Well, if what I read was accurate, “Dark Energy” comprises 85% of the universe, and we really have no idea what it is, how to access it, or how to use it. So, as long as we are that much in the dark, so to speak, anything is pretty much possible.
I’m not sure how much this is accepted nowadays, but yes: “Dark Energy” sort of corresponds to Einstein’s ‘cosmological constant’, which he sometimes called his greatest mistake?
Jury is still out on that. Though of course it has no practical application to any antigravity machine.
Would it be a somewhat fair comparison to look at the energy efficiency of maglev trains vs standard bullet trains?
Assumes facts not in evidence. Mass/inertia and gravity are only vaguely related, I’d say. Of course, since antigrav is itself fantasy…
Without knowing how this anti-gravity device works, we can just look at this from an energy point of view. The energy required to counter the Earth’s pull of gravity is going to be significant, where the energy to have the car just sit on the Earth’s surface is significantly less than that (it’s mainly going to be rolling resistance, if a ground-based car is stationary it doesn’t consume any energy to just sit there). Air resistance is going to be about the same if you are going roughly the same speeds as a ground-based car. The rolling resistance of the ground-based car won’t exist in the anti-gravity car.
So you’ll save some energy with the rolling resistance, but the force required to constantly fight gravity is going to very much outweigh that. Anti-gravity is going to therefore consume a LOT more fuel.
1950s style flying cars that aren’t anti-gravity based are much more doable in that we can make them work with our current understanding of physics, but again, a ducted fan or quad-copter type of lift system is going to consume significantly more fuel than just driving down the road. The main issue with 1950s quad-copter or ducted fan cars is that we didn’t have all of the control algorithms figured out back then like we do now, so loss of a single rotor would mean that you end up going out of control and slamming hard into the ground, which is significantly worse than getting a flat tire in a ground-based car.
I like how that article cites Randall Monroe’s What-If #1 to support its claim about the billiard ball doing way more damage than depicted in the story.
Yup.
Asimov was very imaginative, but the way his story was written was a reasonable conceit to allow there to even be a story.
And yes, you often won’t go wrong citing Randall Monroe.
Anti-gravity tech is routine, and it usually doesn’t require any energy at all. Right now I’m sitting in an antigravity chair. The upward force from the chair perfectly counteracts the force of gravity pulling me down.
Granted, usually when people say “antigravity”, they mean non-contact antigravity. But that’s still perfectly possible, even if it’s a little more difficult to make it stable, and still doesn’t necessarily consume any energy to work.
In addition to the Gravity Regulation Helmet, Bulletman (aka chemist Jim Barr) also invented the “Crime Cure”, which gives him the strength to crush a tank. The helmet also makes him and Bulletgirl bulletproof and crushproof. I think their necks are safe.
Yeah. “All” you need to do is suspend a large enough mass overhead and you’ll negate local gravity. I’ve even seen that used in some sci-fi.
The “magic” part of the technology is manipulating gravity without using large masses.
A car frame constructed of Tesular steel embedded with anti-gravatons and mediated with a bi-plasmic neutrino substrate would permit the vehicle to hover at any arbitrary height, at least until sublunular effects kick in. Since anti-gravatons are known to be paired with ionic reticular particles, the propulsion system should require no new fundamental pan-dimensional science, just a little engineering.
So they would save a lot of gas.
Sure, if you want to do it the hard way. Or you could use magnetism, or ducted fans, or light pressure, or many other options for your antigravity force (obviously, some of these are more practical than others). There’s no reason why an antigravity force hast to itself be gravitational.