===The Secret of Antigravity===

If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the
floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window
or other high and towering place, it will land on its feet.

But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread,
butter-side up to a cat's back and toss them both out the
window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or will the butter
splat on the ground?

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Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment
yourself you should be able to deduce the obvious result.
The laws of butterology demand that the butter must hit the
ground, and the equally strict laws of feline aerodynamics
demand that the cat can not smash its furry back. If the
combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to
resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.

That's right you clever mortal (well, as clever as a mortal
can get), you have discovered the secret of antigravity! A
buttered cat will, when released, quickly move to a height
where the forces of cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in
equilibrium. This equilibrium point can be modified by
scraping off some of the butter, providing lift, or removing
some of the cat's limbs, allowing descent.

Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use
this principle to drive their ships while within a planetary
system. The loud humming heard by most sighters of UFOs is,
in fact, the purring of several hundred tabbies.

The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to
eat the bread off their backs they will instantly plummet.
Of course the cats will land on their feet, but this usually
doesn't do them much good, since right after they make their
graceful landing several tons of red-hot starship and pissed
off aliens crash on top of them.

And now a few words on solving the problem of creating a
ship using the aforementioned anti-gravity device.

One could power a ship by means of cats held in suspended
animation (say, about -190 degrees Celsius) with buttered
bread strapped to their backs, thus avoiding the possibility
of collisions due to tempermental felines. More importantly,
how do you steer, once the cats are all held in stasis?

I offer a modest proposal:

We all know that wearing a white shirt at an Italian
restaurant is a guaranteed way to take a trip to the
laudromat. Plaster the outside of your ship with white
shirts. Place four nozzles symmetrically around the ship,
which is, of course, saucer shaped. Fire tomato sauce out
in proportion to the directions you want to go. The ship,
drawn by the shirts, will automatically follow the sauce.
If you use t-shirts, you won't go as fast as you would by
using, say, expensive dress shirts. This does not work as
well in deep gravity wells, since the tomato sauce (now
falling down a black hole, perhaps) will drag the ship with
it, despite the counter force of the anti-gravity cat/butter
machine. Your only hope at that point is to jettison
enormous quantities of Tide. This will create the
well-known Gravitational Tidal Force.


-------------the SpaceCow------------------------------
=== I doubt, therefore I might be. ===