That’s like virtual insanity.
Thank God we hit those 5.3% odds of surviving!
It could have ruined today’s eclipse.
I tossed one of my smokes in the air; the Earth was now a cigarette lighter.
I’m goin.
Since there isn’t any actual physical process that corresponds to “losing gravity”, it depends on what kind of magic is being proposed. If the earth suddenly became massless, things would indeed fly off in a straight line due to their velocity. It wouldn’t be anything like “rising to the ceiling” though. At 45 degrees latitude, objects would fly off at about 700 miles per hour. It’s best to be at one of the poles when this event happens. Also, it wouldn’t be just loose objects that would fly off. The Earth’s crust itself would fly apart and the whole planet would start to dissociate into a ring system. After 7.3 seconds the upper crust and everything on it would be more than a mile above the original surface (depending on latitude), and when gravity returned, everything would fall from that height. It’s hard to see how any material object on the surface could survive that event.
Also, if the Earth became massless, it would no longer interact with the Sun’s gravity. It would head off in a straight line tangent to its old orbit. I’m not sure exactly what its trajectory would be after 7.3 seconds of this and then returning to normal mass, but I doubt it would return to its original orbit.
Yeah, almost assuredly a superlatively bad day. “Floating” wouldn’t describe it at all.
I survived! That’s $89 billion well-spent! Thanks, NASA!