Hey there and welcome to Life Noggin.
Triangle Bobert snuck into my lab and hit the big red button on the half gravity machine
I told him not to go next to.
I probably should have made the button a little smaller.
That was my fault.
I was able to reverse everything, but it did have me thinking, what if this happened to
your world.
What if earth only had half its gravity?
Well first off, just what is gravity?
In general, we can define gravity as an attractive force that pulls two bodies together.
It’s what keeps all of the planets in orbit around the sun and what keeps you from floating
off into space.
And anything with mass has gravity.
The more massive something is, the greater its gravitational pull.
So a big, massive planet like the Earth is going to pull you toward it a lot more than
one of my small pizza bagels will.
lemme just in here really quick.
Delicious.
Distance also matters with gravity.
The closer you are to something, the more gravity is going to draw you toward it, and
the farther away you are, the weaker the gravitational force will be.
Not only that, but gravity isn’t even the same everywhere on Earth.
According to NASA and data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, gravity is
ever so slightly stronger over places on Earth with higher concentrations of mass.
And these concentrations can even change over time.
But what would happen if the gravity here on Earth was suddenly cut in half?
It’s pretty hard to tell /exactly/ what would happen, especially since whatever would
cause this sudden change would likely have other effects, but if we look at the universe
around us, we can get a good idea of what /might/ happen.
To start off, you’d probably lose a bunch of weight.
That’s because our weight isn’t actually a constant.
It changes depending on where we are in the universe since it’s determined by how much
gravity is acting upon us.
For instance, if you weigh 100 Newtons on Earth, then you’d only weigh about 17 Newtons
on the moon.
That’s because up there, you'd only experience about a sixth of the gravity you normally
do on Earth.
So with half gravity, it makes sense that you’d only probably weight about half as
much.
That, if you survived, and everything on Earth seemed to carry on about the same but just
with half gravity, there would likely be health consequences.
That’s because your body is always working /against/ gravity.
Your muscles have to work against gravity even when you’re relatively still, your
bones have to support your weight, which is affected by gravity, and even your heart has
to work against gravity to pump your blood throughout your body.
So at half gravity, and half your weight, your heart would likely become weaker, your
muscles might become smaller, and you could even lose bone mass.
These are issues that astronauts face when experiencing weightlessness, so with half
your weight, it stands to reason that similar things would happen but to a lesser extent.
But that’s if everything carried on about the same, just with half gravity.
If we actually suddenly lost half of the gravity on Earth, other things would probably change
as a result.
One of those things would be escape velocity.
Since the Earth would have less gravity, how fast you would need to go to escape Earth,
otherwise known as escape velocity, would be less.
This means that you wouldn't need to go as fast to get off this planet, which might be
a good idea if all this crazy gravity stuff actually happened.
Two tickets to Mars please!
I would like to chill with the aliens.
Let us know in the comment section below what we should talk next!
Curious to know what it would take for the earth to explode?
Check out this video.
it only carved out a chunk of Earth a few kilometers deep.
Asteroids that are bigger, denser, or made of different materials could have the ability
to hit us with enough power to shatter our planet.
As always, my name is Blocko, this has been Life Noggin, don't forget to keep on thinking!