What if Earth was a cube?

I don't know. I mean, cheese steak is quite prized in some cities are and um and it's really been elevated to an art if I can say that as a vegetarian, I guess yeah. I mean you turn into the food shows and it's like, uh, they just go on and on about like every city has their grotesque um and too in my opinion, square meet sandwich and uh and the people got got for Well you're saying a square not hip? Right? Yeah? Like not hip? You know,

like what are the squares doing? Like what the cool kids are all going to the midnight puppet show and and then the one of the squares are going to their football game. I don't know. Anytime you say squares, I just feel like I should be dressed in all black and nothing anytime I agree with something that you say, which is what I'm going to do. But but now we're not We're actually not talking about that kind of

a square. We're talking about literal square, literal square planet like um David cross as is bit which Matt Frederick just reminded us of about the Squaggle, where it's a it's a product that was apparently officially marketed, like produced marketed, and he talked about it in a stand up bit. But it's a bagel. It's a real square. Yeah, it's a real thing. It's a square bagel, so that it's not like rolling. What's the opposite of snapping your fingers

to disagree? I don't know. That doesn't make sense. I don't know I'm saying that that's not going to be transmitted by my voice. I guess like lengthy discussions over some freestyle jazz. I don't know. But basically, imagine a square planet. If you're into comics, then you may know that the bizarro world where Bizarrow hails. Okay, and we're not talking about a square planet made out of bagels.

We're talking about a square planet. Like the idea that we're gonna talking about today is what if our what if our earthwork square? Which is, like I said, Bizarro Bizarro Superman familiar with this, right, yes, Sam, he's like Superman, except he's like an albino or something. Um and he's not really well but he's white. He's like really white really and uh and uh and and kind of dumb.

And it's like you might be familiar with the concept with Bizarro Seinfeld to right, right, Yeah, yeah, they they may. They referenced this particular comic creation. So, yeah, imagine the world that we live on seeing it from space and seeing not a sphere but a square, a cube, which would be pretty cool. Right. Yeah, It's not possible, but that doesn't mean that we can't talk about it because lots of let's people have talked about this or dreamed what would it be like if our Earth was squared?

And and actually it gets down to the question of why why do we have spheroid like planets and moons? Anyway? Right, what's the whole deal with that? To be sun filed in about it? What's the deal with the actual formation of planets. No, no, no, Like, hey man, why do we why don't we have a square for a planet? Yeah, well I'll tell you why. Gravity, my friend. Yes, gravity is the key to it all, because at heart we have this thing called accretion. Like this is the way

everything forms. Right. So you know, if you if you go back in time before there's a planet, and even planet or star, you have a whole lot of little bits of dust floating around, and each of those little bits of dust, no matter how small, has mass and exerts gravity. Okay, so everyone with me. So you have dust dust mote number one meets the cosmic dust mote number two and they attract to each other. Suddenly they have more mass. Then surrounding they have more gravitational pull.

They begin to pull in other little bits of of dust, and so you end up with this kind of cosmic snowball effect where the gravity builds, it accrues more mass, and it eventually it gets bigger and bigger and becomes a you know, it in literally becomes like a star or a planet or some other kind of astral bodies. And these are all spherical for a reason because it's because at the center that you have a center of mass, and it is when we're standing on a planet, the

mass is more or less the same. No matter where you go on the globe. It does differ. There areas on the earthware where the the where where gravity is stronger but for the or weaker. But for the most part you have more or less uniform gravity. So a square would not form because a square or a cube

would not have uniform gravity. Yeah, and it's sort of but still I still sort of wonder, like why not the shape of a banana or well, I think because the square is a very um it's it's the opposite, you know, it's uh, it's the squiggle versus the bagel idea. It's like the square is very uniform. There's an episode of Look Around You season two where they have a soccer ball um um or you know in football in in Britain and you push a button on it and it transforms into a cube so that you can store

