Currently: Arround the sun, the earth is rotating from right to left(365 days rotation). And spining from right to left(24 hours spining).

Question:
Are there signs that one day earth will stop rotating in the current direction, and start rotating in the opposite direction?
So that it will be like this
Arround the sun, the earth will be rotating from left to right(365 days rotation). And spining from left to right(24 hours spining)

OR

One day will earth rotate from right to left as currently is, but spin left to right as it is rotating from right to left?


Thanks.

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afbS

No.

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þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

That depends on your perspective. If you view the earth so that the North Pole is at the top, the spinning is left-to-right, as is the revolution around the sun (if viewed from outside the orbit ellipse, while facing toward the sun). Sort of complicated, no?

And, as Musashi said, the answer to your question is "no."

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"I am Meteora, supreme goddess of weather" - Meteora, in The Unchained Goddess

One nice thing about being a meteorologist who also likes astronomy is that the sky is always interesting!

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"I am Meteora, supreme goddess of weather" - Meteora, in The Unchained Goddess

One nice thing about being a meteorologist who also likes astronomy is that the sky is always interesting!

The Earth is not rotating aroung the sun.

THe energy required to reverse the rotaion on it's axis is phnonimal- It will mulch us, if that energy existed(ie. venus smacking into us-creating something that "might" rotate in another direction.)

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

No.

What will happen (in an incredibly long time and too lazy to calculate) the Earth will become tidally locked with the moon.

No, curently the Earth is revolving around the sun in a counter-clockwise manner as viewed from above the north pole. It is rotating counter-clockwise as viewed from the same location.

None what-so-ever.

Nope. Why do you ask?

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"... I knew there was a catch."

You can't take the sky from me.

Any special reason we are feeding the trolls?

?

Troll or somebody like bmpbmp looking for answers? Although feedback on our answers would be nice and lack thereof is suspicious.

Oh and, what the others have said regarding the questions.

Things don't simply stop and start. This is the result of Newton's law about an object in motion staying in motion unless acted on by another force. The Earth will continue spinning until a force of some sort stops it. To get it to rotate in another direction, you will need even more force. The force necessary to do this is phenomenal (about 100 atomic bombs for every square yard on the Earth's surface might be enough energy) , and it would have to somehow be directed so that the Earth's liquid mantle and core would stop. As was mentioned, the Earth's rotation is slowing due to the tidal influence of the moon, but since the Earth has 84 times more mass then the moon, it will take a very long time, and even then, the Earth will continue to rotate in the same direction, only slower than it does today.

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Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

One question like this would be someone looking for answers, especially if he actually interacted with those trying to help. Four (or more) of the same tripe, especially without interaction, is a different matter entirely.

I'll give it a shot, even if a response isn't forthcoming. If nothing else, it gives me practice.

In agreement with everyone else here but would like to expand on a few things. It would take some extraordinary impact to reverse the physical rotation of the Earth. No such impact seems forthcoming. Such impacts do seem to have happened before in the history of our solar system however. It is generally believed that our Moon was created early in planet formation when a Mars sized object probably hit the Earth sending the molten debris of both into a ring which eventually coalesced into our much admired Luna. You'll note that even this impact didn't change the direction of rotation from the typical counter-clockwise motion (as seen from above North). Uranus though seems to have been knocked silly by some similar enounter with a rogue object and it has physically flipped on its side so that it "rolls" along its orbit around the Sun. So I can't say that such a disaster is impossible, but it isn't predicted by the motions of any of the hundreds of thousands of planetoids we can currently track within the solar system.

If the Earth, Moon, Sun and other solar system bodies continue in their current motions then many millions of years from now the biggest noticeable change will be that the Earth will be spinning slower and will be tidally locked facing a more distant Moon. Because the Moon's orbit around this planet is slower than our planet's daily spin the Moon is constantly tugging on the surface of the Earth below like a giant brake and slowing it down little by little (the day's get longer). Actually at the very same time all that material in the Earth rushing around at thousands of miles an hour (at least at the equator) has an "equal but opposite" effect on the Moon and pulls it ahead in it's orbit (making it drift into a higher orbit further away from the earth).

So the Earth will slow down until eventually only one side is facing the Moon all the time (just like has already happened to rotation of the much less massive Moon). But the Earth will still be spinning - just at almost exactly the same speed it will take for the Moon to make one monthly revolution about the Earth. BTW the term "month" will have lost all meaning by this time. Not just because the Moon will appear stationary in the sky, but because no one will likely be around to see it.

And here's an interesting thought. If the Sun/planet system could survive long enough before the Sun expands, then the Earth/Moon pair will also be slowed by the gravitational tides of the Sun so that one Earth day equals one year with the Moon always on the Sun side of the orbit. Keep in mind that not even at this point will the Earth or Moon have stopped rotating on axis. An equilibrium is simply reached where one orbital revolution equals one rotation about the axis.

I hope this doesn't seem too wordy. It seemed like a safe enough entry as my first post on these boards

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The lunar tidal bulges on earth are not perfectly responsive, due to friction, so that they are carried ahead of the moon-earth line. This is true both on the near and far side of the earth, but the "speed-up" effect of the farside bulge is smaller than the slowing effect of the nearside bulge, since it is just a bit farther away from the moon.
Welcome to the board! What's a man-petri?

