A Life Without Gravity

Alexander Rivera

Do you ever think what could happen if we woke up one day and were no gravity? Before start, we must understand what gravity is. Gravity is an attractive force between any two atoms. The more matter, the more gravity. Things that have a lot of matter such as planets and moons and stars pull more strongly. Mass is how we measure the amount of matter in something. The more massive something is, the more of a gravitational pull it exerts. The perfect example for this is when we walk on the surface of the Earth, it pulls on us, and we pull back. But since the Earth is so much more massive than we are, the pull from us is not strong enough to move the Earth, while the pull from the Earth can make us fall flat on our faces. In addition to depending on the amount of mass, gravity also depends on how far you are from something. This is why we are stuck to the surface of the Earth instead of being pulled off into the Sun, which has many more times the gravity of the Earth.

Knowing the definition of gravity, we may ask what if doesn’t exist? A lot of people when first think if there were no gravity, the first thing in their minds is that everything including us is going to float. That’s true but the thing is that imagine cars, humans, animals, furniture and many others floating, is going to be a mess. But that’s not all, two essentially things in our life are going to disappear: water and air. The air depends of our atmosphere, and the atmosphere depends of gravity, what means that in a life without gravity there was no atmosphere. The air will escape into the space leaving us without oxygen. Like the air, the water of the earth is going to be boiling in the space. We were living in a world without air to breath and no water to hydrate. Without gravity no one can live. If it were possible to adapt ourselves to an environment without gravity it is going to be a boring one. We cannot exercise ourselves, there were no sports, no nothing. Another thing is that we are going to be skinniest. Our muscles and bones will deteriorate, they are going to be useless.

Never can we ask a life without gravity because it can’t be possible and can be dangerous for each living thing on the planet. So when you think that this constant (g= 9.81m/s^2) bothers you because makes you slower and lazy, and sometimes limits you to do such things, think that this constant is essentially in our lives. We cannot live without it, and we can't afford to have it change. Gravity is a very important constant in physics, but it is an essentially true constant of our lives that will be with us for our rest of our lives. No better life than a life with gravity.