Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a mad scientist, it's clear to me that the best solution is just to adjust the Earth's rotation to be exactly 24 hours.

Maybe 24 and a half, so we can all have a bit of a sleep in every morning.

View on HN

No it should be 24.0159254 old-hours, so that the orbital period is an integral number of earth rotations. Assuming you want to waste your mad-scientist powers on silly bureaucratic nonsense, and not on, say, spinning the earth fast enough to lower surface gravity (leap tall buildings in a single bound to get to Starbucks).

No, speed up the orbital period too so we can have a 360-day year.

Quarterly reports coming sooner? No thanks. Let's slow down the orbital period to 400 days. Nice, 100 day quarters. And, as that change leads to other changes in our daily life, maybe I'll finally eventually use that "grad" button on my calculator.

The article discussed that problem, indirectly. The earth is always slowing down, so even if you fixed it perfectly it would become broken with time.

So we keep on fixing it. Big ol' railguns firing mass out into space. (If we run out, borrow some from the moon.)

It would be easier to carefully collide asteroids at an oblique angle.

Wouldn't that make a mess though?

Put the impact zone in your favorite geopolitical enemy's backyard. Kills two birds with one, err, stone.

If we run out, we have problems much worse than varying day length.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com