Is Gravity Ending? What People Are Getting Wrong This Week

A rumor is circulating online – on Reddit, Facebook, TikTok and (I assume) Friendster – that gravity will stop working for seven seconds on August 12. Here is part of the warning posted online:

In November 2024, a secret NASA document titled “Project Anchor” was leaked online. The project budget is $89 billion and its goal is to survive a 7-second gravitational anomaly expected on August 12, 2026 at 2:33 p.m. UTC.

Key facts: • Duration: 7.3 seconds. • Expected casualties: 40 to 60 million.

What will happen: 1-2 seconds: Anything unsecured will rise (people, vehicles, animals). 3 to 4 seconds: Objects will continue to rise up to 15 to 20 meters.

Expected consequences: • 40 million deaths due to falls. • Destruction of infrastructure. • Economic collapse that lasts more than 10 years. • Mass panic.

This is a shockingly irresponsible and misinformation-filled prediction. In a theoretical world where gravity was optional, the death toll would ultimately be much higher, but it would come from earthquakes and tidal waves, not from damage caused by falls.

What would happen if gravity stopped working for seven seconds?

We’ll have to wait until August to get observational data on great gravity turning off, but I wanted to be prepared, so I asked Joel Meyers, a theoretical cosmologist and professor at Southern Methodist University, what we can expect on August 12. “It depends on where you are in terms of latitude, but for someone in, say, New York, in seven seconds without gravity you would expect to slowly drift upward about two feet from the Earth’s surface.”

It is therefore shocking that conspiracy theorists on the Internet fake: you would not “climb to 15-20 meters”; you wouldn’t even hit your head on the ceiling. You would just float, unless you jumped into the air at the right time. “An average person who can jump about a foot and a half would end up jumping about 64 feet in the air without gravity,” Meyers said.

Fears related to gravity allayed

Before speaking to a patient theoretical cosmologist, I was concerned that the lack of gravity inside my body might cause my atoms to detach from each other and dissolve into dust, something I’m generally not in favor of. “Gravity itself plays no role in our cohesion,” Meyers said. “The structure of our body is not gravitational, but electromagnetic.”

Another personal fear of gravity concerns breathing. Since gravity maintains Earth’s atmosphere, wouldn’t all the air be instantly ejected into space instead of staying in my lungs where it belongs? No. Decompression would occur, but it would take time. “The upper layers of the atmosphere would begin to float in space, being pushed aside by the layers of the atmosphere below them,” Meyers said. “But a few seconds would not be enough for us to lose all the atmosphere around the Earth.”

However, when gravity returned, it would create a wave of atmospheric pressure that would disrupt weather patterns in ways we couldn’t predict. Even worse would be the effect of a sudden loss of gravity on the planet itself. “This is where things get a little more dire,” Meyers said. “In the absence of gravity, there is nothing to combat the pressure that exists in the Earth’s core, in the mantle or in the crust. The Earth would not explode instantly – it takes time for mass to shift in response to pressure and forces – but there would certainly be a lot of tectonic activity.”

But it’s even worse. After seven seconds, the Earth would come together again, which would “create a pulse that would propagate across the world in terms of global earthquakes in a way that’s really difficult to predict in detail,” Meyers said.

The best vehicles to ride when gravity turns off

If you’re going anywhere on August 12, make sure you don’t travel by car. Lack of gravity means your wheels would leave the road, causing your ability to steer or brake to disappear. “Basically, you would just continue in a straight line no matter how fast you were going right before gravity turned off,” Meyers said, so expect traffic delays on the 405 as every car crashes into another car, a tree and a barrier. Planes and submarines would be safe, however, which brings me to my personal plan for August 12th.

How I’m going to survive a day without gravity

Since I’m not on NASA’s shortlist, I’m going to ride this thing in the metal belly of a deep-sea submersible. The submersible is a closed system designed to resist changes in external pressure, thereby negating any atmospheric effects. The turmoil of the ocean rising and then falling would probably cause massive tidal waves, but not where I am, under the sea.

While you assholes deal with the aftereffects of unimaginable global earthquakes and magma flows, I’ll be relaxing in my submarine, playing Angry Birds. When the time comes, I will triumphantly return to the surface to rule the ruined planet. “I think it’s a very solid plan; [it] really covers a lot of bases,” Meyers said.

The bottom line: will gravity turn off on August 12?

I felt stupid for doing it, but I asked Meyers point-blank what the chances were that the Internet was right about gravity ending on August 12. He responded, “That’s very far from the realm of possibility.”

There is no secret NASA document titled “Project Anchor” and there is no way to turn off gravity. “Gravity is an inherent property of spacetime,” Meyers explained, closing the book on one of the stupidest conspiracy theories of the year.