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.
Lois Lane would be resurrected and unburied by rocks if there had been an earthquake caused by a nuclear strike shortly before this happened.
We should assume that has happened.
Didn’t they make a documentary about this?
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
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.
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?
Lois Lane would come back to life
Randall Munroe made an xkcd about this. It’s not on his website unfortunately, but someone else uploaded it. I would recommend using a adblocker though.
Time goes backwards and I get to eat that cake I had last week?
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.
Full 360 degree turn, eh?
:)
This comment gave me the motivation to turn my life around and do a full 360.
I can’t say this with any authority, but I think the biggest effect would be in weather patterns and the subsequent downstream effects of having different weather.
Nah, the biggest effect would be in every single thing at or above ground level being instantly shot eastward at somewhere between 0 and 1,000 miles per hour. After that the weather is pretty much irrelevant because anything that would experience it would be dead as shit.
Only if the rotation would stop immediately. A slow deceleration would not let that happen
But who cares about the obviously much more boring option?
I mean, people have survived all kinds of crazy shit, I’m confident that many would actually somehow survive.
At least anyone in space at that time
Ehm, good one… what would happen to all satellites and ISS? Would all that junk still spin in the same orbit or would it be flung out into space?
I think they would be going on with their business because gravity would be still the same. IANAP
I mean, sure, there will be some people on the lower end of that 0-1,000 MPH curve that are not in very close vicinity to any objects to splort against. Inupiat, Aleut, Sami, Yamalo-Nenets… anyone inside the arctic circle should be relatively fine, speed-wise.
Can I volunteer to be one of the things shot eastward at 0 mph?
Sundials will be useless
Nah just send each to the other hemisphere.
Wait, I need an animated diagram
The toilet will flush the opposite way
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.
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.
Exactly
Proof: define Antarctica as North. Now earth is rotating in the other direction.
Need more info. Does the earth immediately stop spinning and start spinning in the opposite direction? Or does it gradually stop over an arbitrary amount of time and reverse directions? Haven’t seen the episode…
In the episode it had stopped for a while first, then they slowly spun it up.
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It spins the other way.
Everybody would fall over.
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If it happened suddenly, there would be massive tidal waves on western coasts.
The sun would rise in the west and set in the east. Timezones would be backward. People in different areas would have oddly desynchronized sunlight exposure relative to the time on their clocks. For example, if this happened at sunset for you, the sun would rise first from the east and set in the west, then rise again from the west and set in the east. You’d be halfway through a double day at the moment of switching. Other people would have a double night.
