Dumb Question..

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iomegaman

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Saw the first part of "Outland" an older Scifi movie, starts by describing "Io" a moon around Jupiter and says that it has 1/6 earth gravity...

So I was wondering, if you were from earth, and ended up on a planet/moon/floating object that had much less gravity, would you be able to lift things that you would normally on earth gravity be unable to lift?

If Io had 1/6 earth gravity would a 100 lb piece of steel actually weigh about 17 lbs to you?

just wondering...probably not an issue I will face anytime soon...it is the brewery and all...
 
Or your bones lost all their calcium mass and chalkified within your body. :eek:
 
iomegaman said:
So I was wondering, if you were from earth, and ended up on a planet/moon/floating object that had much less gravity, would you be able to lift things that you would normally on earth gravity be unable to lift?

If Io had 1/6 earth gravity would a 100 lb piece of steel actually weigh about 17 lbs to you?

Yes. But if it was swinging on a rope and headed for you, it would be just as hard for you to stop its swinging, because the mass would still be the same, so the inertia would too.

If you sign up for construction work on Io, practice a lot before heading out onto the job. Then again, the place is lousy with volcanoes, so maybe there won't be a lot of gigs there.

Still, ya gotta like a moon that astronomers inevitably describe as "pizza-colored".

Peace,
Paul
 
> planet/moon/floating object that had much less gravity,

Find the movies of men walking on the Moon.

Despite massive suits and packs, they cavort, jump, skip. It takes a steady push to get their mass moving, but once up they fall back slowly.

Rocks don't drop like rocks.

They had a golf-cart with wire-mesh tires which would collapse on Earth but were merely springy on the Moon.

Lifting is easy.

Drag-racing will be slow. Explosion engines, rubber tires, and pavement can give around one Gee lateral acceleration: a 3,000 pound dragster can apply around 3,000 pounds thrust before wheel-spin. The coefficient of "friction" is approximately unity for street rubber on dry pavement. (Race-only dragsters do much better with soft sticky rubber.) Take that same dragster to a moon with 1/10th Gee gravity, and it still has 3,000 pounds mass but only 300 pounds down-force to cause traction. It will wheel-spin at 1/10th Earth Gee and do the 1/4 mile in much longer time than it ran at Englishtown. It would also be One Local Gee, but so far the convention is to do all thinking in Earth Gee.

To earth-babies like you and me, walking on a low-Gee surface is like slippery steel or rough ice.

But yeah. You could lift 600 pounds. It would go up slowly, it is still 600 pounds mass. (Think of 600 pounds on a dolly. Zero weight on you, but hard to start and stop.) Once up, a "100 pound" earthling-arm could hold 600 pounds against 1/6th Gee.

> probably not an issue I will face anytime soon...

You can dream.

Research continues on fusion reactors. Bombs, engines, and rockets are similar: bomb explodes instantly in all directions, engines (and reactors) explode slow against a piston or turbine, rockets explode slow in just one direction. Suppose a compact reactor were developed for a Reagan SpaceWars weapon, and then abandoned because of politics or budget and discarded through military surplus. You reprogram the containment magnets to "leak" in one direction. Tie it to a large surplus pressure vessel. It is not impossible that such a machine could do 1.1 Gee right off the earth's surface, hold that pace for weeks, get you to Mars in 4 days, and then idle for years of heat and power. Can you live on Mars? Mars' tropics are colder than the Arctic but on average not colder than a bad day in the Antarctic, men have lived in fur-suits. The air is just barely more than nothing so you must use SCUBA, and probably a compression suit, but maybe not a full Space Suit. There's lots of low-tech possibilities: a Honda minibike could carry canned air or be adapted to hydrogen peroxide. Lower power is acceptable, even preferable, because you can't apply the Honda's brisk pick-up in half-Gee gravity.
 

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