My mind was wondering on a long car drive and got to thinking how life on Earth would change if some of the following events either suddenly occurred or were in place from the beginning.
What would happen if:
or if the above existed from the beginning?
With regard to item #3, I think that if gravity decreased ten percent, toast might start landing on the floor butter side up.
If Earth’s revolutions sped up by 25%, maybe the Cubans would boot out Fidel before he dies.
Interestingly, Sofa King, there was an article in Scientific American a couple of years back (don’t remember the year, but it was definitely an April issue) on the topic of falling toast, and it turns out that the local gravitational field cancels out of the equations. You see, if the field were weaker, then humans, and hence tables designed for humans, would be proportionately taller, so toast would still have enough time to flip 180[sup]o[/sup].
The effects you mention probably wouldn’t be a big deal, if they were in place to begin with, except possibly the length of the year, because that’s dependent on the distance from the Sun and the mass of the Sun, and both of those are related to where the “habitable zone” is. However, if, for some reason, the gravity or rotation of the Earth abruptly changed, at the very least there’d be some huge earthquakes as the solid Earth attempted to re-shape itself to match the new equipotential surfaces. If the rotation sped up or the gravity decreased, it’d try to become more flattened, and vice versa.
The OP sounds familiar from something else I read on the 'net…maybe it was this…
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/q1168.html
but I also seem to recall reading something about how the Earth’s crust would probably liquify. Anyway, it’s a bit of a speculation isn’t it?
another thing to consider…the Earth/moon interaction would be altered if the Earth’s rotation changed. (tidal bulging & the gravitational lock on the moon’s near side)