Creating a vacuum around a body Imagine, for abstraction purposes, a spherical object with a single surface (and surface material). I was wondering the effects of giving that object a steady stream of positive charge (that is, maintain a certain positive charge) on the surface. 
Would this create a vacuum around the material because all the protons in the gases (the bulk of the mass) would be repelled by the surface? On further application, could this be used to reduce the air resistance to near zero for a suspended flying sphere in a gaseous environment? What are some complications that could occur?
 A: The protons in gases are bound in atoms, which are electrically neutral, pretty strongly bound, and thus, to zeroth order, would be pretty unaffected by anything but a very strong electric field (which would require a lot of charge on the surface). 
But atoms are also not point particles; they have a finite charge distribution (an approximately point-like proton surrounded by a diffuse electron cloud). A strong electric field can deform this electron cloud, creating an atomic polarization which would turn the atom into a weak electric dipole. The relationship between the applied electric field and the induced polarization is dictated by the atomic polarizability, which is typically a pretty small number, indicating that it's pretty hard to polarize atoms. However, if the gas is composed of molecules rather than single atoms, its electron clouds may already be asymmetric, creating a much stronger polarization. However, even a molecular polarization wouldn't affect the macroscopic gas dynamics that much, because the interaction energy between the dipole and the applied electric field is quite a bit lower than the average kinetic energy of gas molecules at any reasonable temperatures.
Note that the above isn't true for dust particles in the air (which are much heavier, move much slower, and may even be able to accommodate a small electric charge for short periods). As such, your device will end up effectively being an electrostatic air filter, gradually accumulating more and more dust as it operates.
If you make your electric field strong enough (roughly 30 kV/cm in dry air), then you get to the point where the electric field can strip electrons from atoms/molecules and ionize the air around it. Note that for a positive surface charge, which is what we are assumed to have in the question, your device would attract electrons and repel protons. Anyway, ionization of air creates a bunch of fast-moving charged particles, which quickly slam into other molecules/atoms and create further ionization, which gives a chain reaction, causing a stream of plasma to be created from the air - in other words, a spark. This spark deposits a significant amount of negative charge on the sphere's surface, which quickly drives the produced electric field below the ionization threshold. But if you can replace the charge as fast as it is neutralized by the incoming ion flux, then you can get a device that produces sparks at a frequency that increases with increasing input power. At that point, you basically just have a van de Graaf generator. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator)
In order for your device to produce the effect you want it to, it would have to ionize all of the air around it at once, and attract/repel the charge faster than new air can come in. This is not at all a stable configuration, and sparks would rapidly degrade this arrangement and allow air to leak into the vacuum that you may have instantaneously created. So no, it's not really possible to do what you're asking about on any large scale. That said, if the air you're working with is already at extremely low pressures, and there's a finite amount of it around (i.e. you're not trying to use this thing in open air, but rather in a sealed container), then there actually is a device that creates a vacuum by ionizing atoms. It's called an ion pump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_pump_(physics)), and it works by ionizing the gas in the chamber and collecting the ions on charged plates. Since there is a finite amount of gas that can be absorbed into/adsorbed onto a plate, an ion pump will be quickly overwhelmed by too much gas, so this only works with a small chamber of low-pressure gas (i.e. it gets you from "almost a vacuum" to "even closer to a vacuum").
