unfathomable by today's technological standards.

#7: I agree. If it wasn't portable, we'd use it primarily in transportation, though again, I think it'd mostly be seen in use in construction. Because a floating crane that can't tip over is the best crane. :p

#8: The military would shit its pants over this, agreed.

Whee, science~

Glad we agree on these points.
 
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