We just watched the Futurama episodes where alien cats stopped the Earth’s rotation, and they fixed it by making it rotate in the opposite direction.

  • empireOfLove@lemmy.oneEnglish
    84·
    1 year ago

    Regardless of how fast or slow you reversed the direction. Pretty much every weather pattern and ocean current on the surface of the planet would be thrown into a massive calamity. The Corolis effect and momentum imparted to surface fluids around our rotating ball is a huge, huge deal with weather flow, like the “jet stream”. It directs how storm systems (the flow of water that all life depends on) form and track and which typical track they take as the rotation of the earth is constantly deflecting them. There would be huge, unending storm systems as existing patterns now crashed head on into new ones, with storm fronts spanning entire continents. Even after the storms subsided and it settled into a new normal after 20, 30, maybe 50 years… agricultural breadbaskets would be either destroyed, completely inhospitable to their original crops, or stranded in drought. And human civilization would likely fall with them.

  • AmidFuror@kbin.social
    394·
    1 year ago

    Lois Lane would be resurrected and unburied by rocks if there had been an earthquake caused by a nuclear strike shortly before this happened.

  • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
    311·
    1 year ago

    We all die, a lot us rapidly when the water keeps moving across the rock that just stopped and super tsunamis a good portion of the planet. The rest of us die slowly as the weather patterns are ruined for likely decades or centuries and we starve due to crop failures and the fact that the worldwide logistics we depend on is forever gone.

    Edit: actually I thought some more, if it’s sudden then we’re all crushed by flying into the air into stuff at 1000 miles an hour when the rotation stops. If it’s gradual then we all starve since the weather is ruined

    • grayatrox@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      You forgot about air. If the planet suddenly rotates in the other direction, it would level everything, and the probably turn the planet into a molten marble from the friction.

    • wild@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t know. Couldn’t it be gradual enough that we barely noticed the acceleration changes but still only take a couple of hours?

    • Labonnie@feddit.de
      51·
      1 year ago

      But OP asked a different question. Not what happens when earth stops spinning but what happens when earth spins in the other direction.

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
    151·
    1 year ago

    It changes the way stars appear to move for us. Astrology teachings would have to do a full 360 degree turn to retain their accuracy.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 year ago

    The earth’s magnetic field would probably ‘follow’ and change it’s direction. But only a while later and very slowly. During the change, that would leave us without a magnetic field for some time. Then we have lots of cosmic rays hitting us, damaging some of the life on eath.

  • Turun@feddit.de
    6·
    1 year ago

    Only a change in rotational speed would be bad. If earth were to rotate in the opposite direction since the beginning it would behave just like today.

    • EatYouWell@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      That was my thought. The only major change I could see happening (besides the cataclysmic events from the change) is the direction of sunrise/sunset.

      • Turun@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Exactly

        Proof: define Antarctica as North. Now earth is rotating in the other direction.