Ramps get more useful in higher gravity.

You’re probably wondering what kind of nonsense I’m going on about now, aren’t you? “McCoy,” you’re saying, “that diet your wife has you on has driven you straight around the bend, hasn’t it?”

Well, it hasn’t. At least not mostly. Hardly any, really.

Anyhow, ramps at different gravity levels: generally speaking, they’re much more useful at the higher ones. If you’re in zero g, just floating around, a ramp is going to be pretty pointless. As gravity gets higher, though, more and more solutions for bridging vertical distances (or, as I prefer to call it, going up and down) become infeasible.

Elevators, for instance, become useless really fast. Materials technology just isn’t able yet to create a material that can maintain the tensile strength necessary for lifts, elevators, etc. Same thing for pulleys and lifts. Building a high gravity ramp, though, doesn’t require expensive, crazy space materials—it requires dirt. Just dirt. Good old fashioned, boring dirt. Just start piling it up, and there you go.

As far as I know, there’s only one book where a ramp saves the day, and that’s Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement. It takes place on this weird planet with enormous gravity that actually changes between the poles and the equator. It’s weird, but the math works out. Anyhow, these little centipede aliens who live there are hired to retrieve a human probe near one pole, where the gravity is highest, and they end up using a ramp to retrieve the probe’s computer at the end. My oldest son found it for me, back in the kids’ rocket-ship-loving days. Not much of a reader, but I liked that book well enough.

“McCoy,” you ask, “that’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t actually answer my question. Are you thinking about heavy gravity because the diet’s working and you’ve lost weight? Or have you been cheating on the diet and actually gaining weight?”

Well, let’s just say Maggie wasn’t happy when she found me taking apart our scale to try and gimmick it to read my weight lower than it is.

I never really watched much science fiction as a kid, but my boys loved it. Dragged me to all those Star Wars movies, always had Star Trek and all those other space shows on the TV. I can’t say as I’m a huge fan now, but I can definitely see the appeal. (Except for robots. We’ve already lost enough jobs to them; manufacturing lines hardly even need people anymore.)

Something always bothered me about a lot of those movies, though, and I only recently figured out what.

In Star Wars, when they want to travel between ships they climb the ramp into a shuttle, raise the ramp, fly over, lower the ramp. When they’re delivering cargo, same thing. It makes sense.

In Star Trek, though, they have teleporters, and they use them all the time. I don’t know if that stuff is possible, but it just nagged at me until I realized: they’re basically like lifts.

When you’re loading or unloading something, a ramp is almost always going to be cheaper, easier, and faster. Not always by much, but it will be. Less upkeep, too. I don’t know how much power teleporters use, but I feel like it can’t be cheap to run one. Plus, the teleporters come out in those nice, carpeted rooms. They can’t possibly load all their stuff from there. There’d be marks all over the carpet.

Since they have imitation gravity on those things, why don’t they just lower the gravity there and push them up ramps like they’re full of feathers? Heck, you’ll be saving on power this way.

I know I’m being nitpicky here, but it kinda feels like the writers on the show assumed that technology would get rid of the need for logistics. You’re always going to need to load and unload things, no matter how many years in the future you are and, if you ask me, teleporters aren’t going to replace ramps anytime soon.