Is Our Planet Out Of Whack?

[cabinetman]

I was enjoying a daydream the other day and kind of languishing in mental oblivion, when all of a sudden it hit me. No, Alice did not stop over with brownies. The revelation goes like this:

If you take a mounted car tire and add weight to one spot, it throws off the balance - right? Think about this. In the last 100 or so years a lot of concrete and steel have been added to different cities, and in great amounts, which could be thought of as adding weight to a wheel. Has our planets' orbit and its rotation been affected by all the construction and tall condominiums, and buildings. I realize that the materials for all of this comes from this planet, but it got specifically placed.

What do you all think?



"I'M NEVER WRONG - BUT I'M NOT ALWAYS RIGHT"

[Stytooner]

Mother Nature does a fine job of redisbursing materials. Huricanes, Earthquakes, Tornadoes, Tidal Waves, Wild Fires etc...
She keeps it on an even keel.

[Russianwolf]

The earth has been wobbling for millions of years, it's NEVER been IN balance. I don't think our little creations make much of a difference. Think about what Mother Nature does herself with valcanos? How about earthquakes? She displaces more weight than we miniscule creatures could ever hope to move, and she does it in the blink of an eye.

[final_t]

Matter of scale. Assume the tire is already balanced, put a single drop of super glue on it. That's the effect of New York City on the planet.

[Copper]

I agree with final_t. It's a matter of scale. Also, most building materials come from somewhere local (it costs to much to transport concrete, etc.). Therefore, there isn't really much movement of weight going on.

[scorrpio]

Height of Mt. Everest is about 1/1600th of Earth diameter. It's like a 1/64" speck of dirt on a 2-foot diameter tire. Compare largest human-made structure to Everest.

Niot to mention that Earth is liquid inside - so any unbalance is immediately redistributed.

[Kristofor]

Think of Mt. Everest, pushing 30,000 feet of solid rock, on top of thousands of miles of solid/semi-solid rock...

My math may be off, but a quick napkin calculation says that a 1000 foot tall skyscraper (mostly empty anyhow) on the surface of the earth would be equivalent to a 0.0008" bump on the surface of a 36" wheel.

At least for the moment I think we're safe from careening off into space due to an imbalance!

Edit - Funny, same thought at about the same time.

Kristofor.

[Otter]

it is a matter of perceptual scale..

Mother Nature does balance things, I bet in the cosmos there is a body of the same mass wobbling 180 out of phase with us, or 2 others each a half of the mass, 120 out of phase. Scale is the key, and it is always balanced, just not in balance.

[cwsmith]

If you take a look at the planet, you'll notice that it's out of balance anyway. Most of the land mass is in the northern hemisphere.

However, as you mentioned, we're primarily taking stuff from the planet and changing it's form to use for buildings and other structures. Sure we're shifting it from many different locations to more centralized areas, but the total redistribution is insignificant when compared to the total mass.

The harm that we do to the planet is mostly environmental. Even then, there are conflicting considerations. For example, a recent article exclaimed that con trails (condensation) produced by jet aircraft was blocking out as much a 15% of the sun's rays on certain days. On the other hand, the depletion of the ozone layer allows more of the sun's rays. Which is worse? Overall, things seems to be "out of balance", but to what extent.

Similarly, we have a definite warming trend and it is in fact melting the polar ice. In addition to the calamity of increasing storms, hotter summers, etc., this melting contributes mass amounts of fresh water to the oceans, which in turn slows the natural "streams" (like the Gulf Stream) that help regulate and even out the planet's temperature. When this melting reaches an extreme, the "streams" may cease their natural flow; in which case, the ocean may no longer distribute the temperatures as we know it and places like our Pacific Northwest, the warm California coast, Europe, and parts of the Northeast will enter a mini-Ice Age. In which case the polar areas again will regain thier losses, and the cycle may begin anew.

Unfortunately, we humans may well pay the price as we suffer crop loss, starvation, and wars over natural resources and diminishing agricultural land.

As George Carlin mentioned in his quote (on the other thread of this subject), the planet will survive... but many of us may not. In which case, we might all want to take pictures of ourselves with our big SUV's, houses, and other examples of conspictuous consumption, so that our great, great grandchildren will know why their live's are different.

