No, the land will be unclimbable in every direction. Around each circular ocean, there will be a strip of habitable land. If you keep walking away from the ocean in any direction, at about the same distance you will run out of enough air to support life. Unless they can do some very subtle measurements, or they realise that the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is that of a cube, it will be hard to distinguish the Earth from a flat earth, with a single habitable region circular in shape. I don’t think they will be able to detect the vertexes until they can travel uphill carrying an oxygen supply with them.
(And most of the time, the Earth’s shadow on the Moon will be hexagonal rather than square).
Possible, yes. But no orbits less than the altitude of the vertices is practical. Makes the first step into space a lot steeper. I suppose ballistic suborbital shots into the “Great unknown faces of Earth” might happen.
By the way, concerning the shadow of the Earth on the Moon. So, I am to assume that the forces which made the Cubic Earth don’t create a Cubic Moon? Is the Sun round? Not complaining, just trying to understand the range and area of effect of the spell.
What if the Earth was completely round and smooth and bristling with people. Each person would view the Earth as very flat indeed, right?
Then if a giant knife sliced through the top 5th and the cut part raised 50 metres (and stayed there and somehow allowed the people there to fall through to the really flat smooth surface (lets ignore all the molten stuff).
Would the people there feel as if they were in a very straight tunnel? If not, why would the people on the curved side view the earth as flat and the guys on the flat side see curves?
And what would happen to the flat-siders going over the edge (as atmosphere wouldn’t play a part)?
I love how you guys expandon how religions would form, space travel and all. It’s truly exciting how things flesh out on the dope.
The minimum orbital height would depend on the axis of rotation. If it connects two vertices, you’re basically right, though in an equitorial orbit you could get by slightly lower. If it passes through the center of two faces, then the minimum height is that necessary to clear the center of a ridge line.
Good question. If we go with “all spheres are cubes,” this will definitely have some important effects. Among other things, pool, tennis and basketball are going to be tougher.
What about gravity on the surface? Climbing the 8 tits of the mother goddess, You get significantly farther from the center of the Earth, so I would expect the gravity to be less. But also, there is more mass under you at the tip, so that might make it more. Anyone with the tools to do this math?
Oh, and forget about square suns, think square subatomic particles (not that they are round anyways, … are they?)
Ignore gravity for a moment and just consider one face of the cube. Take a laser, aim it parallel to the ground and turn it on. No matter where you aim the laser, it will never intersect the face. So, any inhabitants of the face can look in any direction and never see anything that looks like a “mountain”.
Now, because of gravity, if they start walking in any direction the further they get away from the center of the face the more it will feel like they are walking “uphill”. But, if they turn on their laser and aim it parallel to the ground it still won’t intersect anything. The ground will always look perfectly flat.
Once they get near an edge or a corner they will see what will probably look like a drop off, but they will never see anything visually that looks like a mountain. It may feel like climbing one, but they won’t see one.
Again, assuming mass and volume are the same as for spherical Earth:
Standing at the center of a face, you are 5135 km from the center of mass. If gravity were simple here, gcube would be about 1.54*** gsphere (about 15 m/s^2). It will actually be less than that since there’s significant mass in the four nearest edges and vertices that cancels out (are the core and mantle cubes as well?).
Standing at the middle of an edge, you are 7262 km from the COM. Ignoring the fact that the gravitational attraction of the two adjacent vertices will cancel each other, I get gcube would be about 0.77*** gsphere (about 7.6 m/s^2).
Standing on a vertice (peak), you are 8894 km from COM. gcube here is 0.51*** gsphere (about 5 m/s^2).
At the peak you are also 3759 km higher in elevation than at the center of the face. 99% of our atmosphere is less than 100 km above the surface, 6471 km above COM.
The Shuttle and ISS orbit at ~350 km, so they would be in trouble, but geostationary orbit is ~35000 km so they would be okay assuming those massive peaks don’t throw off the orbit…
Let’s say that an inhabitant of Bizarro Earth trecked out to the edge. (He’s wearing a spacesuit to deal with the lack of atmosphere out there.) If my understanding of the situation is correct, he could look out over the edge and see what would seem to be an endless cliffside. But gravity would be pointing toward the center of the cube, so if he walked over the edge, he wouldn’t fall, but rather it would feel like he was walking downhill. Is this correct?
walking to an edge and then over would feel like walking on a roof. When you get there, you don’t feel like you are walking on a flat, it feels like you are walking uphill at 45 degrees and the other side would also be a 45 degrees downhill.
As some have said, the square faces would “feel” concave because you would experience the sensation of walking uphill as you moved away from the center of a face. So, hang a string with a weight on it, then measure the angle that string makes with the ground. Some simple trigonometry, which I’m too lazy to figure out right now, will tell you how far away from the center you are. When the angle is 90 degrees, you’re at the center. When the angle is 45 degrees, you’re at the middle of an edge. I believe it would be 60 degrees at the corner. In any case, you get the idea. It won’t tell you your exact position, of course, but it would still be pretty useful to know.
Assuming a frictionless, obstacle-less ground (while we’re assuming things…) I believe you could push an object from anywhere,* perpendicular to a line connecting your position to the middle of your face, and it would go around in circles forever, if you pushed it at exactly the right speed. I say “pushed” but I realize that without doing the math, it might be more like “launched” if you’re pretty far away from the center.
On a cubical world, perhaps mathematicians would have hit on polar coordinates before rectangular coordinates, whereas on a round world, we came up with rectangular coordinates first. Funny how that works.
*Except a spot where my trig device reads greater than 45
I’m thinking that hang gliding would be an absolute hoot on this planet. You could take yourself a few hundred miles out towards the edge, then start gliding. It’s downhill all the way, and eventually the gravitational pull gets slight enought that you’d just glide down to the gound and land.
It would be a slope that goes around the entire world. You might be able to glide thousands of miles, like gliding around the rim of a bowl.
What would be the radius of the “circles of life” in the center of each face where there is still breathable atmosphere (let’s call the atmosphere at the top of Mt Everest the limits of breathable)
The OP didn’t say each side would be flat. There is no reason why mountains couldn’t exist on any face, just as they exist on a sphere. They would be mountains relative to the nominal surface just like Earth’s mountains are relative to sea level (or some other surface average).
For those of you who are talking about “no air at the edges,” the OP didn’t specify the thickness of the atmosphere. Certainly it would be thinner nearer the edges and therefore have lower atmospheric pressure, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be thick enough all around to have some air at the edges.
A pressure of “1 atmosphere”, normally thought of as sea level on a globe, would have to be defined as 1 atmosphere at the center of a side.
I guess you could measure the distance you are from the center using a plumb bob. Now that I think about this, you could have two angles relative to the “horizontal”, with one indicating the distance from the center along a line of concentric circles, and the other indicating how close you were to a corner. That’s hard to write down in words but I can see it visually in my mind. Maybe some math genius can explain it better.