Slashdot Mirror
The Earth is Getting Fatter
murk1e writes "The BBC News service has an article which reveals that the Earth is getting fatter. It is well known that the Earth is slightly wider at the equator than at the poles, it is less well known that for years, the Earth has been becoming more spherical. Now it appears that the trend has reversed, and the Earth is getting more obese (in the sense of shape change rather than changing mass). Perhaps the Earth should sue?"
How long before we finally go to far, and the Earth dissolves entirely?
Oh good lord. You can't "dissolve" a planet, no matter how much sci-fi you watch. You must input enough energy into it to overcome gravity, which no amount of drilling will do.
Please get a clue; I mean this not as an insult, but that I really, really wish there were more environmentally concerned people with a clue. If more environmentalists were fighting rationally, maybe they'd make some progress, instead of worrying about stupid things and then making stupid decisions.
This is probably just a normal oscillation the Earth undergoes, driven by the impetus of the various gravitational influences it experiences over time. If we waited around long enough, it would probably start going back.
In fact, just thinking about it, it's virtually inconceivable that it wouldn't oscillate this way. Consider the Earth as a giant drop of water cruising through space. (Note that on a plantary scale, everything is liquid, which is why the surface is smooth. If the Earth were the size of a cue ball, it would be the smoothest cue ball ever made. This is also why blowing up a planet and seeing huge chunks fly away is stupid; it's basically a liquid, it should 'blow up' like one.) Of course it oscillates, what with Saturn and Jupiter and innumerable other influences constantly 'twanging' it.
The only real question is what the period is.
Note that it is utterly inconceivable that humanity has had any significant effect on this process simply by moving mass around. Do a compution on the total mass we've ever moved around, at all. Be generous; go ahead and assume 2002-level industrial output for 10,000 years of human history, which will be an overestimate by about a factor of 5,000. Now divide by the mass of the Earth. Then remember to use your brain when thinking about human effects in the future. (Some things we can and do affect negatively. There are other things we could literally not hope to effect in a million years. Moving a significant fraction of the planet is one of those. Recall the planet is a huge sphere of which "the surface" is itself only a tiny, tiny fraction...)
That doesn't sound like Doppler-based measurement. It's simple laser ranging, though you've got to take the Doppler effect into account because of the relative motion of the Earth and the satellite.
Life isn't a violation of the second law, either. Put energy into a system, and you can reduce entropy locally. The only things that violate the second law are perpetual motion machines. (Small statistical glitches, like those reported last week, aren't violations either, as the second law is statistical.)
Ummmmmm. Did you consider that is is perhaps just due to slow ossilations triggered by the rotation and its orbit (it isn't exactly in a stationary system)? Frankly I cannot imagine how we could of possibly caused something like this, I mean do you realize just how trivial we and our actions are compared to the ENTIRE PLANET!! Also consider that when drilling for oil they put water and steam back into the ground to fill up the gap (other wise we would be seeing a lot of lawsuits when oil wells started collapsing). We have NOTHING to do with the effects/evils of mankind it is just yet another natural phenomenon I don't understand. Besides I don't see a few millimeters here and there translating into the Earth dissolving in a few hundred years:) In fact looking back was your post just a fairly subtle joke on environmental extremists?
I stole this Sig