Just been re-reading Blish’s Cities in Flight series in which there is a brief mention of this.
In other words, setting the axis of spin perpendicular to the orbital plane. It’s quite easy to do if you have a few dozen spindizzy* generators available. (Unfortunately it seems Mayor Amalfi has hidden the blueprints so the Hruntan Empire can’t get their hands on one…)
So what would the effect be? There might still be slight seasons since the Earth’s orbit is not completely circular. How would particular places (the UK, for example) be altered?
*The spindizzy is of course, complete magic. It totally breaks relativity and just about every conservation law. I still want one, though…
The ecological effects would be catastrophic. Even if it would be better for life in the long run [citation needed], any change that drastic is going to be a horrible shock to most species. It’d probably be the second-largest mass extinction in the planet’s history (behind only the Great Oxygenation Event).
Oh, Lord, don’t give some maniac any ideas! I think the earth has had quite enough of our shenanigans. I think that would be the very huge and heavy straw that would break the camel’s back, so to speak.
The UK in particular, would be badly affected. Solar insolation would stabilise at a typical autumn day temperature, with no cold season and no warm or hot summer days. With no period of inactivity for winter, pests, plant diseases and vermin would proliferate. And that is just the simple stuff. I think the jet stream would settle down into a constant, regular pattern, probably bringing permanent storm systems from the west.
Would it really be that bad? I mean, some places that are currently temporate would become tropical, and vice versa, but a lot of species are widely distributed among different climate zones.
We are of course handwaving away any actual immediate physics consequences of the event itself. Like the disaster in Wells’s “Man who could work miracles”… as I said, the spindizzy is magic…
Lots of species have yearly cycles of some sort that are tied to the seasons, and you’d be disrupting all of those. Many, possibly most would be able to survive their own disruption, if that were all that happened, but the thing with ecology is that everything is connected. Some species would have major first-order effects, and those would in turn have second, third, and nth-order effects on all of the other species around them. At the same time as those species are each experiencing their own first-order effects.
Life as a whole is very adaptable. Individual living things are not. What’s often overlooked about “life adapting” is that usually, the way that works is through all of the things that don’t adapt dying off.
This. You know why the tropics are infamous for their disease and pestilence? It’s because in the tropics there is no season where the air and the upper layers of soil drop to the freezing point, forcing most invertebrates to only leave eggs for the following year.
In the thought experiment we are not changing the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
So the average global temperature would presumably not change much. But atmospheric phenomena (jet streams, hadley cells..) and ocean currents would probably be severely affected?
Oh, and of course: do we adjust the moon’s orbital plane too? What effect does this have on tides…?
Probably right. Not much difference compared with the Big Experiment.
If we want to get into real physics, it would not, I think, require a lot of energy. The speed of rotation does not change, just its orientation. So we’re not violating conservation of energy.
But of course we are egregiously violating conservation of angular momentum.
But of course the spindizzies have Heisenberg Compensators that ensure that every part of the Earth (solid, oceans and atmosphere) are adjusted in precise synchrony.
Though while we’re at it, we might as well fix the calendar. Adjust the day to be an exact divisor of the year.. avoid that leap year business….
Extinction of most life on a massive global scale.
Goodby to all migratory birds, butterflys, anything that migrates. Swallows follow the hatch of flying insects, going south for the winter and coming back north when flying insects come out, Goodby to all salmon and other anadromous fish. These species grow and feed in the ocean then come back to fresh water, on a seasonal schedule, to spawn. Salmon cannot spawn in deep water, they come back to fresh water and go through a major physical change and then find shallow streams with gravel to spawn, they cannot spawn in the ocean, there are many other anadromous fish too. All gone in a couple of years or one life cycle.
Every species relies upon another species for food and are also food for another. Krill in the southern ocean don’t just feed a few whales, they feed billions of tons of anchovies, billions of tons of protien, which are critical for even the human food chain. You would be surprised where this protein is going. What would be the effect upon the endless plankton in the ocean. People talk about trees but most of the oxygen on Earth is produced by the little plankton in the ocean, trees almost don’t matter. If ocean plankton die so do most other things.
A cascading series of extictions. There aren’t going to be any, or many humans left around to write science fiction. A few insects may make it, but they need food too, and they also need things to eat them.
It is not just going to be an endless Summer where you don’t need a coat. Evolution over many millions of years is needed.