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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Well, gravity is independent of any spin effect. There is a slight centripetal force on a spinning planet; which space launches try to take advantage of.
They are right that gravity is stronger at the poles than the equator because Earth is an oblate spheroid; but that’s a marginal effect, and the oceans aren’t going anywhere.
Fun fact: ‘Sea level’ is measured from a place not far from me. Place called Newlyn. There’s like a pipe thing with water in it that apparently is significant.
ETA: The middle of that bolt is zero feet sea level.
EETA: It’s in a suitably glamorous setting
We would all die.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
@Alan: Does “sea level” depend on the rusty thing in the middle of the crumbling wall, or does it change according to, well, the sea? Like, with climate change, aren’t things that were above sea level when we were born now below it?
@ gss ex noob
It’s all a bit complex. As the tide comes in the weight of the water actually pushes the land down. That would affect where that bolt is. But that’s where the pipe comes in. Here it is.
They dangle a special tape measure down there. It’s electric. So when the end touches the salt water it makes a connection and a bell rings.
They add (or subtract?) that measurement, and that gives true sea level or something.
Maths isn’t my strong point.
It’s still the most intellectually rigorous article Infowars has ever published.
We know what a planet that doesn’t spin would be like because Mercury doesn’t spin. But ok.
@weirwood:
Mercury is in a rather special position actually. It’s tidally locked with a 2:3 spin ratio. Which means it rotates three times every two times it orbits the sun. So it does actually spin. It also has almost no atmosphere. Both of which changes quite a bit of the variables it faces.
Anyways all of the analysis is very human-centric in David’s post. There’s probably quite a bit of life that would survive the initial stop. Probably all microbial. What would be its tragedy is that the magnetic field would eventually fail if the Earth suddenly became fully tidally locked, with a 1:1 rotation. Meaning such life would likely never be able to evolve into an intelligent species. Even if it adapted to the much harsher conditions.
It is a very interesting thought experiment. Just one that’s almost impossible to ever happen. Unless some hitherto unknown gravity source enacted such a thing on the Earth. Which if I recall correctly, would inflict tidal forces that would tear the planet apart anyways.
Also on a final note: Our sun is going to at most go nova near the end of its life, until all that remains of it is a white dwarf. Before that the sun will expand into a red giant big enough to engulf everything out to like Earth, or Mars. The interesting part is once it shrinks back down, the planets will still be here. They’ll be barren, irradiated, incinerated, and dead planets, but they still will be here. If some sort of humans still exist at that point, they’ll probably have long abandoned the planet and solar system.
I’d better start packing now then?
One of the funniest jokes I ever saw was a parody “scifi setup” relating to earth’s spinning around its axis. Finnish uses the same word for axis and (mechanical) axle, and the joke drew a parallel between these, proposing that the earth’s “axle” might get suddenly jammed if humans extract all the oil from earth. All this was expressed rather pithily in six Finnish words.
Well I want to know if the direction the bath water goes down the plug hole would be affected.
But this has already happened! When Joshua fought the Amorites, the sun and the moon stood still in the sky all day. The only way for that to happen is for the earth to stop rotating, since the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. Looks like giant hand of God it is, then! And nobody flew off into space or nuthin’, so no worries.
/s
This is a perfectly grand genre of Internet time wasting, it’s just that there’s so many people much better at it: eg. What-if?. Not being a humourless science-denier must help.
I only wish that “What if the most powerful government in the world was handed over to an evil clown?” had remained an absurd thought experiment.
Given that the sun’s expansion won’t be a sudden process but a very gradual one, life on Earth will be extinguished a long, long time before the sun engulfs it.
I can imagine the political situation in the millennia before that. There’s like, one faction which wants to move the Earth up to a higher orbit, one which wants to just scrap the planet for resources, one which wants to partially scrap the sun for resources and then move the Earth to a lower orbit (because the sun will be much smaller and cooler), one which says that “it’s just Earth’s time” and that we should leave things alone, and one which insists that it’s actually “space weather” and anyone who claims otherwise is being brainwashed by the robot-controlled media. And then there are a tiny number of doomsayers who say that it’s the sign that Gord will finally cleanse the universe with starfire, but they’ve been saying variations of that for almost as long as sapient life has existed and nobody really pays attention.
The Neptunians are mostly just glad for more sunlight and don’t care as long as it’s not the “scrap the sun” one.
Nah, the sun’s too small to go nova. It’s just going to swell up as it runs out of hydrogen and helium, and turns into a red giant. The most recent calculation I’ve seen is that the Earth with be just about grazing the surface.
If I remember rightly, the Milky Way will crash into Andromeda slightly before then anyway. Now there’s a HUGE amount of space between stars*, so that a head-on collision is extremely unlikely, but the effect on both galaxies is likely to be something like a blender and the Earth is unlikely to keep its orbit.
But hey, we have time to read a book first.
*Picture a scale where the Earth is an orange, and the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri is a satsuma. Well on that scale, they’re something like 3,000 miles apart.
RE: The Core
How could you forget Two-Time Academy Award Actress Hilary Swank?!
And I thought Cuba Gooding Jr. had the most ignoble post-Oscar career trajectory…
Very tangentially related, but back when my son was 5 and was going through the whole “trying to figure out death” thing, he asked me if the Earth would die. I told him that the sun would expand and probably destroy the Earth in about 5 billion years.
…yeah, I was pretty stupid.
None of that shit happened when Superman stopped the Earth’s rotation, and reversed it – twice.
