H.G. Wells certainly caught the continent’s attention with his radio show (in newscast format) about a Martian invasion.  A naive public took it seriously and panicked.  His scary fiction about gravity shields unfortunately also lives on in the minds of many.  Natural gravity shields are a key prediction of this site so the author is compelled to shout “myth” from the rooftops.     

In his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells portrays a terrible accident in which a shield casts a gravity shadow to space and beyond.  With no pull from earth in this column, atmosphere escapes to space and everything from air to kitchen sinks gets sucked into the funnel.  

The entire atmosphere disappears.  Since even less was known about gravity back then, taking it literally is perhaps not too surprising.  

The concept would be credible only if the earth was one solid particle of matter with a radial gravity field.  A small segment of the surface would appear flat and the first illustration (Wells scenario) might seem plausible.

Since the relevant chapter made no mention of gravity pulls the other way by the moon and stars, we will follow suit for purposes of illustration (which of course is not to scale). 

The above scenario is of course ridiculous; gravity does not work that way and the earth is not one particle. There are countless billions of particles in the earth.  True, some of a particle’s energy links may be committed to neighbours as part of a Strong or EM bundle but there are always some left over for Gravity links and they are radial to each individual particle.  Gravity links to/from the earth as a whole are thus Omni directional and random.

The true scenario would be more like the one below.  There simply is no large column above the shield that is free of pulls to earth.    

The shielded volume is quite shallow.

Use of the shield is in no way limited.  For instance, the shield could be sized so that its “shadow” extends just above an attached spaceship.  With chains released, the whole assembly would be displaced by atmosphere into the “shadow”, which would then move upward, followed by the ship and shield.  And so on and so on.  The whole time, pulls from the stars could enter the shadow above the shield and help raise the ship to space.  The stars could then continue to pull the ship in space.

It is somewhat ironic but even learned scientists were not immune to groundless fears during the Manhattan Project.  

Not completely certain of the power they were about to unleash in the first nuclear bomb, some actually feared that the atmosphere would be set ablaze and engulf the entire earth.