What if the Earth stopped turning?

"One breath, one hope, one shooting star, and then another. One thought, one voice, one dream comes true, and then another. One kindness, one touch, one step in peace, and then another. One choice, one change, one spirit soars, and then another. One pond, one stone, one ripple forms, and then another.

One at a time, one finds their way, and then another".

- Rose Fuller 2002

Most of us, lead our lives in a spin. No, I do not say this because we all are spinning, all the time, at a reckless speed, along with the rotation of the earth. That is inevitable, though we take it for granted or are not alive to it.

The spin - the reeling and the revolving; the turning and the twisting; the wheeling and the whirling - that I refer to is the outcome of our lifestyle, the justifiably embarrassing sense of our own individuality, and the way we project it.

The fact is that most people lead a conscious life, a deliberate pretense; and, though possessing knowledge in common of this falsehood, this deceit, this deception, we continues to do so. It is as true as the spin of the earth.

A spin, apart from its other meanings, is a natural fear reaction to an event that we seek to avoid, or wished it did not take place, or want to cover up. We experience it as internal chaos of some degree.

It often feels like life is whirling around you, out of control. The result is that, when relating it, we tell a yarn or infuse additional irrelevant details to narrate the story - we spin a yarn. Events are individual occurrences; but lifestyle is when, reactions, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings etc. have become consistent habits. Hence, spinning becomes second nature, a practice, when the state of mind, body, and spirit of a person is fragile, stressed, overwhelmed, and depleted of strength and resilience.

However, when one person's spin evolves into an extreme spin, like a vortex, it will also capture others who are in close proximity. A vortex is driven by, toxic fear, powerlessness, and self-doubt. Once captured, it is difficult to escape.

Blathering

The world we live in is one of supermarkets, fast foods, rap music, instant friendships, and non-stop political blathering.

On many levels, it is a cold, ugly, and soulless place with dead people stumbling around parroting moronic clichés that they are conditioned and accustomed to not question.

However, in spite of this hurly-burly situation, we find that it is possible for the world to keep spinning, moving, and is a wonderful place to live in.

This is because it is still possessed of, smart and creative people, caring and loving persons, who know something about exquisite beauty, understand how to appreciate this wondrous world, and are kind enough to share it with those of us longing for a break from the usual commercial sewage that predominates: everything from food to interpretation of love.

Earth's spin controls our lives. As the planet dances around the sun, we sleep and wake by its daily pirouette. The rotisserie-style heating keeps Earth warm and sunny all the way around, and Earth's rotation drives the geomagnetic field, weather patterns, and the circulation of the oceans, all of which influence our life and lifestyle. Bearing all that in mind, one wonders: what if the world stopped turning, or for that matter, spinning? Not being an expert on these matters, I quote: "It would be a total mess," said Louis Bloomfield, a physicist at the University of Virginia. "Most humans would drown, suffocate, roast, or freeze to death. But, it is not all bad news: A select few of us, who live in one of four well-situated spots on the planet, would survive - and probably rapidly evolve in response to our dramatically altered environment. Amazingly, Earth would literally change shape if it ceased to spin.

Earth's rotation makes its midsection bulge; it is 26 miles farther around at the equator than it is from pole to pole. If the spinning stopped, that solid-Earth bulge would not immediately relax, but the bulge of the oceans, which are much more fluid, would. The oceans would shift from the equator toward the poles, leaving Earth's surface bone dry near the equator and swamped in miles of water at the poles".

The atmosphere would shift in a similar fashion, he said, becoming thicker at the poles and thinner at the equator. Only Earthlings living at a sweet spot around the mid-latitudes would experience the right atmospheric pressure to survive the transition. Constant sunshine would strike over whichever half of Earth ended up locked toward the sun. That side would be blisteringly hot; the vegetation would die off and the land would dry out and crack.

The opposite hemisphere would become permanent icy darkness, and the land would resemble frozen tundra. "Humans would have to move to the transition area," said Rhett Allain, a physicist at the University of Southeastern Louisiana. "We would be confined to a thin band of Earth along the hot-cold border, where the sun would always appear just above or just below the horizon.

Here, the temperature would be moderate, but the ways in which weather and climate patterns on a non-spinning Earth would change are too unpredictable for the scientists to describe the scenery more fully. At any rate, land on the hot-cold border should be habitable enough for humans to make a go of it. "If you're on the sunny side but where the sun appears very near the horizon, you'll be able to grow crops, but you're not going to get quite as extreme solar heating there," Allain said. People could crossover to the barely dark side at night. "It would be warm enough there because there would still be some sunlight, because the atmosphere diffuses the sunlight - just like it's not pitch-black at night."

Atmosphere

Of course, humans could not live along the entire hot-cold border, but only in the stretches that contain an atmosphere that is suitable for breathing.

"There are going to be four patches that have a decent mixture of the right atmospheric pressure and the right temperature: two in the Northern Hemisphere and two in the Southern Hemisphere," Bloomfield said. The four surviving tribes of human beings would be, permanently separated by the harsh conditions that stand between them. That and environmental differences between the patches would drive the evolution of four distinct humanoid species. They would all need to be hardier and thicker-skinned than the present human race, in order to deal with the greater influx of cosmic radiation they would experience in the absence of a geomagnetic field. This however, having to be thick-skinned, will not be a problem for most Sri Lankans since many are thick-skinned even now, having been conditioned by listening, to our politicians.

Hence, the good news is that we Sri Lankans are, as it is, evolved and ready for any such eventuality, and care nought whether the world continues to spin or not; but shall carry on merrily with creating our own spin on most matters. Thick skin has its virtues.

Standstill

Now, here is some bad news: Earth, in fact, is heading for an eventual rotational standstill. The heave-ho of the land and ocean tides that result from the spinning take a toll on the planet, and the energy driving all that sloshing back and forth gradually winds us down.

The moon ran out of spinning steam, and it became "tidally locked" to Earth. Now, the same side of the moon always faces our way. Give it a few eons, and the same thing will happen to Earth; first we'll become tidally locked to the moon, then a few billion years after that we will lock up to the sun. That is, it would happen, if the sun were not destined to die in a massive explosion first, blowing the solar system, and its future plans, to smithereens.

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking; keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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