LogFAQs > #954775757

ZeldaMutant posted...

That's not how the gravity would work. You'd end up in a back-and-forth motion, spending most of your time inside the Earth, only bobbing above surface at the apex of your trajectory.

I was going to say something like that, but due to the fact that the earth itself is moving through space, I'm not actually sure how it would end up. Presumably, friction is not a thing in this case, so gravity will be the only force acting on you. Your initial velocity would be based on the Earth's motion, but because the earth is orbiting in a circle, its trajectory would pretty quickly diverge from yours. Despite that, though, Earth's gravity will continue to pull on you, and given that that is currently enough to keep people from flying off into space, it can be presumed that that would be true even when you can't touch anything.

As such, I'd expect the oscillation you describe, but you'd gradually stabilize to be just on the trailing edge (WRT the Earth's orbital motion) of the core, since on each oscillation to the leading side, the earth would have moved far enough to keep you from reaching your initial position. It's possible that the Earth's moving fast enough that the core's gravity would slingshot you out of orbit on the far side if you start on the leading edge, but I don't know for sure.

Of course, all of this is largely irrelevant, because you'd also phase through air instead of being able to breathe it. You'd lose consciousness within a minute or two and die a few minutes after that, so you wouldn't actually experience much of that.

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