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DrHugh t1_j5wpvx1 wrote

Gravity is towards the center of the Earth. If you are in space, in freefall you wouldn't have a sensation of "down." If you are accelerating in a direction, you'd have a sense of down from "behind" you (think of how the Apollo astronauts were on their backs on liftoff, even though the spacecraft arced out and changed angle).

In space, there is no up and down. You could identify a convention, that the "top" of the solar system is where the planets all seem to go in this direction around the sun, so if they seem to go the other way, you are "below," but that's just for consistent terminology.

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Damiklos t1_j5x0r1t wrote

So I get the whole no sense of up or down in space.

Assuming you could survive the descent thru the atmosphere. At what point would the brain perceive your going down towards the ground? I guess at some point the sensation of floating thru space and heading towards the earth changes into falling towards the earth.

Edit: corrected punctuation

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DrHugh t1_j5x3ao4 wrote

You'd probably get that sense well above the atmosphere. There have been a lot of videos that do a Google Earth kind of "fly in" effect. If you were surrounded by such views, the sense of collision would probably be very strong, regardless of whether you had a sense of acceleration. I would suspect that different people would experience alarm at different altitude or perceived speeds.

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Damiklos t1_j5x44nb wrote

Yeah so that is kind of the essence of this shower thought I feel.

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