Don't Buy an Anti-Gravity Belt?

First, though, watch this:

What makes all that happen is gravity.

Say you are standing outside in your yard. You flip on the anti-gravity belt. You might not want to have a large building immediately to the west of you, for you'd be smashed into the side of it at several hundred miles an hour. Which is going to hurt.

You might clear the building away if you turned on the belt between local apparent noon and midnight. Because the Earth would be moving away from you in its orbit about the Sun at just over 67,000 MPH. That's 18.5 miles per second.

In the time it'll take you to say "oh, shit" and turn off the belt, you'll be 90,000' up. At that altitude, the air pressure is 0.2psi, which, as far as a normally-clothed human is concerned, you might as well be in space. The air temperature is a balmy -90F. Your blood will boil, you'll be flash frozen and if that doesn't kill you, the hypoxia will.

But maybe it wouldn't happen quickly. For while Earth's gravity would cease to act on your body, you would still be moving at the same direction and speed that you were just before you turned on the belt, because you'd still have mass. In essence, for a time, you'd be flying in formation with the Earth.

The speed and direction of your motion would be linear, because you'd have few external forces working on you (maybe air drag and impacts with trees, buildings and terrain). The Earth's speed about the Sun may be more or less constant, but its direction isn't, as it's in orbit. So it would be Earth's centripetal acceleration around the Sun which would be the number that you'd need to know in order to decide whether or not to either try the anti-G belt yourself or give it to your brother-in-law to test after he gives you his beer to hold for him.

Now I'm getting over my head with the maths. The formulas are here, but you have to substitute the length of the year (365.25 days) and the radius of Earth's orbit (93,000,000 miles) to make it work.

Tally ho!

One year = 31,557,600 seconds. 2π Rad/31,557,600 = .0000001991 radians/sec. Factor in the radius of Earth's orbit to come up with the centripedal acceleration and the number is, well, almost negligible. I get a number that works out to 0.0195 feet per second. Which is an acceleration of a quarter of an inch per second. It might be completely wiped out by aerodynamic drag, but that calculation apparently involves lots of calculus, which is a form of math that I haven't touched in a very long time.

I'd still recommend giving the anti-grav belt to your brother-in-law to try out.