If you lived on the moon, would it be easier to adapt to living with the moon’s gravity, or to create an artificial environment with the gravity of earth? — MK, Orlando, FL
Building an environment that made you feel what appeared to be the earth’s gravity would be a substantial undertaking. The only way to simulate gravity is through acceleration and the only way to make a person experience acceleration continuously is to swing them around in a circle. So this environment will have to swing its occupants around in a circle. However, we are extremely sensitive to changes in orientation, so that we can tell the difference between true gravity and the experience of being swung around in a small circle. To avoid the dizzying feeling of having our orientations changed rapidly, the turning environment would have to be extremely large. It would have to be a huge rotating wheel, looking like a heavily banked circular racetrack that spun at a steady pace and completed something like one full turn per minute. The occupants would have to live on the long, thin surface of this turning racetrack. Building such a device on earth wouldn’t be easy. Building it on the moon would be much harder. I wouldn’t plan on trying to simulate the earth’s gravity on the moon. So I vote for just putting up with the moon’s weaker gravity.