Dr Bilham says that the Indian government has even forbidden him to use a gravity meter in the region (such a meter measures whether a point is moving away from the centre of the earth, and therefore indicates a build up of strain that might be released as an earthquake).

ECONOMIST: Earthquakes in India

The saucer section would be a 0.3-mile-diameter (536-meter-diameter) rotating, magnetically suspended gravity wheel that would create 1G of gravity.

MSN: Spaceship Enterprise in 20 years? Beam me up!