Thread: Global warming Solutions- Increase Earth's rotation speed

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

Errr...


Ever heard of Newton's 3rd law of motion?


"All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction."


So whenever you push a mass (the Earth) in a direction, you must be pushing another mass (air?) in the opposite... but as the mass you'te pushing is into Earth's gravity field, then you're adding spin momentum (to the earth) and also decreasing ti (to the air, which in turn slows down Earth). The only way would be to eject mass from Earth in a certain direction, so the Earth gained the momentum opposite to that of the object leaving it.

FAI, currently each object leaving Earth orbit will take a little bit of Earth's momentum with it (that's why they're shot eastwards); but if they were shot westwards, then they would add momentum to the Earth -but would be a lot more difficult to accelerate to escape velocity.


This being said, changing Earth's speed would require a lot of energy, and of course most of it would be converted into heat which would be wasted into the atmosphere and so in turn would heat the Earth.... which makes a weird way to cool it.

I bet it's easier to convince American that a smaller car does the same as a larger one.

any forces strong enough to speed up the world even 1/1,000 of a MPH a year would consume way to much resources.

Originally Posted by Lucifer

a smaller car does the same as a larger one.

no it doesnt!!SUV! SUV!

Please, let's not screw with the Earth's rotation. The consequences are too varied to go into. The Earth's rotation is slowing naturally, as the moon travels further away, but adjustments are made along with it. If we screw with it out of the blue, oh man.

There are many factors contributing to global warming. There is one that we can control however. Greenhouse gases. We just need to burn less, grow some grass and trees, and harvest it before it decays. If we get into an energy crisis we can put all of these trees and grasses in an isolated environment, throw some termites on them and harvest methane (natural gas) to be burned (cleaner than fossil fuels) and returned to the atmosphere as CO2 to be picked up again by the new trees and grass.

Conserve and plant. It's simple enough but it's taken as seriously as diet and exercise.

All I know is my days are short enough. I never get everything done!