Assuming for the moment that the sun is still going strong and life is still around when these things happen what would it be like for the lifeforms of earth to live on:

(A) an Earth tidally locked to the moon with month-long days.

Or

(B) an Earth-Moon system tidally locked to the sun with year-long days.

Would atmospheric currents keep the air circulating enough to keep the dark and light sides from extreme temeratures?

How would life adapt?

Well that's an incredibly difficult question to answer!

In your first scenario, with a month long day, we would experience much greater temperature swings between day and night. However, the average temperature may not change much. Technologically adept species such as ourselves could certainly survive. As far as animal/plant life goes, I would expect it to be concentrated at the poles, where the temperature differences would be far less extreme.

If the earth were tidally locked to the sun, you would still have temperate regions at the day/night terminator. Actually I have a difficult time picturing this scenario where both the moon and the earth would be tidally locked to the sun. Would we have a permanent eclipse? Could life survive at the "edges" of the moon's shadow?

Now somewhat tangentially related to the original post: If our moon didn't exist, could the precession of the earth have eventually resulted in a complete flip of the planet's axis, thus resulting in a retrograde rotation (or a prograde with a 180 deg inclination, if you prefer)? And if so, any chance that this is what happened to Venus/Uranus?

The moon would be at the Lagrange Point, L1, four times farther away than it is now. It would only cover a sixteenth of the area of the sun. And L1 is unstable.

Just imagine the myths that that would've engendered!
Lagrange Points

A Thousand Pardons,
I realise I could have phrased those lines a little better for clarity. What I meant to show was that the rotation of the Earth helps to "sling" the Moon outwards at an increasing speed thereby widening its orbit around us. It never really clicked with me before that the preceeding tidal bulge could be the reason for this particular part of the forward acceleration of the Moon. That is, if I understood you correctly. I appreciate the clarification.

And BTW, you can think of my screen name as Herman Petri. It's an old nickname I aquired in high school of no real derivation - just a bit of fun.

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Yeah, I was just point out the subtle distinction that there is a part of the tidal bulge that tends to slow the moon--the two effects work oppositely, but the closer bulge dominates the interaction. The "preceeding" tidal bulges (the far one is pulling back) can be considered the result of two effects: one, the bulges directly below the moon do not respond instantly, and the earth does not conform completely, and two, as the earth rotates, the bulge does not subside fast enough. The bulges are symmetrical, to first order, but their distances to the moon are not.

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As I understand it, actually the exact opposite would happen. It appears that the Moon is an integral cause of the Earth's precession in the first place. Removing the Moon would actually decrease its effect. As the Earth rotates it's equatorial regions expand outwards making the Earth a bit fatter than it is tall. This should not be confused with the tidal bulge that the Moon causes as discussed earlier. In this case we are merely describing the fact that, due to centrifugal force, the Earth is a bit wider around the middle than it is from top to bottom. As the Moon orbits it gains slightly more graviational tug on this wider area than the rest of the Earth and therefore imparts a bit of leverage on the Earth as a result (metaphorically speaking). This deviation caused by the Moon forms part of the Earth's precession.

Precession due to the Sun's influence however would still occur due to it tugging on the equatorial bulge as well. The upshot to this is that the Sun's influence works to attempt to bring the Earth into a more perpendicular axis of rotation relative to the orbital plane of the Earth. In other words, since the Sun has a little more effect on the larger mass of the equatorial region it attempts to pull the center plane of the Earth's spin more in line with the center plane of its orbit.

As A Thousand Pardons has already emphasised, there is of course a corresponding pull of opposite effect happening to the far-side, but the closer proximity and thus larger force applied to the near-side eventually wins out. Basically all this interaction attempts to reach an equilibrium whereby the equatorial plane of the Earth's rotation is continually drawn towards the plane of the solar system's ecliptic. In other words, making the Earth become more upright in terms of prograde rotation, not less.

Something to consider is that in reality the Earth doesn't appear to be getting any closer to the perpendicular 0 degree. The axis merely traces a huge circle every 26,000 years. I would assume that this is probably due to the fact that any force exerted on a spinning gyroscope ends up actually directing it in a vector at a right angle to the applied force. So it may be possible that the Sun and Moon can keep prodding the Earth as regularly as they like but it will never completely straighten up. I haven't done any real research into such a hypothesis however so my comment should be considered pure speculation.

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No, it is, at the present time. We discussed Ben Chao's work before. The obliquity oscillates with a 41,000 year period, superimposed upon the 26,000 year precessional cycle. There are several interactions occurring, with varying effect. It requires fairly complex analysis.

A popularization (also discussed before), is Isaac Asimov's The Tragedy of the Moon, where he discusses the advantage to having the moon orbit Venus, I think. In the same collection is The Triumph of the Moon, where he lists three reasons that the moon has been vital to our advancement.

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Thanks again for the info. I'll have to read up more on this. Do you know if it is ever predicted that the Earth will eventually reach the perpendicular within the lifespan of our Sun?

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No, it oscillates, but it doesn't go that far

I assume you meant perpendicular to the ecliptic

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