Ah…The sound of your buzzing alarm yanks you out of sleep. You swing your arm over
to shut the thing off without looking. “Get up, no snoozing! You’ll be late for work…”
When you pull open the curtains, instead of facing the pleasant orange hues of the rising
sun, you’re met with bright burning light that boils the room. You shield your eyes
and close the curtains fast.
“Did I oversleep?!” The panic rises in you as a bead of sweat rolls down your forehead.
You run to your phone, still on the nightstand. The screen shows 6AM, yet it feels (and clearly
looks!) like lunchtime. You check the window again.
The trees are forcefully pushed by gusts of wind, and their branches are scattered throughout
the streets. The birds struggle to fly, and they drift away with the wind. And you just
now notice that your stomach is feeling a little queasy. Either the panic of oversleeping,
not knowing what’s going on, or something else…
“Bing!” – You get a notification on your phone that reads: “EMERGENCY ALERT!
– THE EARTH’S SPIN HAS CHANGED, DAYS COULD LAST ONLY 6 HOURS!”
You read it several times just to make sure your eyes aren’t deceiving you. “What
in the world…”
Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time for this planet! Yup, a long, long time ago, when the
Earth was just formed, a day only lasted 4 hours. When our young little rock turned 30,000
years old, the day had gained 2 more hours. You see, in the beginning, the moon was closer,
and it influenced how long a day would be throughout our planet’s history. As it moved
away, the days got longer.
Indeed, our Earth used to spin faster, but we’ve never experienced that first hand.
Our human ancestors came to existence 4 million years ago (I wasn’t around then), but I’ve
heard that a typical day was close to 24 hours. That’s all we’ve ever known!
So, here we are. If you’ve ever complained about there not being enough hours in the
day, well, you’ll only get a quarter of that time now. Our own planet has decided
to try and relive its youth by spinning faster. We’re now back to 6 hours in a day. That’s
less than we need for a good night’s sleep and less than a typical work shift. But, most
importantly, how will we adjust? Will we survive?...
6 hours breaks down to 2½ hours for sleep, another 2½ for work, and just 1 hour for
chill time. If there is any, because we’ll also have to shower, eat, and clean! Even
the daily commute to work will be a huge waste of our precious time. (well that won’t change…)
Unless you work from home, or live right by your office and the workplace is just a flight
of stairs away. Those will be the lucky ones…
The real problems start with the 2½ hours of sleep. We’ll constantly feel tired, and
those dark undereye circles will become our species’ new trademark. There won’t be
enough time to rest or reach REM sleep – that usually happens 90 minutes after we’ve fallen
asleep, and it has 5 whole stages lasting 10 to 20 minutes each. If the buzzing sound
of our alarm clocks interrupts that every day, we might lose the ability to dream!
And 2½ hours to be productive – what a challenge! We’ll have to squeeze our whole
schedule into just 150 minutes and work fast! But that too will be impossible. Without enough
sleep, we’ll struggle to concentrate and remember things. So, overall work performance
will likely drop.
I bet the coffee industry will thrive on these new 6-hour days! We’ll be reaching for cup
after cup to keep us productive on such little sleep. But we’ll have to forget about lunch
breaks – there’s no time. If we could have one, it’ll only last 8 minutes. On
that note, let’s talk meals…
It won’t be feasible to fit breakfast, lunch, and dinner into our 1-hour chill time. So,
we’ll probably need to choose 1 of the 3. We’ll eat a full meal every 6 hours, which
might be difficult, but not impossible to get used to! Our eating schedule will be:
breakfast on Monday, lunch on Tuesday, and dinner on Wednesday.
Our weekends will only be 12 hours, so we’ll have to make a tight schedule. Will it be
a football game? What about the movies? Or running errands? You can only choose one of
the three this time!
Entertainment will be a luxury. Maybe the industry will collapse altogether. A movie
will last as long as our sleep time. So, for this to work, films will need to be cut short.
The same goes for sporting events. And shopping? Stores will be open for just 3 to 3½ hours
maximum a day. I bet they’ll all be packed.
We’ll work around 50 hours every month. Sounds like a good deal at first, but remember:
our traditional 30-day month is now down to a little over 7 days. And good luck remembering
to change the date so often! But that’s a minor inconvenience compared to the real
problems we’re about to encounter…
Remember the emergency notification we got earlier? In real time, it’ll take days to
arrive because we’ll also have issues with our satellites. They orbit our planet at the
same speed to match the Earth’s rotation. That way, they can always be at the same position.
If the earth starts spinning faster, satellite communications will be interrupted. Aviation,
banking, weather forecasting, TV, radio, GPS – they’ll all be thrown out of whack unless
we can readjust the satellites. But even more serious problems are on the way…
Since the beginning of our existence, our internal clock has been on a 24-hour cycle.
There will be a little less than 3 hours of nighttime, and more than 3 hours of daytime.
That’s not enough sunlight for any living being to survive on earth.
For starters, plants will struggle to photosynthesize properly. Some of them will flourish, others
will grow but they’ll be weak and yellow, and the rest will seize to exist. That will
affect the whole food chain.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, beans, carrots – no longer on the menu. They need at least
8 hours of continuous sunlight to photosynthesize. So, you might as well forget about that salad
you were going to have for lunch on Tuesday. But don’t worry, our beloved coffee trees
will still make it!
Some animals won’t be able to feed, and aquatic life will struggle. Types of catfish,
snails, shrimps, and algae-eaters will have a hard time finding food in the waters and
might go extinct.
You’ll notice your hair growing at a slower rate, your nails becoming weak and brittle.
Fine lines will appear sooner on our skin, and our bones might start to feel weaker because
we lack the sunshine vitamin in our system. We’ll also see an immediate effect on our
mood too, what with the lack of sleep and sunlight . Hey whadaya you mean “bad mood”?
I ain’t got no “bad mood”! Oops, My bad.
But the real issue here is natural disasters. With the earth spinning 4 times faster, the
weather will be disastrous. With the new solar days, our current 12-mph gentle breezes will
translate to tens of miles per hour wind gusts. During hurricane season, winds that now travel
around 75 mph will pick up to more than 200 mph. Enough to take down trees, buildings,
and anything else that stands in their way.
Islands won’t do well either. With the earth spinning faster around its axis, there will
be higher tides. Small islands will sink below the waters, and coastlines will become submerged.
All the beaches we know today will seize to exist, and new ones will appear further inland.
Aquatic life in those shallow waters might not survive the change.
Continents might also move faster, and it’ll feel like we’re on board a cruise ship that
it’s heading to a collision with another vessel.
But it doesn’t end there. Oh. Golly. Right now, the spin of the earth gives our planet
its shape. It’s not a perfect sphere – it bulges at the equator. The new rotation will
turn it into something like a squished dough ball. That could cause continents to split
and break in ways that will be impossible for any living being to survive.
Good thing there are pretty much zero chances of something like this really happening. But
it’s a fun thought experiment. Yeah. This is really not the kind of spin we want to
put on this. And, if it ever does, then maybe we could move to another planet in our solar
system and save ourselves the trouble? I hear Mars could be habitable – what do you think?
Me, I’d take a Milky Way. Much better Candy Bar than Mars Bar. Just my opinion. Give me
yours in the comments.
Okay, we’ve saved the world once again here on the Bright Side. My work is done here.
If you learned something new today, then give the video a like and share it with a friend!
And here are some other cool videos I think you'll enjoy. Just click to the left or right
and stay on the Bright Side of life!