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What if our Earth had no gravity?

News Nation Bureau | Edited By : Subhayan Chakraborty | Updated on: 06 Aug 2018, 10:06:46 AM
What if our Earth had no gravity?  (Representational Image)

New Delhi:

You know why people struggle to climb up the hill? Why people have a bad fall? It is all because of gravity as it is the only thing that keeps you grounded to our planet, stopping you from floating away from it. What if one day, all the natural gravitational mechanism stopped working and the whole world witnessed zero gravity? How would your body work? Would you fly out of the planet? What would happen to our beloved planet?

While flying may sound fun and build a lot of excitement, but there would be some serious consequences if lost gravitational hold on our bodies. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of physics, and it’s also the weakest. However, it is strong enough to hold together entire solar systems and galaxies. If one day this force came to an end, would it kill you?

As Albert Einstein noted out in his Theory of Relativity, gravity is not a singular force fulling things down to the Earth. It’s an attraction that happens between any two objects that have mass. The Earth is pulling you towards its center, the moon pulls out oceans back and forth, and while all this is happening, the Sun is holding the Earth and the rest of the planets in our solar system in place.

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Every second you are unconsciously working against the effects of Earth’s gravity. The human body is completely adapted to work against the gravitational pull as it continuously attract you towards the centre. But without it, you would start losing your bones. Yes, that’s right! Away from the Earth’s gravity, astronauts lose at least 14 per cent of their bone strength during a 6-month stay on a space station. The exact thing would happen to your beloved muscles.

And if your biceps are not important for you, then think about your heart, the most important part of your body. It pumps around 7,200 litre of blood and to send it to your brain, it has to push it vertically against the pull of gravity.

Without gravity, the human body won’t get blood to their legs and stomach as the heart would supply blood only to the brain and chest.

At least for a while, until your body could adjust to a new environment. You would lose your sense of balance too. Circulation of your red blood cells would drop and this means your body would take longer to heal and your immune system would weaken. But none of this would kill you, however the lack of air to breathe might.  

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Our planet is tightly knit only due to gravity. And without it, the atmosphere would be the first thing to float into space followed by oceans, seas, rivers and you. Unless you were lucky enough to be inside a building that was firmly rooted to the ground, you would take off for a lifetime interstellar vacation and the earth would get torn up into chunks and go for a trip to space.

And without any gravity in the Universe, the exact same thing would happen to the largest star, the Sun, and to all its mini compatriots, the planets and black holes. The entire Universe would become a bowl of soup with molecules and atoms in it. And that would be THE END for the world!

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First Published : 06 Aug 2018, 10:06:20 AM

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