Scrolling through my various newsfeeds today and this headline from InfoWars grabbed my attention:
At first I couldn’t help but wonder: Do they know something I don’t? Is a giant hand going to emerge from the depths of deep space to bring our planet’s rotation to a standstill? Or maybe the Chinese have some sort of anti-rotation ray gun?
Looking at the article itself, which InfroWars had picked up from Russian “news” outlet Sputnik, I found no corroboration for either of these theories. Sputnik was just doing a “thought experiment” to see what would go down if this impossible thing were to actually happen. Sort of like the movie The Core, one of the world’s dumbest action/disaster movies, in which a rag-tag group of scientists and NASA pilots and I forget who else had to use a nuclear warhead to get the earth’s core spinning again after it mysteriously stopped.
Let’s just set aside the fact that the earth CAN’T ACUALLY JUST STOP SPINNING and see what they have to say.
It takes the earth 23 hours and 56 minutes to complete its rotation, with our beautiful planet moving at about 1,100 mph, or 460 meters per second.
Well, at the Equator anyway. At either of the poles you just rotate slowly.
But what would happen if one day it suddenly stopped spinning? Spoiler alert: nothing good.
To visualise the unthinkable consequences of this scenario, which some scientists believe may occur in 18.5 billion years,
You are aware that the planet will be long gone before then, as our sun is expected to go “ker-blooey” in roughly 5.5 billion years?
… one has to sit in a car, get it up to 100 miles per hour and then crash it into another vehicle without wearing a seatbelt (don’t do this). You’ve probably seen this in action movies and news – the car stops the person in it continues to move or rather flies.
Oh my god can’t you guys even do a thought experiment properly? First off, the earth is never going to suddenly stop spinning, either this evening or in 18.5 billion years. Because that’s not how physics works. — and I say this as someone who took physicas in high school. Objects in motion in the vacuum of space remain in motion unless a giant hand pops out from some nearby galaxy to stop them. It’s called “conservation of the earth spinning around with no giant hand to stop it.” Or something like that.
Also, if you’re trying to see what would really happen, your imaginary car would have to be traveling at 1000 miles an hour, not 100.
This is exactly what would happen to every living being on Earth when it stops spinning. US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted anything not bolted to the Earth would fly due east at 1,100 miles per hour. (The phrase “when pigs fly” would no longer be used as a figure of speech).
“When pigs fly” would no longer be a figure of speech because we’d all be too COMPLETELY DEAD to say anything.
But wait, there’s more!
According to a “thought experiment”, conducted by James Zimbelman, a senior geologist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the sudden stop would also affect our atmosphere, creating incredibly strong winds, which would be followed by massive tsunamis.
The sudden stop would also flatten out the bulge at the equator, which would cause oceans and seas to migrate to the poles, where gravity is the strongest.
Isn’t that gravity thing something that only would happen on a spinning planet? (Someone tell me I’m right; I’m reaching the end of what I learned from high school physics.)
Oh, who cares, this isn’t going to happen.
As a result, our planet would have two super oceans – one in the North and one in the South – with a giant continent in the middle.
No, this wouldn’t happen.
The full day would last an entire year with earthlings seeing Sun for six straight months and living another half of the year in darkness.
You forgot the fact that the side facing the sun would get so hot that our oceans would boil over. Meanwhile, the side away from the sun would be, well, let’s just say bone-freezingly chilly.
Magnetic field would deliver the coup de grace. It would slowly fade away and leave our planet without a protection against solar wind, deadly cosmic rays and radiation, which would kill all life on our planet.
I’m pretty sure most of the life on the planet would be long dead before anyone would need to worry about the solar wind.
The good news is: scientists doubt that such a scenario will happen, well, at least not in our lifetime …
Or in anyone else’s lifetime.
Here are some other spacey scenarios I think Sputnik and InfoWars should cover:
What if the sun was a giant baby like in TeleTubbies?
What if the moon could talk?
What if Mars and Venus just switched places for a week?
What if all the water on earth turned into delicious soup?
I’ve got a million of them.
