“What if” posts are not simple writing prompts but supercharged explorations into the many directions a simple prompt can take you. Here you will find conventional questions and “what if” questions surrounding a prompt to help get the creative juices flowing.
Prompt is about gravity.
There are a number of mass extinction events that could occur, from the obligatory wayward asteroid, catastrophic earthquakes, and the like. Even slow prolonged death due to climate change and food shortages.
What if gravity was the cause of our planet’s demise?
Gravity in its simplest explanation taken from NASA’s Space Place website is thus. “Gravity is the force by which a planet or other body draws objects toward its center.”
One of the first conjectures to come to mind would be: What if planet Earth was knocked out of orbit around the sun? But I want to go in a slightly different direction.
Gravity pulls objects toward each other and anything that has mass also has gravity. More mass, more gravity and if two objects with mass are close together the stronger the gravitational pull.
So what if the earth started losing its mass?
Earth loses and gains mass on a daily basis. It gains through dust and meteorites captured by gravity. It loses due to radioactive decay, but it loses hydrogen and helium at a higher rate. All in all, the mass of earth changes constantly but not enough to significantly change gravity very much.
So how can the earth lose mass at a more rapid pace? You would think mass has to go somewhere and it roughly takes an object to travel at 11.186 kilometers/second to break through the atmosphere and even if it fell back it probably would burn up. That mass would be gone. But it would take a lot of dirt, stone, and everything else to be jettisoned into space to affect gravity. But this still can be explored.
What if volcanoes around the world started erupting with such force massive amounts of material got launched beyond the atmosphere?
The mass extinction would probably be from the volcanoes and not gravity, but it’s a thought.
For a fictional story, there could be some outlandish ideas. What if a creature that was hibernating around the core of the earth finally woke up and was hungry. Certain abundant minerals could be its diet. As it dines the mass of Earth starts to reduce at whatever pace you want.
A lot of stories are done around aliens harvesting planets because they’ve used up their own resources. What if Earth was being harvested but no one knew? Well, until your main character found out.
Whatever the reason Earth loses the strength of its gravity, what happens next as it slowly decreases. What if someone notices that the scale tells them they are losing weight every day but they still have to buy bigger size clothes? What if smaller objects start to float?
What are the people of Earth going to do with the problem? What if it is easier to break the hold of gravity? Say it only takes 5 km/s, or 3, or 1? Space travel is less expensive at this point.
A lot of research would need to go into this, but it might be fun to do. Things like how less gravity would affect the environment, like the oceans, the tides, and the orbit of the moon. How does it affect our own orbit around the sun? What if we drift further away from the sun? Could our lessen gravity reach a point where we could be a moon to Mars?
This seems like a huge topic with three parts to it. One, how would the earth lose gravity? Two, how is it discovered and how does it affect us? And three, what do we do about it and what will eventually happen to the Earth?
That should give you a lot to think about for a story.
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