• Question: If gravity became stronger, what would happen to the world?

    Asked by Wurly135 to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 6 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by Gully.
    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      If gravity were just a little bit stronger, I think it would be interesting to watch how animals (and us!) would evolve. For example, dinosaurs were so big and strong because the air was different. If gravity were stronger, I think animals would become smaller, and spend more time close to the ground instead of high up. Giraffes would probably go away ( 🙁 ).
      If gravity were much, much stronger – then really bad things would happen, like the Earth would start to slowly implode. It’s mostly lava on the inside, so it would all be squashed down by the heavier crusty surface. I guess it would be like squeezing a tomato really hard 😛

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      It depends on how much stronger but if its a lot then it would be really cool to see how we evolve.

      Humans would likely to evolve to be smaller and probably we would walk on all 4’s to help with movement and that’s if we exist at all, most likely land animals would consist of insects.

      Birds probably wouldn’t exist anymore either because they would require so much more energy to fly.

      Most life would live in the oceans as the gravity change would have little effect on them.

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      It really depends how much stronger!
      If it was just a little bit stronger, then the world would probably cope alright. Eventually trees and plants would probably become shorter, because they would struggle to send their nutrients high up (they use something called capillary action). Gravity is one of the things that sets the limit on the height a tree can grow to, so if gravity’s stronger, trees are shorter!
      But if it was quite a lot stronger it would be pretty catastrophic for life! Creatures would struggle to pump blood round their bodies. The Sun and stars might even burn their fuel faster and have shorter lives.
      And if it was much much much stronger, the Sun, Earth and even you, might turn into a black hole!

    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      The others have covered most of it pretty well 🙂
      I’d add that a lot of skyscrapers and bridges are designed to hold a certain weight. So eventually we’d start seeing a lot of tall buildings and bridges collapsing. We’d see a change in how things are designed to accommodate for the gravity.

      Cool Question,

      Ryan

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