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The first thing is : if the planet stop spinning, it probably mean tidally-locked, like a lot of smaller object are (like the moon). In which case, half of the earth is permanently in the sun, and half in the dark.
(the impact on climate is hard to evaluate, but because atmosphere and oceans are good at conducting heat, I would mostly expect super strong winds and current, and a temperature on the sun side a bit less extrem than what David expect)
The thing they present here make no sense, since it’s a planet still spinning, but in a way that have their days be equal to their years. Which can happen but it’s absurdely specific, and also, it’s still spinning.
The earth spinning *do* slow down by energy dissipation, and Earth would eventually get tidal locked if it’s not blown up to bit beforehand, and we also are getting closer to the sun. The 18 billion year figure is probably a scientific guesstimate of the time for it to spin down ; the one I heard was more 50 billions years, but given the time frame it’s actually not really different.
Both the 5 billion year before sun blowing up and the time before earth getting tidal locked are very very rough guesstimate ; it’s based on a physic we know is incomplete and there’s not a ton of examples to corrobate it. That being said, having a super short spin down for Earth mean an absolutely mind boggling amount of energy would get dissipated. So the first consequence would be the Earth being burned to a crisp. Maybe it would be instantly and entirely vaporised, given the absolute bullshit amount of heat that would create.
The magnetic field thing is probably them misunderstanding that the earth magnetic field is linked to its rotation. It’s true, but we don’t know the details super well, so what the magnetic field would do if the earth spin was slower is anyone guess. That being said, if the earth slowing down lower its magnetic field, it probably would kill all life on earth significantly before the changed day duration would do anything.
WWTH : it remind me : tidal locking isn’t *quite* not spinning at all, because “not spinning” is relative.
If you take the sun as a referential, tidal locking mean no spinning. If you take the earth as a referential, then the earth by definition cannot spin, but you see most object in the solar system as doing very strange dances. And in their article, their idea of “not spinning” is pretty much entirely senseless, since I can’t find a referential in which the earth would not spin with their day duration outside of the earth-based one where the earth never spin anyway.
@ jenora
I seem to recall that the Earth-Moon system has much higher angular momentum than it might be expected to have. That’s part of the evidence for the Theia impact hypothesis.
So there are forces out there that can affect rotation on a planetary scale*. I suspect in such a scenario though, having to adjust your watch would be the least of your worries.
(* Isn’t there something weird about Uranus’ rotation, it’s more than 90′ off, that is also suspected to be the result of some sort of close encounter with another large body?)
Unrelated, but if you’re in the mood to cover whiny gatekeeping manbabies in comicbook land, a bunch of them are 1 star bombing “I Am Not Starfire” by Mariko Tamaki and Yoshi Yoshitani on Goodreads. They’re big mad that the cover features a gay and fat goth girl they find unattractive or something. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56120074
@Trying
They decided to hate it waaaaaay back when it was first solicited 5 or so months ago. They also accused Tamaki of creating a self-insert based on nothing much more than the cover*. They also declared victory and “get woke, go broke” when it was delayed some months for some reason. (It happens, especially since the covid shutdown spring last year.)
Something not being for them doesn’t compute for these people.
*Making sweeping generalizations based on a cover, promo image, or 1 sentence announcement is kind of their national sport.
@Alan : the main thing is that a celestial body that spin have a lot of energy in that spinning. Anything that change it by significant amount mean an ungodly amount of energy going in or out of the system, both being, as you said, a bigger worry than your watch being inaccurate suddenly.
It *is* the best way to know this won’t happen, because while we aren’t fully, 100% sure of all possible source of slowdown (or acceleration) of earth spinning, we know that energy will get somewhere ; and even if the earth took 1 million year to tidally lock, that would mean the equivalent of ~1000 Hiroshima atomic bomb exploding every second in term of dissipated energy. Which would be reasonably observable regardless of which way that energy dissipate.
I wonder why they bothered writing this at all when it was addressed in a wonderful, entertaining form in the mega best-selling short story The Wandering Earth, now also a blockbuster film.
Oh right, because someone from China wrote the story, and it was a Chinese film, so it may as well not exist.
