What If the Earth Was Shaped Like a Cube?

Just explain that God made it round so aircraft could fly round it and satellites can orbit it. If it were a cube life would just be harder to cope with.

Marvelous! A good solid scientifically based answer......... That wouldn't wash with my kids at all, they would (quite rightly) say I'm just avoiding answering the question. This is just the sort of thing I would have asked, and to be honest, I'd love to see a good scaled diagram of how high up the 8 mountains the sea would go, how high would the mountains be? (the 8 corners) Would they rise above the atmosphere? Grrr, my days been ruined! To busy to work it out!

P.S. A cube shaped earth, in conflict with the laws of physics - ie. gravity likes balls, would be the final definitive proof of gods existence, therefor proving finally that god does not exist, as he refuses to show proof and relies on faith. QED. (Douglas Adams, what a guy!)

It just goes to prove simple answers can raise questions.

Sorry?

Who or what is 'God' ?

If the world was a cube then presumably there would be a weird set of natural laws which had caused it....maybe a cube would some how be efficient.

So we'd have cubic rain drops....

Lead shot mode by dropping molten lead would be cubic....

That would be really good 'cos then, just maybe guns wouldn't be so easy to make?

Don't count on it.

The only reason that planets form spheres is the gravity overwhelms the cohesive forces between the rock and metal that makes up the planet and forces them into the spherical shape. Having a liquid or semi liquid core also helps.

If you had a solid lump of material that didn't melt and was cohesive enough to resist its own gravity then there is no reason you couldn't have a planet shaped like dunny.

Another possibility is to reduce the mass and hence force of gravity, so that it can not overwhelm the cohesive forces in the material that makes up the planet. Asteroids come in just about every shape so it would be physically possible to construct a cubic asteroid.

Somebody might like to calculate how large you could actually construct a cubic planet from of a solid lump of rock, could be before the force of gravity became too strong to cause the rock to fail and form a sphere. If you kept the size below the point that the material could melt due to gravity it should hold its shape.

Right, whenever in nature, that you have opposing, internal and external forces, such as in our example of Centripetal forcing our vs gravitational pulling in, the result is likely to be spherical.

- The pressure geometry must be omnidirectional (of O-type symmetry)

- The material must be malleable enough to allow, or the forces great enough to enforce.

The sun's inward pulling gravity vs the inner core's outward-pushing radiation pressure, results the same: a sphere.

I have single handedly imported the dunny to my local area, I am trying to get it supplanted by thunder box!

Spare a thought for the Americans.

Gravity will rectify the imbalance rapidly.

Effect on population if water is ignored: everybody will be running around to avoid earthquakes etc.

Consider the following experiment: Take a satellite dish and put it horizontal facing up to represent a portion of one of the faces around the centre of the square earth.

Put an even layer of sand in the dish.

Represent people with pieces of matches and match boxes as buildings.

The objects must be planted vertical to the real earth.

The idea is to have the objects pointing to the centre of the cube when the surface is flat tent.

The model will closely simulate the effect of gravity on a flat surface of a cubed earth.

The rim of dish can now be tapped gently with a pencil or water can be poured in.

Is the Earth/Cube standing on a pair of opposite corners for the North/South axis, or is it lying flat top and bottom? I wonder what the out of balance Earth/Cube would do if it were spinning at the approximate 1,000 miles per hour at the equator like our round one? Hmmmmm. Maybe some chunks would depart as the World began to shake itself apart. Do you think the storms behind the corner vortices would place them in a Super Duper category.

I would say to him the Earth is cube shaped and ask him to convince me otherwise.

Don't even ask the question, the Borg may be listening!

All the gravity-would-put-it-back arguments are good... in this part of reality. A cubic earth would have to form as such, and in that sense the governing physics would be drastically different from what we know here. To truly imagine this, you have to discard every preconceived notion, every intuitive process that deals with physics as you know it, and construct a universe in your head where the cube is the "natural" shape, instead of the sphere. How would gravity work? Would gravitational fields be restricted to only move in perpendicular directions? Would all the cubic planets in a solar system be aligned in the same directions, regardless of position, like dipoles in a magnetic field? Would planetary orbits be square instead of circular? What about light, would it only be emitted perpendicularly from the planar surfaces of the sun, straight like a spotlight?

There is no such thing as a simple question - a question is simply a catalyst for thought. How far you take it is up to you, and simple questions are only simple if you haven't thought them out all the way through.

