What Happens If Gravity Suddenly Stops Working? | Unveiled

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What Would Happen if Gravity Suddenly Stopped Working?</h4>

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s gravity - right? One of the four fundamental forces of nature, it’s crucial in our understanding of the wider universe. But, on a more personal level, it’s also why none of us has yet just up and floated away into space. The gravity of Earth keeps us tethered to this planet… but what if that were to change?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what would happen if gravity suddenly stopped working?

Picture the scene. You’re going about your daily business, perhaps walking through a park or waiting at a red light somewhere, and out of nowhere… you feel funny. Really funny. Like butterflies in your stomach, but way worse. Incredibly, you find yourself losing balance, but you haven’t fallen over exactly… instead, your feet are no longer on the ground. It’s like you’ve suddenly been thrown out of an airplane, you’re weightless; like the ties that had been keeping you down have been cut loose. In a rising panic, you glance around… and everyone else you can see is experiencing the exact same thing. It can’t be, but it is - gravity has been switched off. So what happens now?

As far as doomsday scenarios go, this one starts off seeming like it could actually be quite fun. Turning totally weightless during your daily commute, wouldn’t that just be hilarious? Well, actually, laugh if you like… but it would almost certainly kill you, and quickly. We take gravity for granted but without it we’d all be gonners, and here’s why. Gravity keeps everything together on Earth. Not just you, or people, or animals. Everything. Water, air, the atmosphere… it’s all exactly as it is thanks to gravity. Take gravity away, then, and it all instantly falls apart.

First, unless you were for some reason strapped to the Earth at the time of the big switch off, you wouldn’t actually have much time to even register what was happening. That first instance of sudden floating would quickly turn into a rapid ascension into the sky. The Earth itself is still rotating, but you are no longer attached to it… so you rush upwards in a straight line. In fact, it might even feel more like the Earth were falling away from you rather than you were flying away from it. Regardless, very quickly you will have left Earth completely. If you somehow managed to remain conscious, you might even briefly get to glimpse from afar the planet you once called home continuing along in its orbit around the sun. After that, you (and everyone else) are lost in space. To your left, right, above and below you, it’s endless corpses of people and animals that until moments ago had been safely held on the ground. And, no longer does it seem like much fun, at all.

In truth, though, you actually wouldn’t be conscious to really witness that. If gravity were to stop then it also means an instant end to air pressure, and that would rip through your body, devastating its structural integrity in a variety of ways. The makeup of your lungs, your brain, your once steadily beating heart; the condition of your blood and saliva, your muscles and your bones… all would instantly fail without gravity. You would certainly pass out within seconds, and after that your body would at once collapse in on itself and tear itself apart. And that graveyard in the sky gets even more grotesque, as a result.

The air itself can’t even avoid the carnage. In amongst the loss of pressure, the very particles of the air would also be breaking apart and fast drifting away from Earth. It would be the same for all liquids… they would rise as if to the heavens, too, disintegrating as they went. Rivers, lakes and even oceans, they’re all kept in place by gravity. Take that away, and they also all disappear. If you were somehow watching Earth from afar while all of this was happening, it would be as though the planet were shedding its skin; like our world were melting away into the abyss. Everything that wasn’t tied to the ground in some other way would be very quickly lost.

And then the ground itself would start to give. The foundations of buildings fail, bridges collapse, even centuries’ old structures could never stand a chance. All loose rocks and boulders will have already careened off into space, but soon there’d be rocks breaking out of the ground and seabed. First massive chunks, and then they’d disintegrate too, into smaller and smaller pieces. Volcanoes would erupt, but not via any kind of traditional mechanism. Instead, the molten rock would crash out into nothingness, just like everything else. Of course, there would be earthquakes, as well, but these wouldn’t merely be temporary tremors… they’d be the last signs and sounds of a planet that is literally tearing itself apart, outside to in. Ultimately, even the mantle and the core would succumb; the very innards of our planet, the last to finally depart.

In terms of timeframe, it’s not as though we have anything in the real world to even remotely compare this to. It could then be that it would all happen in an instant, like a giant explosion (or implosion) that’s dramatic enough to render everything lost in milliseconds. On the other hand, it’s perhaps more likely that there would be at least a little time between the beginning of the end, and the end of the end. In any case, if you were to slow it down to a speed slow enough to follow, then it would be all loose things that would be first to go; followed by anything embedded in the planet; followed by the planet itself. And all of those components would find themselves whittled down and down, to their most fundamental parts.

What happens next depends on how far and wide the loss of gravity is. If it’s only contained to Earth, then all of the above is the extent of the damage. If it’s all across the solar system, then a similar scenario would be playing out on all the other planets, with all the millions of asteroids, and with the sun at the center, as well. The gasses that make up Jupiter and Saturn would get siphoned away in the chaos; the asteroid belt would disband with nothing left to keep it in place; the farthest flung planets would either escape intact and carve out a new existence as rogue planets, or else they would also break up forever. If there were no gravity to provide integrity to the sun, then all of its energy gets lashed out across the surrounding region, too, bathing the entire mess in one last wash of heat and light. Zoom even further out, and imagine gravity stopping across the entire universe… and all of that would be happening in every star system out there, all while the galaxies that once held them together are inevitably disbanding to ruin, in the background.

Thankfully, this is one apocalypse that we can say with confidence actually won’t be happening anytime soon, in real life. Gravity ranks as one of the four fundamental forces for a reason. It’s always there, no matter what, whenever a massive enough object (like the Earth) is present. It isn’t something that can just disappear. 

Nevertheless, this is a thought scenario to really highlight the incredible and perfect balance that governs our world, universe, and reality. Because clearly without it, we’d be toast. The humble human being would find itself ruthlessly dismantled, all while shooting off of this world, cast off into the darkness of space. If you were to somehow retain a sense of self, then you’d see carnage all around you; a floating massacre of the life you’d just left behind. And, even if you were to somehow know what was going to happen before it did… and, as such, you decided to strap yourself to something massive like a cliff face to watch it all unfold… then your end-of-the-world experience still wouldn’t last for long. The oxygen would quickly be sucked out of the atmosphere around you; the water would swiftly be channeled out of your body; it would be as though all of your most delicate parts - your eyes, teeth, tongue, fingernails - would be struggling to detach themselves from you. And then, even after all of that, the rock you’d tied yourself to would eventually crack and crumble, anyway.

It’s a wholly hypothetical scenario, yes, but there really isn’t an upside or an escape route to any of it. And that’s what would happen if gravity suddenly stopped working.