Tom Scott
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2022–2025
6:18 · 7.2M views · Apr 2, 2019
Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.
HN cites it as an intuitive demonstration of the Coriolis effect and the practical problems of spinning habitats.
5 comments from Hacker News
Coriolis force. It's pretty basic but I never really got it until I watched the Tom Scott video this video
EMS = electro muscular stimulation? No, not 100%. Astronauts have very good resistance training onboard the ISS at this point. Some of them come back to earth stronger than they left. However, it turns out that your body also needs skeletal loading in order to produce strong bones. That kind of loading comes from having large forces distributed through the entire body. NASA tried a variety of shortcuts around resistance training, but none of them were satisfactory. A spinning drum is probably the best method short of artificial gravity, but it has a couple problems. A rotating reference frame creates some pretty non-intuitive effects ( this video ). Research is ongoing about just how fast a human can be spun for a long duration, although data is hard to come by. We also don't know how low of a gravity a human can stay healthy in without intervention like serious exercise. If it turns out that you need 1G, that involves a much larger spinning drum than a G/3 (Mars) or G/6 (Moon) environment. The problem is that we really have no way to simulate those environments for a human.
The idea is much older for example 1948: [LINK] Various test chambers for astronauts where built to test how people respond to higher gravity / a rotating reference frame. Actually trying to do this runs into some unexpected issues in practice. Here is a Tom Scott video about a more recent example: this video
Relevant Scott Manley video: [LINK] Relevant tom Scott video: this video There is a lot of research, but it’s not as simple as operating under real gravity. Makes many movements harder and can result in getting sick.
Artificial Gravity via rotation is no walk in the the park either. See: [LINK] for the long explanation. and the youtube example: this video