What People Are Misunderstanding This Week: Will Gravity End?
A rumor is circulating online—on Reddit , Facebook , TikTok , and (I assume) Friendster—that gravity will cease to apply for seven seconds on August 12th. Here’s part of the warning posted online:
In November 2024, a classified NASA document titled “Project Anchor” was leaked online. The project, with a budget of $89 billion, aims to survive a 7-second gravitational anomaly expected on August 12, 2026, at 14:33 UTC.
Key Facts: • Duration: 7.3 seconds. • Expected death toll: 40-60 million.
What will happen: 1-2 seconds: All loose objects will rise (people, vehicles, animals). 3-4 seconds: Objects will continue to rise to a height of 15-20 meters. 5-6 seconds: Panic and chaos will ensue, people will hit the ceiling. 7 seconds: Gravity will return, and everything will begin to fall from above.
Expected consequences: • 40 million deaths from falls. • Destruction of infrastructure. • Economic collapse lasting more than 10 years. • Mass panic.
This is a blatantly irresponsible prediction, rife with misinformation. In a theoretical world where gravity were optional, the death toll would ultimately be much higher, but it would be caused by earthquakes and tsunamis, not by fall damage.
What would happen if gravity stopped working for seven seconds?
We’ll have to wait until August for observational data on the Great Gravity Blackout, but I wanted to be prepared, so I asked Joel Myers, a theoretical cosmologist and professor at Southern Methodist University, what to expect on August 12th. He said most of us will survive the initial period of weightlessness without injury, and there’s no reason to tie ourselves to the couch. “It depends on where you are latitude-wise, but say, a person in New York City will typically slowly rise about two feet above the Earth’s surface in seven seconds of weightlessness.”
So, to everyone’s surprise, the internet conspiracy theorists are wrong : you wouldn’t “rise 15-20 meters”; you wouldn’t even hit your head on the ceiling. You’d just float—unless you leaped into the air at just the right moment. “An average person, capable of jumping about a foot and a half, would actually jump about 64 feet into the air, not accounting for gravity,” Myers said.
Fear of gravity is dispelled.
Before speaking with the patient theoretical cosmologist, I worried that the lack of gravity inside my body might cause the atoms to tear apart and dissolve into dust, something I generally disapprove of. “Gravity itself plays no role in holding us together,” Myers said. “The structure of our bodies is not gravitational, but electromagnetic.”
Another personal fear related to gravity concerns breathing. Since gravity holds the atmosphere on Earth, wouldn’t all the air be instantly expelled into space, instead of remaining in the lungs where it belongs? No. Decompression would occur, but it would take time. “The upper atmosphere would begin to escape into space, pushed back by the lower atmosphere,” Myers said. “But a few seconds wouldn’t be enough for us to lose all the atmosphere around Earth.”
However, when gravity reactivates, it will create a wave of atmospheric pressure that will disrupt weather patterns in ways we can’t predict. Worse, the sudden loss of gravity will impact the planet itself. “This is where things get a little more catastrophic,” Myers said. “Without gravity, nothing will be able to withstand the pressures present in the Earth’s core, mantle, or crust. The Earth won’t explode instantly—it takes time for the mass to shift in response to the pressure and forces—but there will certainly be a lot of tectonic activity.”
But the situation is even worse. In seven seconds, the Earth will collapse again, which, according to Myers, “will create a pulse that will spread throughout the world in the form of global earthquakes, and predicting their scale in detail is extremely difficult.”
The best vehicles to be in when gravity doesn’t apply.
If you’re driving anywhere on August 12th, make sure you don’t drive. The lack of gravity means your wheels will lift off the road, making it impossible to steer or brake. “You’ll basically just be driving in a straight line at the speed you were going before gravity shut down,” Myers said. So expect delays on Highway 405 as every car will crash into every other car, tree, and fence. Airplanes and submarines, however, will be safe, which brings me to my personal plan for August 12th.
How will I survive a day without gravity?
Since I’m not on NASA’s shortlist, I’m going to survive this ordeal inside the metal hull of a deep-sea submersible. A submersible is a closed system designed to withstand changes in external pressure, eliminating any exposure to the atmosphere. Rising and falling sea levels would likely cause massive tidal waves, but not where I am, underwater.
While you losers are dealing with the aftermath of unimaginable global earthquakes and magma flows, I’ll be relaxing in my submarine playing Angry Birds. When the time comes, I’ll triumphantly return to the surface to rule over a ruined planet. “I think it’s a very good plan; it really covers a lot of ground,” Myers said.
The main question: will gravity really stop working on August 12th?
I felt awkward doing this, but I asked Myers point-blank what the chances were that the internet was right about gravity ending on August 12th. He replied, “It’s very, very far out of the realm of possibility.”
There’s no secret NASA document called “Project Anchor,” and it’s impossible to turn off gravity. “Gravity is an inherent property of spacetime,” Myers explained, summing up one of the most silly conspiracy theories of the year.