While daydreaming today I had an interesting thought, If we were to slightly speed up the rotation of the earth (which of course could be possible in the near future with worldwide cooperation) what effects would it have negatively and positively. While going over the characteristics of our planet at it's current speed it seemed that the positive effects of being able to speed up earth's rotation on demand would be very beneficial. I have found that increasing the rotation would not only shorten the length of a day but also woul result in less gravity, if gravity were reduced there would be millions of changes to every object. With all vehicles, planes, and trains, and people weighing less there would be less demand for energy needed for travel and work, weather would also be greatly affected with gases weighing less and cold air having a higher ceiling than normal. With global warming temps are increaing, but a shorter day would mean lower temperatures even though there is a shorter night also. This might also have a strong effect on the earths magnetic field. Now the most troubling of problems when proposing this is that it would greatly affect ocean levels, wind speed, and even more serious, plate tectonics. The earth's crust would be put at more stress to expand to compensate for the forces involved with spinning faster. I believe at some point we are going to be at a last resort considering global warming and this option should not be overlooked. I have not come up with many ways to get the energy required to spin the earth faster, the only obstacles are the great mass of the earth, speeding the earth up against the flow of wind which already slows the earth down in millisecond levels, and it is proven that global warming and the high winds it will also bring can slow down the rotation to about 11/100,000 of a second every 100 years. Any ideas would be great, but basically would only need to consist of integrated highly powerful propulsion devices pushing against preferably a natural wall such as a mountainside. And of course these would need to be as close to the equator as possible for max effect. These would definitely need to fire at precisely the same time and also be mirrored by the same propulsion devices set to fire in the opposite direction to reverse the process if necessary. The system would not need to keep the speed at the accelerated level but would need to provide the energy needed for a dramatic increase in order to reverse what has been done already. -- Andrew Bunde bunde83@cableone.net