A Ponder in Freefall

[gfish]

With one week to go before flying to Houston, freefall is naturally on my mind a lot right now. And I was just thinking...

Assume a standard SF belter society. The gestation thing turns out to be a null issue, so people spend almost all their in freefall.

The question is, do they still juggle? This could only be done when under acceleration, or with excessively complicated little devices (not unlike our space robot, only much, much smaller) that would use thrusters to mimics motion under gravity. Either one is expensive. So I'm imagining juggling as a very elitist skill, something only done by rich jerks into conspicuous consumption or by people who spend a lot of time under acceleration. Old hands on the rare high-g ships would do it as a sign of their sub-culture, and to impress the passengers (most of whom would be afraid to even walk under real acceleration). At times, a fad would pass among rich jerks who would want to emulate the edgey coolness of the high-g hands. Sales of the ridiculously expensive juggling toys would spike, at which point the real high-g people would stop juggling to distance themselves from the poseur-jerks.

Maybe they'd take up hackey-sacks.

Comments

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

That would be so very, very... you.

:)

I keep envisioning little tiny space robots now. So cute!

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

Naw. Juggling would just become a different thing. It would be tossing objects from hand to hand and trying to keep them moving in fascinating patterns without letting them fly away in any direction, rather than just keeping them *up*. The way juggling works now, you have to come back to each object in the air and give it a boost upwards before it falls too low. The way it would work in freefall, you'd have to reach out to each object in the air and give it a push back in toward your juggling-space before it flies too far away.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

Bounce juggling would still work fine — it'd be a combination of the normal gravity standard and drop juggling.  I think it would actually be overly difficult to make something that has the feel and movement of an earth-normal juggling ball — one gee is a *lot* of thrust for something that small, in a habitable environment.

Still thinking about freefall martial arts . . .

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

And I am increasingly convinced that grappling would be one of the best strategies--or at least part of it. If you want to hit someone hard, you will need to hold one to something. That something might as well be what you are trying to hit.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I imagine you could still bounce-juggle upwards, anyway, throw the (rubber) balls up hard enough, they'll hit a flat ceiling, and come back to you.

I think it'll be interesting when the Guinness Book of Records starts having to specify which world a particular record is valid for. Mars will have a different set of world records for extremes of distance and speed, as will Luna. (Don't say, "the Moon", because there's a bunch of moons out there)