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What would a world where gravity is a weather condition look like? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by flashgnash@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Apologies if this doesn't fit here, not sure where else to post something like this on lemmy

I think having gravity act like weather might be an interesting concept for a fantasy world, where each country has its own gravity patterns, some tend to be heavier some tend to be lighter, some are all over the place

For a few examples, there could be a desert with gravity so high you can get dragged down into the sand

Could be a country with gravity so low everyone uses personal aircraft that work like bicycles instead of land vehicles

Animals in higher gravity areas would have less dense bones, more muscle, etc and lower gravity would have far larger animals because they can support more weight

In a really high gravity area people might need exoskeletons to prevent long term damage

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[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You’d need the planet’s core to contain some kind of non-dense material that will not mix with the dense material … like molten rock but also molten something else that’s much lighter than rock. Basically you need “oil and water” droplets that don’t mix, and are of different densities. Then you need some mechanism for them to churn in a turbulent way. The turbulence makes their movements chaotic and unpredictable.

Only thing I can think of to account for the churning is electromagnetic forces being generated by naturally-occurring nuclear reactions.

So to summarize:

Mantle composed of two substances. One much heavier than the other, and they don’t mix
Electromagnetic forces occurring at random places and times causes these substances to churn in a turbulent way
Turbulent churning of these two materials affects the total amount of mass under characters’ feet at different times, causing unpredictable “gravity weather”
Those electromagnetic forces somehow result from nuclear reactions happening naturally underground (otherwise where do you get the electromagnetism from?)

[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this is my favourite idea so far as to explaining the gravity changes, very cool explanation

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you’re gonna write this book I highly recommend taking a physics class where you study the physics of bounding surfaces and energy flux.

I’m sorry but I don’t remember the exact name of the subject matter. But there are all sorts of interesting properties that different geometric configurations of matter have on the resulting gravitational field (same for sound intensity, electric field strength, etc, anything with an inverse square law).

There are some crazy properties of gravitational fields you wouldn’t expect. Like for instance if all mass was contained in a shell of constant density, then the entire space inside that shell is zero-G, regardless of the shell’s shape.

From outside that shell — say it’s a mickey-mouse-shaped shell of matter that’s uniform in density — you experience the gravitational pull of all of Mickey’s mass toward the centroid of that shape. But from anywhere inside that shell — whether you’re in Mickey’s eye or his heart or the tip of his tail — the pull from all the surrounding matter cancels out and you float in zero-G.

[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago

I'm no writer, just like worldbuilding and character building when I have ideas like this