CWS

[just4funsies]

Russianwolf is correct. The Earth has been wobbling for millions of years. It is cyclical, it is normal, and our our goings-on are having little effect on the wobble itself. What we should be more concerned about is what we are doing to the basic CHEMICAL equilibrium of the environment. Mother Nature only has but one way to deal on the appropriate scale with the complex poisons we have wrought, and the thoughtless depletion of natural resources, and that is to wipe the slate clean and start again. The destruction of the ozone balance in the atmosphere, and the resultant warming from solar radiation, are the most immediate manifestations of this ever-increasing threat, but there are many others. The time to downplay or dismiss the consequences as far too distant is over. In the last hundred years, we have done more damage to this planet, and to the future, than was done in the prior TEN MILLION. Whether creationist or evolutionist, it should be universally recognized that something IS WRONG, we are the cause, and we'd better correct it SOON. Sorry if I killed anybody's buzz, but it is what it is.

[JBCrooks]

You guys are overthinking the problem. The main difference is that a tire reacts to the gravity of the earth, and anything man builds on earth has so little gravity as to not matter.

[paulstenlund]

I think of it as a liquid filled golf ball flying smoothly, and we are pumping out the liquid from one side at an alarming rate

[Kristofor]

The time to downplay or dismiss the consequences as far too distant is over. In the last hundred years, we have done more damage to this planet, and to the future, than was done in the prior TEN MILLION. Whether creationist or evolutionist, it should be universally recognized that something IS WRONG, we are the cause, and we'd better correct it SOON. Sorry if I killed anybody's buzz, but it is what it is.

Give or take 10,000 years ago there would have been a mile of ice above my head... The planet can be pretty mean on its own.

60 odd million years ago a "small" impact from space wiped out a significant portion of life on the planet.

The question to be asked may not be "how can we be nice to Planet". To ask this question requires a religious or ethical approach to resource management. This is a valid approach if that's the intention and people realize that's what they're doing (and accept the implications of perhaps assigning more value to things like a Lion or an Ebola virus than a human).

From a scientific perspective I would think the question should be "What can we do to ensure our continued survival at a level we find acceptable?" This probably involves many things including conservation, technological advancement, and development of new resources (there's a big fusion plant 93M miles away giving off tons (literally) of "free" energy). A livable planet is not the end goal, but a byproduct of the goal of living well. If as a society "well" means 6000sqft houses, so be it that's half of the trade off, the other side is that there need to be fewer people living like this or much more efficient use of resources if it's to be sustainable.

Kristofor.

[just4funsies]

Well thought out, Kristofor. What we have to do is stop making mistakes, because they are now much too costly. Rather than learning from mistakes, which even the simplest of animals can do, we have to start using our self-described superior intellects to learn BEFORE making them. I'd like my grandkids to grow up in a world that I didn't screw up for them...

[zedzeo]

Actually, we have affected the planet's tilt, orbit and gravitational field - by building dams. I remember learning about it in a geology course a few years back. Here's an interesting article about how different natural and human changes can effect the earth's rotation.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationwo...,5860508.story
Quote:
"As snow blankets the mountains each winter, it shifts enormous weight away from the Earth's core, causing the planet to rotate more slowly. (Think of the spinning ice skater spreading her arms.)
Even the filling of the Three Gorges Dam in China will have an effect: According to Chao's and Gross' calculations, it will lengthen the day by 60 billionths of a second."

Basically, by redistributing so much water in all the reservoirs around the world, the planet is wobbling slightly differently. So slightly that only geophysicists notice perhaps. But your original thought of us moving things around changing the course of the planet, is true.

We can have an impact on the earth no matter how large it is. I think this is sometimes lost when we think of how big the planet is. Six billion humans can do some major damage. After all, the reason that life evolved past photosynthetic microbes and eventually ventured out onto land was because this first from of life's waste product was oxygen. Before this, there was little oxygen in the atmosphere. The oxygen rich atmosphere eventually gave rise to the ozone layer to filter out harmful UV rays allowing animals to thrive out in sunlight as sunblock wouldn't be invented for a while yet. (the ozone layer by the way is another good example of us altering the planet as a whole) http://www.moorlandschool.co.uk/earth/earthorigin.htm