No matter how comfortable your space station, Moon base or Mars colony might be, it will always be lacking one of the most important things the human body needs to remain healthy over the long term – a local gravity environment equivalent to standing on the surface of the Earth.
While astronauts aboard the International Space Station attempt to mitigate the long-term effects of weightlessness by exercising, this can only provide a certain degree of effectiveness – especially for someone who might be spending most of their life in space.
Future colonists on the Moon and Mars will fare a little better because at least there is some gravity, but it’s not enough to keep someone physically healthy over the course of years or decades.
Now in a bid to solve this problem, engineers at Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation in Japan have developed a concept for a futuristic, spinning building capable of producing artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
known as “The Glass”, this super-advanced cone-shaped structure would have a radius of around 100 meters, a height of 400 meters and would complete one spin every 20 seconds.
The goal is to build one of these for real on the Moon before the end of the century.
The team has also come up with a plan to build a high-speed transportation network connecting the Earth to other worlds, as well as a futuristic biome in which people could live and work.
You can check out a visual representation of these ideas in the video below.