it on a shelf without it rolling off. There's you know, it's just something on a very like mathematical basis, like the cube is a very ordered what they're both very ordered shapes, but but but they're very opposite, you know. And uh, and so we can't help but but but think of things in terms of their ridiculous opposites, you know, like you know, we would look in the mirror. It's like, well, what if what if I was a woman instead of a man? You know, what if? What if? What if

that horse flew instead of walked? What if the world were a cube instead of a sphere? And uh and and when you when you look back at some of the things that have been written about this, I mean, there have been times where people have made some surprising arguments for the existence of cubes in nature. Now, now, granted, cubes do can form in nature. Rough cubes conform in nature. Obviously. We've all seen blocks of stone that have fallen off

of something that may be roughly cubicle. You've seen tricksters using bubbles to you know, tricks tricks. Well, I guess they're bubble artists or something, blowing bubbles and then piecing them together in forming that square, that cube at the center. So it's not like a natural impossibility. But you see fewer of these in nature than you do spheres. Well, geographically, right, you tend to see more of the spheres right, certainly in the universe. So yeah, I found it really really interesting.

Looking back to four, there was a Swiss astronomer by the name of Aren't a r N d T. And uh, this is like the only name he was attributed in this particular chair. But Aren't Yeah, and he made the headlines back in the day when he claimed to have discovered a very curious planet in the orbit beyond Neptune, a cubicle planet. Even in eighteen a four astronomers knew better there was. There was a New York Times article

titled the Cubicle Planet, November sixte edition. The the author talked to a physicist by the name of Dr Theodore

Van Kirk. It's it's a great article because it's this is the Gilded Age of newspapers, so it's extremely long, and it's like it's written in the style of like and then the writer asked, and then he's like, oh, good boy, let me explain it to you, and and and and so like the first debt is the professor just saying this is complete whuie, this this is just I'm not yeah, he says who he and he's He's like,

I'm not even gonna dignify such an idea. But then he goes on to say, oh, but this is what it would be like, you know, because because at the heart, that's the cool thing about thinking about a cubicle planet is that, um it it illustrates some of the things that we take for granted about life on an actual spherical world. Yeah, so what would a cube shape Earth look like? You know, would it? Would it? Is this some sort of like parallel universe where Picasso just exist

and well for and then this cubical form. Well, the important thing to realize is the way center of gravity affects everything. Again, um gravity more or less uniform across the planet because the center of the Earth is always

directly beneath your feet. No matter where you're standing. You can point down at the space between your feet and say, if I were to go straight down from you know, straight down towards the center of gravity, I would hit the core of the No matter where you were, gravitation is um it's always going to point roughly towards the center, right right. So imagine you're facing once one square one

side of the six sides of the queue. If you were standing the exact center of that it would be like on Earth because the center is directly below you. You're standing standing straight up, You're standing straight up on the Okay, So let's say you're out near an edge. If you're out here an edge, you would be technically you may be standing straight up on that particular side, on that particular plane, but it would feel like you were standing on a hill because the exact center, the

center of the planet's mass, is not directly beneath your feet. Okay, Yeah, I'm trying to get the idea of this. So you've got the you've got these six sides, and it's almost it would almost feel like it's forming a bowl right right, Like like, let's say again, you're standing at the center of one of the six sides, okay, and then you're gonna walk towards the edge. The closer you came to the edge, the more it would feel like you were

walking up the side of a mountain. Only if you were to actually reach the very edge and stand on the edge, would it feel like Earth would Only then would the center of the planet's gravity be directly beneath you. Okay, I think it's fascinating. There's some This question was posed to ask mathematician slash physicists. These are the guys that show up at Burning Man, So take this for what

you will. But they had some very interesting thoughts about this, and they said that Earth would take the form of a vast barren expanse of rock directly exposed to space. And if you were standing on the edge of a face and look back toward the center, you'd be able to clearly see the round bubble of air and water extending above the flat surface with the poles in the center of the two faces. Then then two of those bubble seas that were created. Right, wait, are these the

