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Re: Pseudoscience
Tom Brosz — (archived)

The quick answer is that there is not enough gravity on Earth to hold that much atmosphere down.

There are other answers as well. To get any kind of buoyancy effect from air on something that approximates the density of water (living tissue), the air would have to have at least that density, which would require compressing it to over 12,000 psi. If I didn't make a math mistake, this is approximately the pressure under 27,000 feet of water. Under these kinds of pressures, lungs don't work. Gases are toxic.

And it wouldn't affect the size of the Earth even if you did it. The pressure required to compress a mass of rock and liquid metal symmetrically more than a few feet is astronomical. And it wouldn't make a lot of difference if you did. Gravity, measured in "Galileos" (Gals) varies from tens to hundreds of milliGals due to the effects of distance from the equator, mountains, oceans, and other natural variations. This is not very much, as 1 standard gravity is about 981,000 milliGals.

No one is doing the numbers in this. At all.

This theory is the sort of thing that sounds good if you are about 12 years old, and don't know how things work yet. I have this same trouble explaining economics.

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