Stupid fact that is locked into my head rather than say people’s birthdays – The Japanese version of 1963’s King Kong vs Godzilla starts off with a spinning globe and then a voice asks what would happen if the earth would stop spinning (there is yelling and such after that) It turns out it’s the opening for a TV show and that the show is stupid hence the question about the earth stopping- there is a lot off office life satire in this version that was cut of the American Release (and they put in different music) because they wanted to get to the monster fights – which I can’t really blame them. Still the Japanese version does make a bit more sense than the American Dubbed one. Not much but some.
Anyway my point is that the question “what would happen if the earth suddenly stopped” was used to show just how lame the program was.
So, fun fact! The speed of the earth’s rotation is not actually constant.
Pre-8th century BCE, we were gaining about 2.3 ms per century. Then we gained only 1.8 ms per century.
And recently, we’ve caught ourselves speeding up!
Rotational speed of a planet is complicated, because rotational velocity is dependent on inertia, which is dependent on where the mass is relative to the center of rotation. For a physics professor on a spinning platform or a figure skater, it’s not that complicated (but is still hella impressive) how moving body/limb position can dramatically change spinning speed.
For a planet? Figuring out where all the mass is going and changing is not easy. Additionally, some power is lost in internal friction because we do have this fun molten core thing going on. And oceans sloshing about. And tectonic plates.
Still, there are a whole lot of things that are going to cause us trouble long before any stop to our spin will get us.
Suddenly stopping spinning? Why is it even a thing to be worried about? Like, if there exists something that is capable of applying that much braking torque to the planet (the power requirement is something truly horrific), and it shows up, and stops the planet rotating…
…I think it’s safe to say we’d have a whole lot of other problems first.
Fun fact #2: Infowars must be ripping off HowStuffWorks these days. I think How Stuff Works posted a similar thought experiment in February.
On topic for them, because rotational inertia! It’s how rotating stuff works! Inertial frames of reference! It’s how stuff works for us! My jam, it is.
InfoWars? What are you doing trying to be physics nerds?
And this “at least not in our lifetime” silliness? A sudden deceleration (current speed to zero in under 1 min) without Superman or “Divine Intervention” or aliens with WAY too much power to waste (10^29 joules or something ridiculous) is just not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how many lifetimes you go out, unless you go out far enough that our rotation is darn near petered out already, but by then we’ve already had a whole other set of problems.
Aaaand whoops. Nerd moment.
TL;DR:
Nerding on a nerd blog, fun and good.
On a “news” blog, not good.
*not that infowars is news. It’s not really. It thinks it is, though.
Worm reference?
If not, it really should be…
One thing that these bozos haven’t worked out … Evolution. Whatever and whoever is around in that time zone, none of them – including our own gazillion generation descendants – will look or be anything like us as we are now.
There are very few organisms in our world that have survived anywhere near one or more billion years that look or function anything remotely like their long-ago predecessors. Dinosaurs are still “with” us, but in the form of birds. And the mainstream dinosaurs died out a mere 65 million years ago, that’s a measly 6.5% of just 1 billion years, let alone several. God only knows what paths our evolution will take … and She’s not likely to tell us even what the options are.
I think the idea that we’ll not even be part of the scenery when these processes actually start having a direct effect on Earth’s occupants would be quite distressing to these self-centred, silly brained bozos.
We’re irrelevant. All of us.
A lot of spacecraft use slingshot manoeuvres to gain velocity. As there’s a price to be paid for everything in physics, that does alter the rotation and orbital speed of the planet used. It’s probably not something we need to be too concerned about just yet though.
Maybe we should try to get Mercury back into being tidal locked though. We lost a whole genre of science fiction when we found out it does in fact rotate.
I was going to say that one of my favourite facts about the Earth’s rotation is that there’s an organisation called the International Earth Rotation Service, but they’ve changed their name to International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which is objectively less funny. Anyway, they’re responsible for time standards and some coordinate systems, but in my head they’re responsible for keeping the Earth turning, from a pair of secret bases at the poles.
In the bible, Joshua asks God to stop the sun and moon in the sky, to give him more time for some important killing, and God complies. I think it was Isaac Asimov who wrote an essay about what effects this would have had on the Earth.
Heh. As I know I’ve mentioned before, I used to work at a place that did radio astronomy work and fed some of what we found to the IERS, the International Earth Rotation (and Reference Systems) Service. This is the organization which could tell you things like the fact that the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami actually sped up the Earth’s rotation to make the day shorter by about 3 microseconds, and even El Nino can alter the length of the day by a measurable amount. Which is more a thing about how sensitive our measuring systems are these days.
One of the people I worked with had actually done his thesis on measuring sea level anomalies via shifts in satellite orbits. It’s pretty impressive just how much we’ve learned about anomalies in the Earth itself just by tracking a few dozen atomic clocks in orbit. (A.k.a. the GPS satellites.)
@Mogwitch, Moggie:
XKCD actually had one on the Superman flying around the Earth bit:
@Alan:
XKCD had one about stopping Jupiter using gravity assist slingshot manoeuvres before as well, where he pointed out that even if we threw the entire Earth at Jupiter, it wouldn’t slow it down much, because Jupiter is just so much more massive than the Earth. Everything we’ve done so far has shaved enough off of Jupiter’s year that by the time the sun goes nova Jupiter’s position will be several nanoseconds off from where it would have been otherwise. So… really, really not much.
How sadly typical that they’re more concerned about a corny sci-fi level fictional scenario than they are about climate change which is REAL and literally going to affect how my generation ends their lives and subsequent generations experience theirs.