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From: mason3@husc9.harvard.edu (Richard Mason)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Surviving Electrocution
Message-ID: <1991Apr13.230951.525@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 91 03:09:50 GMT
References: <1991Apr12.212721.519@husc3.harvard.edu>
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Organization: Harvard University Science Center
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The reason I ask about running currents through people is my idea for a
high-acceleration launch system.

It's difficult to accelerate people at great rates because they're so
soft and mushy, so human beings tend to be an acceleration bottleneck
when you're launching manned rockets or whatever.  I mean, in theory
there's nothing stopping you from building a gigantic bullet and
launching it with explosives with 10000g acceleration, except that
any people you put inside will be instantly killed at launch.

The reason people cope so poorly with bullet-like accelerations is that
their bodies are accelerated non-uniformly.  If you imagine yourself
sitting in the pilot seat of the aforementioned bullet ship, then at
launch the back of your seat will come rushing forward at 10000g and
push the back of your skull through your face before your body has
figured out what's happening.

If one could only accelerate every part of the body uniformly, then the
body would not be stretched or squished and our bullet ship crew could
survive ANY amount of acceleration unharmed.  Uniform acceleration
occurs generally in some sort of uniform force field.  For example,
a skydiver in freefall over a heavy planet would *NOT* be harmed by
his acceleration, even if the force of gravity was so great that he
was accelerating like a bullet in a rifle barrel, because the gravity
is pulling on his nose and his toes and every other part of him equally.
(Disregard tidal effects.)

NOW... one way of launching things is to use an electromagnetic railgun.
You mount a conductor on rails, run a current through the conductor
perpendicular to the rails, and then turn on a magnetic field perpendicular
both to the current and to the rails.  (The magnetic field can be created
by the same current that is flowing through the conductor.)  The magnetic
field pushes the current-carrying conductor along the rails, potentially
very very fast.

Acceleration via railgun has the same human-squishing problems as any
other form of acceleration, UNLESS the current which runs through the
conductor (the bullet ship) actually runs through the human crew
(and not just some part of their ship).  If current is passing through
the human beings, then the magnetic field will accelerate *THEM* (as
opposed to accelerating their ship, which then pushes on them) and
you could launch the bullet ship without liquefying the crew.

Of course, the crew do have to survive the current, which must be
fairly high if we want to have a decent railgun, and must be fairly
uniform if we are to solve the squashing problem at all.  (It has to be
fairly uniform in space, not necessarily uniform at all in time.)
-- 
"These things are pure science fiction! And yet they are all true."
                                              -M.O. Rabin
===================================================================
Richard Mason | mason3@husc9.harvard.edu | All opinions are my own.