I think the idea is that you’d take the current mass of earth and form it into a cube. So it would neither be a cube that could fit the current earth inside of it, nor would it be a cube that would fit inside the current earth. It would be somewhere in between.
None of the three options would have an atmosphere that connected over the ridges. The atmosphere isn’t nearly thick enough for that. On the other hand, if you went with the smallest option, the planet might not have much of an atmosphere at all. How much mass does a planet have to have to keep light atmospheric gasses from escaping?
Well, there would be some barely detectable remnants of the atmosphere – perhaps about what there is 1,800 km over the earth’s surface now, since the vertices would (as I calculated earlier) be 3,660 km up from the ocean bottoms. But don’t expect to survive there more than a minute or two without an oxygen supply.
No human or god can match
Nature’s simultaneous 4 day
rotation in 1 Earth rotation.
No human has a right to
believe wrong - for that
would be evil thinking.
Ignorance of 4 days is evil,
Evil educators teach 1 day.
1 day will destroy humans.
I think Cubic, therefore I
rise above the singularity
mentality human and the
false gods they worship -
discovering a Universe of
Opposites their education
will never allow them to
know. Evil of believing
is not measuring and the
result of not measuring -
is never knowing Truth,
ineffable by man or god.
Gene Ray, Cubic and Wise Above Gods
This message brought to you by the Time Cube. Time Cube; because Cubic Time gives you NATURE’S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY EARTH ROTATION. Accept no substitutes.
Perhaps we’d first have to calculate the diameters and depths of the six oceans (assuming they are equal), to establish sea level, then add the atmosphere.
Imagine for a second that these 6 oceans are connected (by whichever thoughtexperimenty means necessary). Would their surface really be a sphere? Won’t the gravity of this oddly shaped planet affect them somehow?
Assuming that each ocean basin containsthe same amount of water, I don’t think they would be spheres. I suspect that the surface near the centre of each ocean would becloser to the centre of the earth. I also suspect that the coast line around each ocean won’t be an exact circle, because the water would be more attracted to the parts nearer the vertexes of the cube. However, I think a sphere would be a good first approximation, even though my mathematics skills aren’t up to doing the exact calculations.
One would expect a fluid to shape itself spherically around the center of gravity. Same for the atmosphere, which would have the interesting effect of having edges sweeping through it, stirring it up. We also haven’t established the axis of rotation, yet, which would have some impact on the atmosphere question.
The Troposphere, the part of the atmosphere where the weather is currently extends around 10 miles above sea level (52,800 ft). The entire hydrosphere currently has an average depth of less than three miles.
The side length of a unit volume cube is s = (22/7 time 4/3 r[sup]3[/sup]) [sup]-3[/sup] where r is the unit sphere radius.
The distance from the center to the center of a face is s/2, or .5s
The distance from the center of cube s to the center of an edge is 2[sup]-2[/sup]s/2 or .707s
The distance from the center to a vertex is the square root of the sum of the squares of those figures or .8660s
The Earth has a radius of 4000 miles.
Using the formula above, that makes Bizarro Earth 6448 miles on a side. The center of a face, 3224 miles from the center, the center of an edge 4559 miles, a vertex, 5583 miles. This gives you eight mountains rising 2360 miles above the centers, and ridges dipping to a low of 1335 miles in altitude. The oceans are small puddles in the centers of the sides, their twenty mile depths insignificant in comparison. The atmosphere clings to the centers of the faces as well, unless you tell it to go somewhere else.
Space travel? Well, since nothing we currently have in orbit below Geosynchronous stuff is much over a thousand miles high, none of our current space technology applies. Keeping a satellite stable while orbiting this artifact is an entirely different matter, requiring a list of just which laws of physics to ignore.
As to the shape, and location of the seas, well, you have 317.17 million cubic miles of water to place pretty much wherever you want. If the forces that make the rock hold their shape are in effect, I suppose you have square oceans in the center of each face. If not, well, you have to ask your spell caster where he wants the oceans to be.
Indeed, it would be almost impossible for any sort of life to ever have gone from one face of the cube to another. If biogenesis started in one place, life would be restricted to that face; if there is no biospheric connection between the faces, life isn’t moving. The evolution of an advanced, inteligent species would be correspondingly unlikely; life would be restricted to a much smaller area, and opportunity for new species to develop would be reduced.
Even if humans did evolve, there are only two ways we as a spcies could get to any of the other faces:
The development of Apollo-sized launch vehicles, which would enable space travel over the edges and peaks.
By launching an over-the-edge land expedition. It would likely be as enormous an effort as the Apollo mission, maybe more; you would be constructing vehicles of some sort that would have to travel thousands of miles, uphill one way and down the other, most of it in terrain basically indistinguishable from the surface of the Moon, bringing oxygen and supplies with them.
Let me get this straight, you buy into the entire bizzaro world, with evolving life, and then, someone mentions a tunnel, and now you say, “But, a tunnel is impossible!”
If you can have a cubic Earth, you can have subway service.
Through which axis does the cube rotate, and how is that axis aligned with respect to the star it orbits? Answers to that question might make night / day and seasonal variation, well, interesting.
If sentient beings evolved in one of the ocean lens areas, their theology might be rather strange, too. I expect “God lives on the top of that huge freaking mountain that we can’t climb up because we run out of air.” to dominate. Once they developed enough to realize the shape of the world they were living on, I would expect that the realization that there were probably 5 more oceans on the planet to be a VERY strong incentive to figure out how to reach them. And, I suspect, proposals of their existence and such expeditions would result in very strong accusations of hubris / blasphemy from their religous establishments.
Addendum - because they may realize that there are 4 “corners” that they can’t climb up to, I might expect them to create quadumvirates of Gods ruling them.
Not visible from one of the oceans. I’m considering the early theology of the beings whose view is that they are living in a single ocean ringed by a mountain ridge with 4 corners.
Well, GPS satellites are at about half the height of geostationary satellites (i.e. about 20,000km), and I don’t believe much in the way of new space technology was necessary to accomplish this.
