> What happens is that Earth, by virtue of having mass, gobbles up space
> inside and around it. Always. Constantly. Whether there are any apples
> out there or not. (So does the apple, but that's negligible compared to
> Earth's dietary budget.) There's no acceleration or even movement
> involved there /per se/ - in the vicinity of matter, distances just
> shrink over time. Fast.
>
> If it was only for this mechanism, earth would shrivel to nothingness in
> a matter of... minutes? hours? Dunno, but certainly in less than a day.
> Space between the elementary particles would just shrink to zero.
>
> Fortunately, electromagnetic force comes to our rescue: The electron
> clouds of any two atoms in the universe repel each other. Partially this
> is compensated by the fact that the electron clouds of any atom  in the
> universe also attracts the nucleus of any other atom, but on average the
> net EM force is repelling. And there are a lot of atoms in the Earth. So
> the atoms making up earth constantly accelerate away from each other.
> Earth is exploding.

If gravity (or rather, mass) causes space to contract and get gobbled 
up, this must mean then that EM forces (and other equations?) must 
somehow be able to measure distances "outside" of this distorted and 
gobbled up space? There must be an external "real" space that is somehow 
related to the distored spacetime by the distribution of mass around.

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