(Although it is kind of hilarious to see the editing that goes on between story and film, the entire—successful!—rebellion against the world not-stated-to-be-communist-but-it-definitely-was government was wiped from the film. Even though they were tragic heroes in the story… I cannot think of any reason why…)
These are the same vain preoccupations which propel billionaires out into space.
Just a few physics and astrophysics notes here.
You are right that the bulge at the equator is caused by the spinning, and that the variation in gravity across the planet, which isn’t much, is due to the centrifugal force pulling the faster spinning middle outward. Without that force, the Earth would settle back into a sphere, which would be continents and water being pushed to the poles. But it wouldn’t be instantaneous.
The main problem with the article is that any force capable of stopping the Earth from spinning would stop everything on the Earth with it. So the whole we continue spinning and all die scenario wouldn’t happen.
Of course Superman went back in time, he didn’t affect the Earth’s rotation. Even the Man of Steel can’t do that. Still my favorite superhero. Right there in the name.
I highly recommend a book called “When the Earth Had Two Moons”, which gives you all the planet and solar system formation you could ever want, in a very readable way. Total nerds can check the math in the footnotes, but everyone else can ignore it and understand it fine. Good pictures too.
Lol, what happened? I thought this blog was about “the new misogyny, tracked and mocked” but instead, I’m just seeing some silly crap from a conspiratoid website. Is this your way of suggesting that there’s actually not very much misogyny out there for you to mock, so you’re forced to take swipes at low-hanging fruit with no relation to women’s rights whatsoever, or have we finally come to the part where feminists stretch misogyny so far that merely having any non-normie view about ANYTHING is violence against women? Jfl at you just sitting there on the commode, desperately searching for anything you can punch out on your keyboard to keep the traffic flowing to your website.
contrapangloss wrote:
Insert a joke or two about “spin doctors”
On that FTL Superman theory: then why did he reverse direction to send time forwards again? That makes no sense.
Tidal locked planets still rotate, one full planetary rotation to one full orbit. Just depends where you’re standing if you see it or not.
This question was actually addressed in the very first entry in “What If” by Randall Munroe. The entry begins with “Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting.”
Bit O/T, but may be of interest.
As you may know, Hobby Lobby is having a lot of issues with the antiquities they obtained for their museum of the Bible. Basically much fake and looted artefacts. One of my friends is having a fair bit of success in recovering it all. Here’s the latest. That’s left HL a cool one and a half million dollars out of pocket; on top of a $3 million fine.
https://www.artandiplawfirm.com/fool-me-twice-the-gilgamesh-tablet-has-been-forfeited-from-hobby-lobby/
OT: in the Fun Ways to File a Lawsuit category, a Huston, Texas store next door to a hotel filed suit against their neighbor over the hotel guests’ habit of tossing dishes, cigarette butts, and fire extinguishers onto said business’s roof, damaging it. The hotel said they didn’t quite understand what the plaintiff was claiming, so the store – Third Planet Sci-Fi Superstore – amended their complaint to include a comic detailing what exactly their problem was.
https://youtu.be/GQhEog8aeBs
It’s pages 6-18 at the following link:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/houston-comic-book-store-lawsuit-comic-form/amp/
I figure the comic nerds and legal eagles here would appreciate it.
For a more scientifically accurate perspective on the topic, check out this National Geographic video:
WHEN THE EARTH STOPS SPINNING National Geographic Aftermath S01E04 – YouTube
I’m physics student and to be fair I think about these scenarios a lot 🙁
InfoWars is still stupid, are they trying to show that they can be rational because look a “science” article?
But thought experiments are fun even if they’re not going to happen. Sincerely, a physics nerd
@ redsilkphoenix
Oh wow, I love that comic book lawsuit! Thank you; I might be able to get a vlog out of that.
I’ll swap you for this. Seems sort of on topic for the thread.
(Puzzled look) Well, yes, if the earth stopped spinning things would be very bad. But what relevance that has to the real world is beyond me.
They’ve just ripped off Randall Monroe, who did it as part of his XKCD What If series of serious scientific answers to absurd questions. Keyword, absurd.