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Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
by delichon 3mo ago
Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
- gumby 3mo agoThe problem is future societies harvesting the engines for interstellar probes. This problem has been discussed in a series of books by Larry Niven.
- tenthirtyam 3mo agoThere's a graphic novel by Cixin Liu "The Wandering Earth" where they not only stop Earth's rotation with this method, but also propel Earth out of the solar system (for what appear to be good reasons, I might add). Can't quite remember what fuel they used for the engines.
- tialaramex 3mo ago> for what appear to be good reasons, I might add [Spoiler] They are good reasons. Conspiracy theorists are able to persuade almost everybody that the reasons were bullshit, an excuse to seize power or something, and so the few who still insist this was necessary and mustn't stop are executed. Almost immediately after those executions, Mother Nature proves them right. So that leaves everybody: Guilty of having murdered their saviours and with no choice but to carry on with the very plan they had insisted was bogus... There is a Chinese movie but I'm kinda surprised no Hollywood studio got themselves a rights deal and made a US-friendly movie where the Sun conveniently blows up slightly earlier and our heroes are vindicated and everybody agrees they were right all along.
- jandrese 3mo agoIIRC they accelerated rock as the reaction mass. Gigatons of rock accelerated to well above escape velocity and launched from the ground. In the real world their scheme is doomed as it would strip the atmosphere off of the Earth, but since they were planning to leave the solar system the atmosphere was going to freeze to a solid anyway so maybe it didn't really matter. To be honest I thought the entire scheme was an extremely elaborate cover for the fact the lead ship was the actual ark and everyone else was just plain doomed. This would have mirrored one of the themes in the 3 Body Problem where interstellar space travel is strictly forbidden until everybody can participate at once. The "launch the Earth as a spaceship" concept was so poorly thought out I thought it had to be a fraud in the story, and our somewhat dense protagonists just didn't catch on.
- flippyhead 3mo agoI feel like we can all just jump at the same time. I mean, we only need a second or two, right?
- ninju 3mo agoWell...we would all have to be at the same spot so that we don't cancel each other out. But that would come with its own challenges https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ (oh and it wouldn't be strong enough to affect the Earth's rotation)
- slashdave 3mo agoMaybe a whole bunch of people can charter some planes, fill them with weight, and just travel full around the earth to where they started.
- dylan604 3mo agoWouldn't it just be easier to have Superman fly around the planet a bunch of times really fast to do the same thing? Then you wouldn't have to worry about having to deal with all of that engine maintenance.
- fragmede 3mo agoSuperman is best used elsewhere. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Polizeiposaune 3mo agoIt would appear that this has worked as they haven't had to insert leap seconds for quite a while.
- Perz1val 3mo agoNo, jet engines push against the atmosphere and the atmosphere is a part of the earth
- delichon 3mo agohttps://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/608372/if-a-jet-engine-is-bolted-to-the-equator-does-the-earth-speed-up https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/608372/if-a-jet-... It would have to be rockets. My napkin says 2B starship boosters and 250K tons of propellant per second should give us around 1 second per year.
- Sohcahtoa82 3mo agoIf the jet engines are pushing hard enough, then the atmosphere won't be a part of the earth for long.
- rzzzt 3mo agoThen we'll have to decrease the radius a bit.
- s0rce 3mo agoYou could actually move very large quantities of water around and probably have a measurable impact. Like draining the California central valley aquifer.
- nofunsir 3mo agoThe Three Gorges Dam has already given us 22 more microseconds in the year. Basically, the Chinese have converted the angular momentum of every molecule on Earth, including you... into electricity.