• Question: How much more gravity would it take for everyone to be squished (die)?

    Asked by Hanjo to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Not much. Our bodies have evolved to survive in our exact gravity field. In fact even if you went just to the bottom of the ocean you would die without a protective pressure suit.

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      As Lidunka has said, it doesn’t take much extra gravity to start causing us problems!

      In fact, our bodies would start running into trouble long before we even got squashed. NASA’s Ames Research Centre say that if you put a person in a gravity field four times the strength of the Earth’s, their heart wouldn’t be able to pump blood all the way around their body to their brain. Someone could survive in four times Earth gravity for a short while, but not for very long!

      As far as being squished goes, though, even if you were standing on the surface of a planet with much higher gravity, you wouldn’t be immediately squished. Gravity just pulls you downwards, unlike the pressure in the deep ocean which pushes in on you from all sides. On a high gravity planet, you’d just find that your arms and legs felt much, much heavier than they do on Earth. You’d get tired quickly and might not be able to stand up. I’d guess it would take well over ten times Earth gravity to begin visibly squishing a human being, but I don’t think anyone really knows for sure – I don’t think anyone’s ever tried it!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      It would also depend on how long we’re squishing everyone- people can survive really extreme forces for short periods of time, but if you leave yourself in that force for more than your endurance time you can die. Roller coasters give you forces of several times the earths gravity, but only for a few seconds at a time. If you’re permanently increasing the earths gravity, it wouldn’t take a huge increase to eventually damage everyone.

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