So sings Stuart Braithwaite in Belle & Sebastian’s 2010 hit… er… I Want The World To Stop as he laments the mundanity of modern life, the all too rapid passing of time, and the moments that are now but memories.
I’m not sure whether he means the spinning of the planet or the orbiting of the planet around the sun, but it doesn’t really matter. Either would be absolutely catastrophic.
Let’s be very clear right now: Stopping the world would be a terrible thing to do.
And because of that, whatever your personal reasons for this – even if it is the melancholic and introspective desire to relive fleeting reminiscences – we should probably avoid doing it.
The world only works because it’s moving, both round and round, and round and round the sun.
If you stop the spinning, in a best case scenario in which this is done gradually, one side of the earth would be constantly facing the sun and the other would be constantly… not. Humans, animals, plants, and indeed THE EARTH wasn’t made for this. While the hot side would be extremely uncomfortable until everything eventually died from being too hot, the cold side would likely die more quickly, with no sunlight to keep plants alive and the animals warm. I’m giving us a few weeks or maybe a couple of months at best before we’re all gone. Joy.
Of course, if you instantly stop the world spinning, bad things will happen a lot more quickly. At the poles, you might be fine for a short while, but anywhere else, you’re immediately in a lot of trouble. Stuff at the equator is moving at about 1,670 kilometres per hour (1,037 mph). Bringing that to an abrupt halt would be like a driver putting on the brakes in a car and you getting held back by your seatbelt as your inertia wants you to keep moving forward.
The problem is that everything on earth isn’t wearing a seatbelt and it’s braking from anything up to [checks notes] about 1,670 kilometres per hour (1,037 mph). Basically, everything – including humans (and including Belle & Sebastian) – will be wiped off the face of the planet.
Anything left even vaguely unscathed will then be subject to the constant (but brief) summer or winter situation described above.
And it’s really not much better if we take Stuart’s words to mean the orbit of the earth around the sun.
Again, if we stopped immediately, inertia would come into play again and we’d all be hurled off the face of the planet (or into the face of the planet, depending on which side we happened to be on when the stopping thing happened). We’re doing 108,000kph (67,000 mph) through space, so we’re all moving at about 30km each second. Stop the world immediately (this would take a ridiculous amount of energy, but hey, I’m not the one that wrote the song) and within one second, your body will want to be 30km from where it is now: that could be 30km towards the sky, sideways across the face of the earth, or it could be 30km into the earth. Sadly, you’re only really about 0.0015km above the earth, so the remaining 29.9985km will just be substituted by your body being driven into the now stationary planet at just under 108,000kph.
Ouch.
And if it the world gradually stopped? Well, we’re lucky enough to be treading a very fine line in terms of the livability of our orbit. Even our closest neighbours – Venus and Mars – are far too hot and far too cold respectively to support life. And it’s that distance from the sun and the gentle tug-of-war between our orbit and the gravitational pull of the big yellow thing that keeps us there. Take away the orbit element of that equation and we plunge into a fiery death like one team has left go of the rope.
It would likely take about 8 weeks before we actually hit the surface of the sun – our speed increasing all the time as the gravitational pull got stronger – but happily, we’d all be gone long before then, as we slowly started our approach, falling out of our fragile little habitable zone and being thoroughly cooked on our way down towards certain doom. Lovely.
Look, perhaps I’m taking the lyrics a bit too literally, but wanting the world to stop just seems like a very bad idea. Maybe rather just reflect over some old photos, relive the memories and smile because those moments happened, rather than killing us all in some horrific manner just because you miss some nights out at club 30 years back.
