• Question: What would happen if all of the electricity in the world dissapered for ever

    Asked by anon-267529 on 12 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 12 Nov 2020:

      It would not be great for civilisation if we stopped making electricity. We would have to use simpler technology for everything, and farming would be a lot harder. Civilisation would survive, but it would be hard to support the world’s population as it is now.

      If all electrical forces disappeared, the Earth would collapse into a very dense blob because it relies on electrical forces around atoms to balance gravity – some stars end up like this, turning into white dwarfs, neutron stars or even black holes.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 13 Nov 2020:

      I don’t think that our current society would cope very well as we rely on electricity all the time! But there were times before we had electricity so I think we would be fine.
      .
      If the electrostatic forces all disappeared then we would be in big trouble. Atoms would no longer be held together so I would expect everything to fly apart. Because chemical bonds rely on electrostatics then everything would probably just kinda dissolve. But on a subatomic level, the lack of electrostatic force would mean that the nuclear forces might dominate so everything could get compressed. It would depend on whether those forces were preserved or not!

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