• Question: can you create artificial gravity or life

    Asked by zeamcihly to laurenceharwood, Jack, Gill, David, Akram on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Jack Snape

      Jack Snape answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Yes to gravity … you could build a space station that spins around so you feel a ‘centrifugal force’ … you know the force you feel when you’re on a roundabout??

      Here is a pic of how it might work

      or a nicer one

      🙂

      Artificial life has been created … scientists recently made a bacteria called ‘synthia’ totally from scratch. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not!

    • Photo: Akram Alomainy

      Akram Alomainy answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I guess yes with some degree of doubt for artificial life but both has been proved possible as great explained and shown by Jack 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Harwood

      Laurence Harwood answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Artificial gravity is easy – Jack as already answered that question. You can also feel weightless in a plane that dives downwards faster than you would actually fall – however the plane has to be very high up when it starts its dive as it has to have time to pull out of the dive and not crash.

      Real life is a bit more of a challenge. As Jack says, there are conglomerates of materials that appear to act like primitive cells, they divide, move and absorb each other. Whether they are life as we know it or – more likely – a pretty good approximation of how things first started to organise themselves to give precursors to what then became “living” things is up for discussion.

    • Photo: Gill Menzies

      Gill Menzies answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I can see the science behind artifical gravity – I’d love to spin round in gravity free space 🙂
      Artifical life? – well I think we need to be careful. Scientists have to be careful about something called ethics – that means doing the right thing – sometimes we have the science to do some very bad, unfair or wrong things with the science we now know ….and it’s not ALL good (nuclear weapons for example!!) 🙁

Comments