What impact would reversing the Earth's rotation have?

EatYouWell@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 97 points –

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.

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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.