The Starship Enterprise featured quite a few cool technologies that didn’t exist when the show débuted back in 1966. Cell phones (communicators), portable computers (tricorders), Bluetooth earpieces (those gizmos Spock and Uhura would stick in their ear on the Bridge), transporters and tractor beams. Many of those things exist in some form today. Some do not. I can’t help you with designing a transporter or a warp engine, but I do have a theory about how to make a tractor beam.
The premise behind a tractor beam is that it is some kind of probably electro-magnetic beam that can somehow grab hold of an object and either hold it in place or push it away or pull it in closer relative to the device that generates the beam. How this was done was never explained. We just assumed that it worked and in the context of the show it did.
But could such a thing work in the real world? I don’t see why not. All we have to do is figure out how gravity works. Then we need to figure out how to generate gravity without lugging around a 55 gallon drum of the stuff neutron stars are made of. Oh yes, once we have gravity figured out then we’ll also need anti-gravity.
Minor little details…
Gravity is an attractive force. Conversely, anti-gravity is a repulsive force. For our tractor beam to work we need both. And they need to be able to be fine tuned to match exactly if we are trying to hold an object in a given location. To move an object we need to be able to precisely imbalance them so the repulsive force is greater than the attractive force if we are pushing it away or so the attractive force is greater to pull the object towards us. Or us toward the object depending on our relative masses…
I am envisioning the beam being constructed like a highly collimated beam of light. Like a LASER. The attractive force (+G) is a cylindrical beam that is surrounded by a tubular beam of the repulsive force (-G). It’s similar to the construction of a shielded cable and for much the same reason. The outer beam will repel any other object it comes in contact with. In this way we will not accidently grab hold of an object and draw it into a collision with us as we would if the outer beam were the attractive force.
Being exactly balanced one would think they would cancel each other out. They don’t, but in a way they do. Being highly collimated they contact the object in different locations and act upon a different set of molecules. The attractive force will pull the molecules it comes into contact with toward it. The repulsive force will try to shove them away. By applying equal force they will cancel each other out to the point of not moving the object. But they will have it in their grasp. When they are imbalanced they will apply a different amount of force to the object. Whichever is applying more force will move the object. But only as fast as the other force will allow. The weaker force is acting as a speed-brake to maintain control of how fast the object is being moved. The greater the imbalance, the faster the object will go.
How much can be moved by such a system is dependant on the mass of the object the beam generator is anchored to relative to the object to be moved and the amount of force that can be applied by the beam.
It’s as simple as that.
Next, to balance the Federal budget. On second thought, let’s replace the Gregorian calendar with something a bit more logical…
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