Considering that the earth was formed when a fireball cooled it stands to logic it formed into the round shape because of ..

1. Gravity

2. It was rotating.

Just imagine what would have happened it it was not rotating.

There would be no day or night. There would be desert on half the earth & other half would be a frozen mass. We would not be here to question & answer !

"There would be no day or night. There would be desert on half the earth & other half would be a frozen mass. We would not be here to question & answer !"

-----

You were obviously educated on one of those tetrahedral planets. Have you considered a career as an itinerant deaf-mute?

I think you must be be one of those that believe what another man has written BLINDLY.

Please read the caveats first & why it would be a cube & not a spheroid. Then yap off your mouth.

If even today the earth were to stop rotating, soon enough you WOULD see the scenario I am talking about.

I like to yap. And I have an aversion to caveats, preferring instead to believe what another man has written BLINDLY. Take the vacuous tripe you've posted, for instance...

I think you would end up with something like this.

The brow regions are arid regions where the atmosphere is too thin to support life, the white areas are regions of preeminent snow cover, the green the arable land and the blue the oceans. The cube would be about 7014 Km down each edge if it ere to have the same volume as the earth.

As you can see there would be precious little arable land and the oceans would still form a spherical shape so they would be very deep and the middle. Everything would slope downhill towards the centre of the six oceans and traveling from one region to another would entail leaving the atmosphere

I thought opposite sides were supposed to add up to 7.

Thanks, Masu. The original question was: WHAT IF.... and most responses are trying to argue that a cubic shape Earth would be impossible... isn't that begging the question? Use your imagination and play "What if...". From Masu's drawing, it is easier to see that gravity would be weaker at the apexes of the cube. So, what can one say about going toward or away from a lower-gravity point, or living there? Would it be easier to launch rockets and space vehicles from the lower gravity points of the cube? Need a person be fearful of the speed of rotation at the extreme corner of the cube, considering the reduced gravity? Especially if there were mountains there? How much would centrifical force counter gravity at the points of the cube? Would seas and lakes predominate the flat areas? Pretend you are driving a vehicle as you reach the apex of a corner and start down the other side. What strange sights and effects would one encounter? Would it be like climbing a mountain? What about clouds and rain? THINK!

I really envy guys like you who can afford calculators with those fancy x^y keys.

I think there is some assumption here about the planets day length/axis of tilt etc. Also does it have a cubic moon or some kind of thing made of 8 hemispheres. Islands would have to be built in the seas to optimize sports conditions.

Hi Masu,

Your assumptions are based on only the shape being different.

If the forces which created the cube operated in the three cartesian ordinates, would the effect on the water and atmosphere not be driven by these forces also?

Would there be any rotation, as the "lubrication" of the atmosphere would be uneven against what remains in the surrounding space.

It could be that different orientations of magnetic plane would make it impossible to travel from one face to another, as passing the corner would lead to falling sideways across the next side, where the inhabitants would need to jump out the way (sliding tackle?).

I have done a little bit of a redraw of the cubic Earth and added lines of longitude and latitude. The red line is the equator and the blue is the ocean but as it is liquid it will still form a spherical shape, I think!

My original dimensions were also incorrect and the length of each edge is about 10,270 Km. For simplicity I have made the oceans so that the have the same spherical radius of the Earth as it actually is. In reality they would be considerably smaller as the depth of the oceans in miniscule when compared with the diameter of the earth.

If I get time and somebody else hasn't already done the calculations I will work out how large each of the six oceans would actually be.

Masu, you are having way too much fun!

Shhh - I want to see lego-like people and fish- he's on a roll

GO MASU ,GO MASU,GO MASU......

You goblin. He's a hard working Ozzie, and by the time he's done, we still debating here, and he's on his way to patent this as a new Rubik-Cubic, selling this to our kids.

Who do you think is due to pay for your kid's toy, me?

Why wouldn't or couldn't the axis of rotation pass through a pair of opposing corners? That would place most of the mass near the equatorial plane, consistent with the centripetal forces acting on a rotating mass...

"Why wouldn't or couldn't the axis of rotation pass through a pair of opposing corners?"

I knew somebody was going to ask that!

The reason that I drew it with the axis like this is it makes the projection a lot simpler. The drawing was done with a 2D drafting package and so the 3D rendering is all done manually. I havn't done conical/cubic intercepts since I was at high school and my brain hours when I try and get to remember that far back. To put the axis through the corners makes is considerably more complex and to be honest I can't remember how to do it.

