Your Mass in Gold

by Boghos L. Artinian

If you were paid your weight in gold to go to the Moon, and you were weighed once you got there, what type of scale would you take with you?

If you took a spring-balance scale, your weight would be one-sixth of your weight on Earth. If you took an asymmetrical beam balance, your weight on the Moon would be the same as on Earth or as on any other planet, because a beam balance actually measures your mass rather than your weight. Yes, definitely take a beam-balance scale!

Any fluctuation in Earth’s gravitational force could not have been detected by the more than five-thousand year old beam balances before Huygens invented the spring balance in 1675. Since a spring balance actually measures gravitational pull, an object would vary in weight on different planets, and any measurable change in Earth’s gravity after 1675 would have been noticed.

We might explain the Herculean feats of the Ancients, the stories of giants that existed in early times, and the real existence of dinosaurs 65 million years ago if we postulate that Earth’s gravitational pull has actually varied over the eons. The apparent ease with which ancients built monuments such as the pyramids and many stone structures using only rudimentary technology still amazes us, but it need not, if gravity were much less at the time than it is today.

Now that we know that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, have you ever wondered why they shrank to their present bird size and could not maintain their former sizes? Can you imagine animals the size and weight of dinosaurs running freely or pterosaurs weighing 250 kilograms flying in the present gravitational pull of Earth? I am sure such a thing can be proven impossible when geneticists succeed in reconstructing the genomes of dinosaurs from their blood preserved in amber, as in the film Jurassic Park.

In outer space, mankind will need a few million years to adapt by natural selection to zero gravity. Moreover, mankind will be living as a unit making up a super-organism in space. Ultimately, human beings will be crawling in the innards of the super-organism as boneless creatures, much like octopuses. This metamorphosis could take place in only a few hundred years if geneticists succeed in changing our genome faster, by genetic engineering. And many scientists already suspect that octopuses may be space aliens!

Because mankind’s adaptation to zero gravity will be slow, space colonies will have to generate artificial gravity by centrifugal force for many centuries. Even plants will need centuries to adapt to zero gravity and will also need artificial gravity for a long time. However, once totally free of dependence on gravity for locomotion, humans will float in the innards of a super-organism like blood cells in our bodies, or they may be fixed, like cells in our organs. These beings will have either a fixed age — like skin cells, blood cells and lymphocytes — or live as long as the lifetime of the super-organism itself, like our brain and muscle cells.

Personally, I’m happy here on Earth. I would rather stay stuck to the ground by gravity and be able to go up or down, have day and night, fall and rise, swim and dive, and not have to wish for the assistance of gravity when nature calls.