Would we struggle in daily life if gravity weakened?

Question: Would we struggle in daily life if gravity weakened?
- Keywords:
  gravity
Asked by Wurly135 to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 6 Nov 2017.
- Ry Cutter answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  Depends by how much, weaker gravity would mean we’d get weaker. But, it also means heavy things get lighter.
  If it got too weak though we’d have a hard time getting anything done because everything would start flying of in the wind.
  So, if it’s not much it weaker it’d make life a little easier. But too weak and everything is a mess!
  
  Cool Question,
  
  Ryan
- Maggie Lieu answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  If gravity weakened… hmm i guess it depends on how much.
  
  If alot, then in the long term yes. Our heart would have more trouble pumping blood around our body, our brains will be deprived of oxygen, our bones and muscles will start to deteriorate.
  
  But earths gravity isn’t constant. The Earth isn’t a sphere, it bulges out near the equator and more squished at the poles. Over time this effect is growing which means at the equator the gravity is slowly weakening
- Daniel Williams answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  I guess it depends how much gravity is getting weaker by, and whether it ever gets stronger again.
  
  Lots of things would become easier: things would become less heavy, so you’d need to be less strong to lift things up, and if you fell over you’d probably hurt yourself less. Of course, because moving heavy things around is what keeps your body strong, you’d probably just end up becoming weaker over time. If gravity never got stronger again that would probably be okay though.
  
  Other things would get worse though, because they rely on being heavy to work. Fast cars for example rely on their weight to make sure that they stay on the road as they go around bends, and so they’d be less stable if they became lighter, but because they’d still have the same mass, they wouldn’t have the advantage of becoming any faster.
  
  Lots of non-everyday things would get easier though, and the most obvious one of these to me (as someone who thinks about space a lot) is launching rockets. The strength of the Earth’s gravity means that we need to burn a lot of expensive fuel to get into space; reducing its strength means we could get away with rockets which travel more slowly, and consequently need less fuel. That would mean getting to space was cheaper, and therefor easier.
- Scott Melville answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  Haha, let me also start my answer with ‘it depends how much’ 😛
  It’s a nice thought, that if we all weighed less then we could probably jump higher and run faster, making life easier (and more fun!).
  But problems start to happen pretty quickly – unless the change is slow enough for evolution to keep up. All of the lovely air that we enjoy breathing is only held to the ground by gravity – if the gravity got just a little bit weaker, it would make the air ‘thinner’. Ever been to the top of a tall mountain and felt quite dizzy? We’d all feel like that, all the time – because our bodies have grown to need a certain amount of oxygen in order to move around with a certain weight.
  If the change was slow enough, I reckon we’d actually cope with the thinner air by growing weaker bodies, so in the end how high we jump and how fast we run probably won’t change very much. For example, the oxygen content was much different when the dinosaurs were around (not related to gravity), and this is one of the reasons they could grow to be so big and fearsome!
- Hannah Middleton answered on 7 Nov 2017:
  
  I agree, it does depend by how much! The weaker it gets, the bigger the effect on our lives and the world. If gravity suddenly got a lot weaker, the Earth and other planets might even escape from their orbits around the Sun and become a lonely planet without a star, which would probably be the end of life on Earth!

Question: Would we struggle in daily life if gravity weakened?

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