• Question: Do you think the gravatational force on earth will ever end, and if so will we float through the ozone layer or die

    Asked by buddingscientist to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by lol4eva.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      For gravity to be just ‘turned off’ would require everything we know about the universe to change, so it’s unlikely.

      Hypothetically, if we turned gravity off, we wouldn’t necessarily start floating up, we would just keep moving in the same direction we were going. So eventually we would drift out into space and die, but more importantly so would all the air, so it would actually happen much faster!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      There is no physical way for that to happen. The mass of the Earth is what makes its gravity, so you’d have to get rid of that to get rid of the gravity. And that’s just not possible.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      To have gravity, you need mass. If you have something with a lot of mass, you must have gravity. The Earth has a lot of mass, and the’re no way we know of to get rid of it instantly, so we will always have gravity and we won’t float away,

      I suppose we could mine out the inside of the earth so there’s only a thin shell, but that’d make the magnetic field go away, and then we’d die from radiation poisoning anyway!

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