What would happen if gravity...

[Hi-Val]

What would happen if gravity went away for one second each day, here on Earth? Ignoring the obvious cosmic differences and physical stuff, how would life react?

I'm reading "A Smack On The Side Of The Head", which is a book MaRo suggested in last week's column. It's excellent, btw.

So how would we adapt? Would 1 second of zero-G make a difference daily?

[Roxas]

Would it be the same second each day or a random one? I'll assume it's random:

It could potentially really suck to be driving at high speed when the zero-G hits. Hell, you could really hurt yourself if you were just taking a normal step (though if this happened daily, people would probably have developed reflexes to deal with this).

Buildings would all probably be built quite differently, because as they are now, many would probably crumble in this sort of environment.

Of course, I think those would be minor concerns compared to, say, the atmosphere dissipating, the Earth moving farther way from the sun, and most likely the Earth exploding. 

[Jacob Orlove]

Earth is actually moving really really fast. I'm pretty sure everyone would get smashed into walls/flung into the air. It wouldn't be good.

And I'm not up on my particle physics, but wouldn't this do really bad things there?

[Hi-Val]

From Harlequin:

I think the real problem with going to "no" gravity is that the earth is spinning.  The surface of the earth is moving actually fairly fast at the equator ~ 340mph.  So the effect of no gravity would actually feel like negative gravity (things would fall up).  So any reasonably dense object that was no "tied down" would lift about 6in to a foot ... which is a fraction of how far they would fall from a dead stop in 1 second.

Then gravity would return, and everything would thump back down.  Now, you might think .. we'll then we would all just drink outa sippy cups.  Wrong.  It might be cute the first time, but now we're adding huge amounts of extra strain on the techtonic plates.  At the equator (where the effects would be the greatest) the world is mostly water - that means - Tsunamis.  Tsunamis would basically wipe out everything within 10 miles of the cost across the world.  I mean, were talking about picking up the pasific ocean (and all the bedrock under it) 6 inches then dropping it!!

His/her comment about sippy cups is really interesting. How would we design buildings? Playground equipment? Would there be new sports designed for this one second? What if it was random? What if it were predicatable? How would you make money from it?

[Anusien]

So we don't know what causes gravity, other than massive objects attracting each other.
Gravity is kind of a weak force compared to electric attraction, magnetism and some others.  Now, it is however one of the four forces holding atoms together.  If this is a universal problem, I think the strain on an atomic level destroys everything.  But if it's on a planetary level, I think you can build some giant device at the center of the Earth to simulate the force of gravity based on magnetic attraction during that one second.  Otherwise, I don't see how things like planes, cars, rollercoasters and similar things work.

[LotusHead]

If gravity disappeared for 1 second, we would all feel weightless for 1 second.

However, Inertia would still keep us all kinda where we are at.

Cars on the road need gravity/friction to speed up or slow down, brakes would be useless during that one second.

[Limbo]

I'd assume that cars would be designed kinda rollercoastery (did I just invent a new word?).

What will realy boggle your mind is that the moon and the sun would actually influence our movement

[Matt]

Insane orgasms!

[Anusien]

     There would no practical pointy objects made by man.

     Also, all large buildings on the ground would not exist,
unless, someone rigged them to the ground perfectly with
duct tape...etc, or tied them to springs and put a trampoline
underneath them.

     However, this method would be extremely impractical,
because while the people were building a building,
everything would abitrarily jump up once a day,
and then they'd have to start over.
This would also apply to the taping of the building...etc,
even if mankind got that far.

     You might say, "Gee, everyone would live in Hobbit holes!"
Wrong! You'd bump your head on the ceiling at least once a day,
and this doesn't even consider the possibility of small infants.

     This brings forth another point: Infant mortality.
This figure would shoot through the roof.
Once a day, parents would have to play a mandatory game of
catch the baby. Sure, they could hold on to the baby 24-7,
but that baby has to learn to walk sooner or later,
and then the trauma begins!

     Also, bouncy balls would be banned from production,
and possibly become a chemical weapon level threat.

     Oh, and all men would wear cups.
     All the time.

[Klep]

Everything would die.

[Methuselahn]

Personally, I would try to time it so that I could jump as high as possible.  And then try and beat that record the next day.

[Liam-K]

Personally, I would try to time it so that I could jump as high as possible.  And then try and beat that record the next day.

After you got out of the hospitol you mean?  You'd probably get far enough up to break a leg on the way back down in one second if you timed it right,

[Methuselahn]

I would obv. be landing into a cush pile of bean bag chairs.  OBV.

[freakish777]

@JOrlove, I don't think anything bad would happen on the particle level.  The gravitational force at that level is far overpowered by the strong and weak nuclear forces (holding protons and electrons together).  Certainly one less force would do something, just it might be neglible.

@Roxas's comments.  Spot on.  We don't have to worry about being alive if 1 in every 86400 seconds (roughly, it'd actually be more than this as a day is longer than 24 hours, hence leap-year) is "gravity free."

Most estimates have us (the earth) moving at 29.78ish kilometers a second through space (in an elipitical orbit).  Assuming the elipse of our orbit is close to circular, each day we'd travel something like 0.000003 km away from the sun (30 km one side of a right triangle, 150,000,000 the other side).  So although we'd be "travelling" deeper into space each day it's a small small number that would take a long time for the effect to happen.

The escape velocity suddenly changing for even a second each day is much more interesting, as we'd end up with a different atmospheric composition and pressure. 

The really really interesting thing would be how things form in a universe where this "rule" is/was always in effect.  At the very least it would take planets/stars/etc much longer to form, at the most, it might make them impossible to form.

If this "rule" suddenly came into place though, I'd imagine a lot of equipment would get destroyed after the first time it happened and a lot of people would die.

[Hi-Val]

Okay, new thought process for this. Think of the world not rotating and being the center of the universe. Go back to medieval times. Let's take talk of the physics out of it. So buildings wouldn't cascade down because of the forces, the world wouldn't drift away from the sun, we wouldn't have gravitational effects from the sun. What SOCIAL or TECHNOLOGICAL things would come out to take advantage of this free second?

I feel like if it were a regular event day-to-day, there would certainly be sports invented exactly like it. There may be sporting games that particularly avoid that time of day as well.

I think we'd have cranes that would use the one second of free lift to move things great distances in the air. Maybe even a space tether that would try to make use of that one second to pull something up with little work.

[oneofchaos]

Well if assuming the world is the center of the universe, and physics don't exist...

I'd imagine it would be quite painful for the anatomy of many vertebrates.  I can see terrible bone conditions, like an astronaut returning from a long space journey.  Some groups would profit from the loss of gravity.  Like somebody said earlier, it would suck to be driving.