How can artificial gravity be created for space exploration?

[berkeman]

Thread closed temporarily for Moderation...

 

[Mark44]

The thread is now reopened...

 

[sophiecentaur]

I think that pause has released us all from the thread's grip.

 

[Digcoal]

So if you're throwing a ball "up" in a rotating spacecraft , it'd move in a weird arc.

Weird only insofar as the conditioning you’ve had in living in standard Earth gravity.

It wouldn’t be “weird” after a few weeks. The brain is amazingly plastic.

 

[Digcoal]

Is it really worth introducing Sci-Fi ('Fiction') ideas into an Engineering problem? We might as well have a man with a magic wand on board to take us wherever we want.
And before quoting Arthur C Clarke, his ideas came from informed sources. The only real error in his fiction was the time scale for his events - very optimistic.

Our current state of technology is a series of realized ‘fiction.’

 

[sophiecentaur]

Our current state of technology is a series of realized ‘fiction.’

If you made two lists of SciFi ideas, with the fruitful ones in one list and the dead ends in the other, I think the dead ends would be in a huge majority. But that isn't a criticism of SciFi literature; a random bit of SciFi will be about as 'valuable' as any other bit of fiction.

We're straying into the realms of semantics. But I would disagree with the idea that 'fiction' is necessarily the route to technological solutions. Very often, it's Maths and concentrated thought that yield to advances in technology. The process of invention is very varied and will depend on the individual. But so much technological advance these days is based on group discussion.
But if you want to define fiction appropriately then you can get any answer you want to this question.

 

[Dale]

Very often, it's Maths and concentrated thought that yield to advances in technology.

And the cases where it is not are usually happy accidents followed by carefully digging into a “that was weird”. Such happy accidents are hard for sci-fi writers to predict.

Any way, let’s not divert to a discussion about sci-fi