I recently saw something by Randall Munroe about this, the guy who makes xkcd. Something in there where the moon would partially restart the rotation of earth.
Staying in space is hard. After getting up above the atmosphere, you then need to get thrown sideways so fast that the curve of the arc you’ve been thrown on is equal to the curvature of the planet’s surface.
Earth’s rotational speed will only get you about 1/15th of the way to reaching orbital velocity.
Thank you, but I’d rather not limit my heralding of the apocalypse to a specific phase of the moon.
On an unrelated note, what if the earth suddenly stopped spinning for whatever reason, and we all got yeeted into space?
I recently saw something by Randall Munroe about this, the guy who makes xkcd. Something in there where the moon would partially restart the rotation of earth.
You would fall back down a couple minutes later.
Getting into space is easy. Just go up.
Staying in space is hard. After getting up above the atmosphere, you then need to get thrown sideways so fast that the curve of the arc you’ve been thrown on is equal to the curvature of the planet’s surface.
Earth’s rotational speed will only get you about 1/15th of the way to reaching orbital velocity.