If you are really kind and ask nicely, I may be persuaded to muster the last few brain cells left from that era and coax them into revealing their secrets.

Groveling also helps!

You could go the whole hog and make something like this. I wrote a program in Qbasic once to do this (which confims my insanity ) . I am not going to try and repeat it , and certainly not with seas. Using my Qbasic I had to set up a 3D transform with cubic equations etc (I was toying with it for 3D stress analysis). Better to buy a package someplace and save the brain-cells. I need the few I have left.

What a cool object!

I know , and that's despite my fur.

...despite my fur...

Current or previous?

My mother gave it to me . Who says I can't dodge a question. Anyway , you didn't question my leather cape .

Nice going, Masu!

But you should think fairly of the other of possibility when North and Shouth pole were the corners of the cube, and no must for a side of the cube having an ocean at all.

Consider too, if the surfaces were frictionless, then everyone at the corner will slide to the centroid of the side and pass it while reaching the other corner, back and forth performing oscillation traveling, free of charge, off course :)

Is this an internal or external view. Also is it rotating. ?

I think it's probably not rotating in order to be a perfect cube. People will be able to live on 4 of the corners and connecting edges , but only if an atmosphere can deflect sunlight to them in winter and they can move over the edge to remain in the winter /summer boundary.

Hello Masu. Could you include on your drawing a representation of the earth as it would appear in scale? According to my hurried calcs, the 'mountains' would only rise above the earths original surface by 14% of the original radius. Cheers, Mate, mind the thunderbox.

Hey but that is one funky planet!

We would still believe the earth was flat and we would fall off if journeyed to the edge. Most likely would for the earth to form as a cube throws off a lot of the physics we know today.

Hmm.. You mean the earth is not flat? It is common knowledge the earth is flat.

Here is some proof.

^_^

The earth is flat... It just exists in curved space!

Not true. Space in our part of the universe is flat. If you do a little cosmic surveying and use three landmarks to create a triangle, and then measure the side lengths and angles of the corners, it conforms to typical euclidean geometry, within the tolerances of our measurements. if space were curved, the angles and lengths would not add up "properly" using the geometry/trigonometry of a flat plane. i.e., the angles of the triangle would not add to 180°.

Basically, you'd have eight humongous mountains.

Speculation is futile. You will be approximated.

You have had too many sour grapes.

Not a NexGen fan, eh? Also a play on the Intel FPU debacle, but perhaps you are too young to remember...

Europium??

What in the heck was the "Intel FPU debacle?? I must have slept through that, but I know what the 4004 and 8008 were.

Sincerely

Bill

For the rest:

I sure would not want to put satellites in orbit with that world. Those sudden 90 degree turns at the corners could be murderous... unless we could incorporate the fact that cos x is REAL while sin x is IMAGINARY... but they are orthogonal. Luckily, this whole concept is imaginary.

Bill

... would not want to put satellites in orbit...

Eight geostationary rigs would do the job nicely, facets being flat and all that.

Eight geostationary rigs would do the job nicely, facets being flat and all that

I would prefer 2 very tall masts. I suggest thay are aligned with axis of rotation.

Here's a historical link about it. Intel got quite a black eye over this; not so much because there was a problem, but because of their response to it.

"Also a play on the Intel FPU debacle"

A label seen on a PC from the era!

Intel inside don't divide!

Yeah, Intel was the butt of many jokes, including the Borg reference: "Division is futile. You will be approximated!"

Square Earth? Make it so!

Hey, that works even better, Borg cube!

i guess y'all have never visited htrae ????

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World

The earth must be a cube. What is the origin of "over the edge"?

Changes:

Edgeporters instead importers.

Columbus would have been known as an edge crosser.

Tunneling would have been a major occupation.

Try these links ;

http://www.jimloy.com/astro/earth3.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/oneminutemovies/watch/cube.shtml

http://www.math.utoronto.ca/~drorbn/People/Eldar/thesis/mapOfEarth.htm

You people! Don't you know the earth is a tetrahedron? Or haven't you ever heard of "the four corners of the earth"? Duh!

I know that the earth is like a olive? How and where do you know the earth is a tetrahedron?

NC-

I was only joking. I don't know where the expression "four corners of the Earth" comes from. It may harken back to the days when people believed the earth was flat. Perhaps the surface was thought to be square.

Bil Morrow

P.S. My apologies to the flat earth society