Since the early 1990s, NASA has been asking a quiet but consequential question: what happens to a living thing when the oldest signal it has ever known — the pull of the Earth — simply disappears? Corn seeds launched into orbit grew into healthy seedlings, yet wandered without direction, their roots and shoots reaching outward in all directions as if the universe had forgotten to tell them which way was down. This small disorientation, consistent across species and decades of research, now stands at the center of humanity's ambition to feed itself on the long journey to Mars.