Why do people in space shows like Star Trek and Star Wars walk around in space ships instead of floating in microgravity? No floating budget. But what's the in-story reason? Artificial gravity. Every sci-fi show has it. How can we?
It turns out that it's really hard to film things in space. The artfully arranged food on the craft services table floats away and no production can possibly carry on under those conditions. Space-based entertainment has almost always been filmed on the ground — and this helps, because it allows the actor's muscles to keep from atrophying, their blood pressure from getting screwed up, their bodily fluids to stay where evolution intended them to stay, and their bones from becoming brittle and fragile.
The lack of gravity seriously messes your body up, and so if we are going out into space for any length of time, we'll have to devise a way to simulate the gravity we have on Earth. The question is, how do we do that? Plenty of people have thought the problem over, and here are the major suggestions.
This superficial article forgot the most important and practical way to generate artificial gravity for rapid and deep space travel, and that is accelerating at a steady 1g. To read more, click here.