this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Instead of wind mills, you could have gravity mills. Pump water into a higher-altitude reservoir on low-gravity days, and let it flow down -- turning a turbine -- on high gravity days. At least electricity would be cheap.
Or if it varies by region, pump water horizontally (or let it flow slightly downward) from a high gravity region to a low one. Then pump the water upwards there, then horizontally again to the high gravity region. Then let it fall down to turn a turbine that runs all the pumps -- perpetual motion (ish)!
Predicting tides becomes hard. Everything is going to be really windy all the time, as the atmosphere expands in low-gravity regions and contracts in high gravity ones. This makes tall buildings impractical, as they would also have to be built for some maximum gravity rating on top of the constant gravity storms.
The oceans would be weird, and violent. Hurricanes might get far more powerful than what we deal with, if the right gravity conditions occur.
For any sort of civilization to emerge, gravity would have to change/vary really slowly. I don't even want to think of orbits. Kerbal Space Program would be like, really hard in that universe.
Oh man I didn't even think about atmospheric pressure, could giant windbreakers not potentially be constructed to lessen the effect of this wind?
Or maybe in this fantasy world as it has formed originally with these gravity differences there are lots of natural windbreakers, raised areas and lowered areas, mountains etc due to earth getting compacted to different levels
I would imagine the gravity variance within an area would be fairly mild by comparison to the differences between areas - like how you tend to get warmer temperatures near the equator but can still get variances in temp around that
Oceans may become terrifying but it may be easier to travel by air anyway, instead of trying to travel by ocean you could attempt to plot a course through lower gravity areas and avoid the higher ones Could even spawn some badass hardened sea captains that are required to make certain journeys as they are impossible by air
Well if we are going for science...
Giant constructions will have a lot of wear and tear under varying gravity. On top of that, high winds and frequent storms are likely to weather geographical features a lot, making them more flat. In a fantasy world, you can just magic things away, so that's fine :)
I don't know about you, but I would find constant high winds fairly terrifying for air travel. Perhaps they are high enough to permit wheeled sailboats on land? That would be creative!
Wheeled sailboats would be very cool, for air travel could have an airbender-like group, a bunch of monks who dedicate their lives to studying the way the wind changes who can instinctively navigate it and use it to their advantage
Aircraft could essentially just be a hang glider with various mechanisms for steering and best catching the wind
I think if I were writing this as a book I'd have to conveniently ignore/find a way to explain away the wind problem though as it would turn the world from a kind of whimsical interesting place to a deadly, unforgiving one.
I also quite like the idea of low gravs having low tech man-powered aircraft instead of land vehicles and wild wind would make that rather impossible
I quite like the idea of wild wind over the ocean for those air nomad people but that might be a case of wanting my cake and eating it too
I guess if I were going the magical route there could be a group of wizards in every town or city maintaining some kind of force field to keep the wind out, taking it in shifts. Could be a major terrorist threat if someone were able to take them down
I suppose wheeled boats are just... cars with sails? Sailcars? Wind chariots?
Hm, one thing I didn't think about was magma, if the variations are not so small. Going to have more volcanic eruptions, as fluids get pressed out of high-gravity regions and into low-gravity ones (creating big mountains that grow and tumble into the high gravity wells like some sort of horizontal convection?). Earthquakes too, as the high gravity regions sink and the low gravity ones rise creating shear force. I bet the planet would be more "lumpy" than your run-of-the-mill oblong spheroid. I wonder what continental drift would be like?
With that much irregular magma flow, I bet the magnetic field would be weird if it could sustain one at all. Maybe as 'cells' where the eruptions occur in low gravity regions, then gets pulled into high gravity regions where it compresses, heats due to radioactive decay, melts and is pushed back out into low-gravity regions. So maybe you'd have 'local north' for the cell? Or a very weak magnetic field overall (yay radiation)? I don't really know on this point.
Oh and exceptionally high-precision clocks won't be useful except locally, because of the effect of gravity on spacetime, but that doesn't seem so bad. Low precision clocks based on pendulums won't be useful at all! Spring escapements should be fine though.
Maybe it would be better to live underwater?
Wow all of that, and home ownership still seems more accessible there than here. I bet real estate prices are a bargain!
I can't imagine living under water would be much fun either, I imagine the bottom of the ocean in high grav would be absolutely unlivable due to the pressure
Also, I'm not entirely sure how it works but divers have to come out of the water really slowly and carefully so they don't get the bends, imagine that where the water pressure keeps changing
Infact imagine any underwater structure where the pressure continuously changes dramatically
Also also the tides would be going absolutely crazy overhead
All that said that would make it even cooler to have some kind of hermit character, maybe a powerful wizard living under the sea despite all the hazards and difficulties
As a mercenary science hermit, I approve.
If the gravity variation was controlled by a super dense material responding to magnetic fields in a weird way then you might have stable-ish conditions at the magnetic poles.
Could lean into the conspiracy theories and say the poles are off limits to regular people and have it as the headquarters for a super elite shadow organisation