Gravity in the form of gravitational waves is currently in the minds of many people. We all experience gravity. Jump up - and you will return to the ground. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to be superhuman. But what if you turn off gravity? If one day the force of gravity disappears, space flight will be the lesser of evils. Physicists are confident that this will never happen. But what prevents us from conducting thought experiments? And what do experts think about the sudden disappearance of gravity?
Jay Bucky, a physician and once a NASA astronaut, described how the lack of gravity affects the human body. Our bodies are adapted to the gravitational conditions of the Earth. If we live for a while where gravity is different (for example, aboard a space station), our body changes.
It is no longer a secret for anyone that the cosmonaut's fame is a little overshadowed by the fact of loss of bone mass and muscle strength during his stay in space, and the sense of balance also changes.
The lack of gravity brings with it problems. For reasons not entirely clear, the number of erythrocytes decreases, resulting in a special form of "cosmic anemia". Wounds take longer to heal and the immune system loses strength. Even sleep is disturbed in the absence or weakening of gravity.
This is exactly what happens after a short visit to space. “What would happen if we grew up without gravity? Bucky asks. "What about gravity-dependent systems like muscles, balance, heart, blood vessels?"
There are good reasons to believe that the human body will develop differently.
Bucky cites the example of an experiment in which a cat grew up with one eye permanently covered with a bandage. As a result, she grew up blind in one eye. The circuitry that connects the eye to the brain simply could not evolve because the eye was not processing any visual information. As the saying goes, if it was stolen, it means that it looked bad, so it is not necessary.
Promotional video:
It is possible that other parts of our body will develop in a similar way. If gravity doesn't affect our heart, muscles and bones, our organs will develop differently. It turns out that without gravity we would need to think about the long-term plans for the development of mankind.
Karen Masters, an astronomer at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, is studying the immediate physical effects of the loss of gravity. The first problem is that the Earth spins at a high speed, like a weight on a line that you spin over your head.
"Turning off gravity would be like breaking a line," Masters writes. "Things that are not attached to Earth will fly out into space in a straight line."
Anyone unlucky enough to be outside at this moment will be lost forever. People inside buildings will be more fortunate as buildings are firmly rooted in the ground and can stand even without gravity - at least for a while.
The Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, rivers and lakes will be the first to go into space. And, of course, we will all die. Lack of gravity will also doom our planet. The Earth itself will fall apart and set off to float into space. A similar fate will befall the Sun. Without gravity holding it together, the core would simply explode under pressure.
A similar thing would happen to all the stars in the universe. But since they are far away, it will be years before the light announces their sudden death. Ultimately, there will be no scraps of matter, no stars, no planets - nothing. It will be just a diffuse soup of atoms and molecules drifting around.
This scenario - which, by the way, you'll remember, will never happen - illustrates how closely gravity determines how the universe works. It is one of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe. The other three are also important. Without electromagnetism, strong and weak interactions, atoms would fly apart. But gravity is still the most interesting of them - otherwise we would not be so inspired by thoughts about antigravity.