Making Earth flat
With this one weird trick geologists hate
If you had the power to do absolutely anything for a day, what would you do?
Some say that they would eradicate all diseases or create limitless clean energy. Others say that they would end all wars, finally bringing peace to all humanity. I, on the other hand, would give Earth its biggest upgrade in 4.5 billion years.
Why a flat Earth is superior
You can thank our planet’s round shape, tilt, and spin for blazing summers and freezing winters, time zones that give you jet lag, and a weird physics thing that “curves” the path of bullets horizontally the farther you shoot them.
If Earth were flat and didn’t spin, our lives (albeit short-lived) would be far more interesting. This is why — given unlimited power — I would turn our planet into a cosmic frisbee. Here are some benefits of this plan:
1. Earth is now San Francisco
On a flat Earth, people at the edges would be very scared because gravity “skews” the farther you are from the center. Since you’re always being pulled towards the Earth’s center of mass, running towards the edge would feel like jogging anywhere in the Bay Area. This effect was illustrated in the popular Vsauce video “Is Earth Actually Flat?".
On the way back, you’d simply be able to roll home — no car needed! Unfortunately, you would also break every bone in your body.
2. Fun weather
If Earth was laying flat alongside the sun (picture a coin laying next to a ball), its surface would receive less sunlight, causing the planet to cool rapidly. Additionally, there would be no seasons — a minor problem for agriculture, wildlife, and civilization in general.
The upside is that if you were standing at the edge of Earth furthest from the sun, the sky would glow a brilliant reddish-orange due to the same phenomenon that gives sunsets their unique color. Since Earth’s atmosphere scatters shorter wavelengths of light more than longer wavelengths, the blue light will have scattered by the time it gets to you. As a result, there would be an eternal golden hour (or at least as long as Earth can resist crumbling under its own weight).
3. Earth would be one-of-a-kind
In a universe full of nondescript spherical planets, it could us do us some good to stand out from the crowd. The closest we have to this in our solar system is Saturn’s moon Pan — known by us commoners as a space empanada.
How to flatten the Earth
To actually pull this off, there are a couple approaches we can take. The first would be the hydraulic press approach, in which we construct a massive apparatus capable of squeezing Earth into a disc. However, we’ve built enough Earth-destroying machines already, so I will opt for the second approach: the pizza dough technique. Earth already slightly bulges at the equator due to its rotation, so if we spin the planet fast enough, we might be able flatten it.
Let’s start by doubling Earth’s rotational speed.
First of all, our sleep cycles would be thrown off due to the fact that days would only be twelve hours. What’s more, the additional centripetal force would cause the oceans and atmosphere to quickly pool at the equator. According to Witold Fraczek, an analyst at the Environmental Systems Research Institute:
It would clearly be a disaster . . . I think everything in the equatorial region would be covered with water.
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be fast enough to make a significant difference in the flatness of Earth. A formula by mathematician Colin Maclaurin tells us that in order to flatten the planet by a third, we would have to spin it a little over nine times faster. Let’s check our fast-o-meter:
At this point, Earth would resemble a clementine, although this change would likely take thousands of years to occur. Days are now about three hours long — roughly long enough to watch either Barbie or Oppenheimer, but not both. Life at the equator would have long been destroyed by colossal amounts of water. If we sped up Earth’s rotation even more, the planet would stop flattening and become what is known as a Jacobi ellipsoid — a Tic Tac, in other words.
To achieve some semblance of flatness, we’ll have to spin Earth so fast that it gets shredded apart. Since gravity is responsible for holding the planet together, we just need to figure out how to overcome it with centripetal force. To do this, we’ll have to increase Earth’s rotational speed by a factor of 17.
Things aren’t looking good for our planet. Days are a little less than two hours and anything at the equator is now weightless. The term “planet” might become outdated as the upper crust begins to break up, leaving only Earth’s denser mantle and core intact. Even so, this wouldn’t be fast enough to shape Earth into a frisbee. For comparison, the second-fastest rotating star ever discovered looks like this:
This star spins over a thousand times faster than Earth, and it’s still nowhere close to a disc. It’s safe to say that flattening a planet would be impossible given the physical laws that govern our existence. To misquote famed scientist Carl Sagan:
If you wish to make a flat Earth from scratch, you must first invent the universe.