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World

What If Earth's Gravity Doubled?

What does a stronger g do to your weight and a standing jump?

Mass is not weight. Mass is how much of you there is; weight is how hard the ground has to push up to keep that mass from accelerating. Standard gravity is 9.80665 m/s². Multiply it and the bathroom scales move even though you have not. A standing jump is a small energy budget converted into height against g, so the same takeoff kinetic energy reaches a height that scales as 1/g. Double g, and that hop is about half as high — if muscles still deliver the same energy, which in a real body they would not, because they now have to lift heavier limbs. This page does the first part honestly and flags the second as biology it does not have. It will not claim you could or could not stand up. It will tell you the new newtons.

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Results update as you move the controls.

2×g

1 is Earth today; 2 is double g.

75kg
0.35m

Typical untrained standing jump is around 0.3–0.4 m.

Your result

150 kgf

apparent weight at 2 g

1,471 N

Weight now (1 g)
735 N

75 kgf

Weight at this g
1,471 N

150 kgf

Standing jump now
0.35 m
Standing jump at this g
0.18 m
g in this run
19.613 m/s²

What does that mean?

A 75 kg body weighs 735 N today and 1,471 N at 2 g — the scales, if they still pretended to show kilograms, would read 150 kg. The same takeoff energy that reaches 0.35 m on Earth reaches 0.18 m here. Stairs, chairs and tree branches all get a new opinion of you; this page only did mg and v²/2g.

At a glance

  • Jump on Earth0.35 m
  • Jump at this g0.18 m

Compare

1 g75 kgf / 0.35 m jump
2 g150 kgf / 0.18 m

Compare scenarios

Weight is just mg

Your mass in kilograms times the local acceleration gives newtons, which consumer scales then divide by the old g so they can print a 'kilogram' that is really a force. In 2 g that display would lie unless it was a true mass measurement. This experiment reports both the force in newtons and the equivalent kilograms-force so the comparison is readable. Nothing about diet or bone density is implied. Those are real topics with real literature; they are not computed here.

Jumps shrink as 1/g

Take off with speed v and you rise v² / 2g if drag is ignored. Hold v fixed — same muscle energy into the same legs — and height falls as 1/g. At zero g the formula misbehaves: there is no downward acceleration in this model, so 'jump height' stops meaning a returning hop. At 3 g a 35 cm standing jump becomes about 12 cm. Birds, trees and raindrops would all rewrite their numbers. Only the hop is calculated.

The planet has other opinions

True 2 g on Earth would mean more mass, a smaller radius, or both. Atmosphere scale height, orbital speed, and the habitability of the surface would change with that structural choice. This experiment isolates g as a slider because the question people actually type is about weight and jumping. For radius-and-density knobs, use the twice-as-large experiment. For g going to zero, use the gravity-stopped page, which is a different thought experiment entirely.

How we calculated this

Weight is mass × gn × the chosen multiple, with gn from NIST / ISO 80000-3. Jump height is the input standing jump divided by the multiple, i.e. constant takeoff energy and no drag. If the multiple is zero or negative the jump is refused rather than printed as Infinity. Compare rows show 1 g against the chosen g. No musculoskeletal model, no atmosphere, no planetary-structure solve.

Go further

A curated rabbit hole from this question. Each link is a real experiment, not a random suggestion.

  1. 01 · ScienceWhat If Humans Could Fly?
  2. 02 · WorldWhat If Everyone Jumped?
  3. 03 · WorldWhat If Earth Was Twice as Large?
  4. 04 · ScienceWhat If You Fell Through the Earth?

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