I'll be the first to admit that gravity is weird and we don't understand it's fundamental origins, but this is pretty simple.
Much like how you can easily and in many ways observe the celestial bodies around us to conclude that we must be on a globe, without ever seeing it from above, we can observe the behaviour of gravity without understanding why it works.
Gravity does not exert an "all encompassing force". Gravity causes everything on Earth, regardless of it's mass, to accelerate at a constant rate.
This is weird because Force = Mass x Acceleration. That means that the force that gravity exerts on different masses varies depending on the mass.
This was demonstrated by the famous Tower of Piza experiment: if you drop a cannon ball and an apple, which vary greatly in mass, from the same height they will reach the ground at the same time (so long as their coefficient of friction is roughly the same). If gravity were exerting the same force on everything, the more massive cannonball would actually fall slower because it wouldn't accelerate as quickly.
The "force of gravity" for you, personally, is only as much as is needed to accelerate you towards the Earth at about 9.8m/s^2; if you can accelerate faster than that away from the Earth, you can leave the ground.
Now you can go ahead and nitpick my explanation (it's hardly complete) but I would point out that: if gravity doesn't work on a globe Earth, it doesn't work on a flat Earth either.
This also explains why, over time, more dense ("heavy") objects sink and less dense ("lighter") objects rise to the surface. This is because if two objects of the same size, but different mass, are accelerated to the same magnitude, the object with the greater mass has more inertia and force, and will displace the object with less mass.
It's one of the controlling aspects of weather phenomena, since cold air sinks and hot air rises (which creates clouds and rain). There's a neat kids physics experiment where you add multiple differently dense things to a tall clear container (stuff that can be shifted around, like dried rice, beans, foam peanuts, etc.), and shake the container. The greater density objects will sink to the bottom, and the lesser density objects will rise to the surface, creating clearly delineated layers.
I'll be the first to admit that gravity is weird and we don't understand it's fundamental origins, but this is pretty simple.
Much like how you can easily and in many ways observe the celestial bodies around us to conclude that we must be on a globe, without ever seeing it from above, we can observe the behaviour of gravity without understanding why it works.
Gravity does not exert an "all encompassing force". Gravity causes everything on Earth, regardless of it's mass, to accelerate at a constant rate.
This is weird because Force = Mass x Acceleration. That means that the force that gravity exerts on different masses varies depending on the mass.
This was demonstrated by the famous Tower of Piza experiment: if you drop a cannon ball and an apple, which vary greatly in mass, from the same height they will reach the ground at the same time (so long as their coefficient of friction is roughly the same). If gravity were exerting the same force on everything, the more massive cannonball would actually fall slower because it wouldn't accelerate as quickly.
The "force of gravity" for you, personally, is only as much as is needed to accelerate you towards the Earth at about 9.8m/s^2; if you can accelerate faster than that away from the Earth, you can leave the ground.
Now you can go ahead and nitpick my explanation (it's hardly complete) but I would point out that: if gravity doesn't work on a globe Earth, it doesn't work on a flat Earth either.
This also explains why, over time, more dense ("heavy") objects sink and less dense ("lighter") objects rise to the surface. This is because if two objects of the same size, but different mass, are accelerated to the same magnitude, the object with the greater mass has more inertia and force, and will displace the object with less mass.
It's one of the controlling aspects of weather phenomena, since cold air sinks and hot air rises (which creates clouds and rain). There's a neat kids physics experiment where you add multiple differently dense things to a tall clear container (stuff that can be shifted around, like dried rice, beans, foam peanuts, etc.), and shake the container. The greater density objects will sink to the bottom, and the lesser density objects will rise to the surface, creating clearly delineated layers.