# What If The Earth Spun The Other Way

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-earth-spun-the-other-way/471844>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 8, 2008, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-earth-spun-the-other-way/471844 "2008-11-08T21:23:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 38

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**Author:** ![groo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecd19e/32.png) [@groo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groo)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2008, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-earth-spun-the-other-way/471844/38 "2008-11-10T16:30:46Z")

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> [@si\_blakely](#):
>
> One side of the planet would get really cold, and one side would get really hot. Around the terminator a hellacious storm would rage as hot air from the sun side pushes over the cold air from the dark side, cools and falls. Really, really unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as freezing to death in the dark side.
> 
> Of course, over the course of a year the sun exposed portion of the planet would move, so I suspect that the situation would be inimical to continued survival of life.
> 
> Si

Note that in [this documentary](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/), they showed how it’s possible to use strategically placed nukes throughout the liquid hot magma of the earth’s core to inject enough angular momentum that it can resume its rotation. Presumably, we could just use a little more energy to stop the rotation and subsequently start it back up in the opposite direction. We should be able to test this theory in just a few days, but we’d have to get more than $100 billion (2003 dollars) of unobtanium which, obviously, we won’t be able to do until we get the economy back in shape.

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