cornels as physicist? No, this is different. This is why I say these are These are the guys that show up at Burning Man. And they have a tent. Actually it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, and it says ask uh. Mathematicians are asking a physicist, right, they're one of each. So guys are wandering up to be a burning man and going like, dude, what if? What if? Like a cube? It was cube and it was completely pupiled by a bunch of Picasso's and they were fragmented faces, and one

of the areolas was on his ear. That's that's what they're asking. So that's why I say take it, take it what you will out of this. But I do think it's really you're standing on the edge, you're looking down, and you're seeing the seeing the bubble of the atmosphere, right Okay, So that in and of itself is pretty cool to imagine, and that you're you're on this the face of the square and you're seeing this atmosphere because right now we can't we don't perceive that right well,

and we wouldn't be able to perceive it. And then uh, these bubble seas would create solid ice cot ice cap blocks, yeah, and that this would be an entirely weird area that that life probably wouldn't be supported in um but if it were, it would it would be in this ring around the shore of those bubbles bubble seas that were created, and the leaning tower of piece would be straight. And actually a Dr Karen L. Masters, who was coming in

on Cornel's Aaska Physicist page, she pretty much backs this up. Yeah, she's got some good mouth. Yeah, and I'm not going to bore everybody with the numbers, but she conscious the numbers and says, yeah, based on the way the atmosphere works on the Earth we actually live on. If the Earth were impossibly a cube, the edges of the cube would be Titanic mountains just jutting far above the atmosphere. They would be space mountains in a very atmosphere. Yeah yeah.

And the oceans would be uh, would be pooled at the center of the six square planes. So each side. If you think of this cubical planet as a dice, each face of the die would be like a one when that one would be an ocean. Yeah. Um. And then and then you have to also take into account how weather and seasons work. What is a pretty complex system, and gravity is one of the key players. And gravity holds the atmosphere to the Earth, and again it holds

it uniformly, so in the shape of this cube. That's when you have the mountainous edges piercing above the atmosphere. But then rotation also plays a role because you have alternating periods of night and day of heat and cool that end up stirring the atmosphere into motion. And then a number of other geological and gravitational factors complicated even more untill you have this vast and largely unpredictable system.

But climates would basically depend on exactly how it's rotating, because there's you know, a sphere is only going to rotate pretty much. I mean, it's it's a it's a sphere. Everything is is more or less uniform. So if it's rotating up and down side the side, it doesn't matter. This position is still gonna look the same shape wise. Whereas a cube, how is that going to rotate? Is it gonna be like if I were to lay a dice down on the table and just rotated it around.

Is one of the six sides gonna face face down or yeah? Or is it gonna be on edge? Is if I were to take a die and spin it like a top on the table. Now if I were just if it we're gonna rotate like like you spin it on the top of the table, you would have

more or less uniform coverage from the sun. But if it were like a die setting on the table, you would have like an entire the entire top and bottom uh squares, The entire top and bottom planes would be like our north and south pole, and then everything else would be like like the equator, So it would be similar. Then in terms of our weather, Yeah, except weirder because you would have like you'd have six six sides six sections. Four be equator land and two would be um Arctic

or antarctic land. So it'd be like you're rolling. If you were to then roll it on the table, you're like, well, I have a two and six chance that I'll roll snow and a four and six chance that I'll roll the crazy vacation. Well, and that's what I was just

thinking too. All of a sudden, your wind patterns are going to be completely different because what feels like wind coming out us right now across our localized area, if if you are at an extreme point, I would imagine that the wind would act in a very different way because it's one of the things about the way that the wind works on Earth is you have a global system where what's happening on one side of the globe affects the other because you have you have heat here,

cool here. It's all one system. But in this scenario, we have the space mountains the edges of the cube, so each face will have its own atmosphere basically, I mean it's it's cut off from the other atmospheres. So it would have its own isolated weather So each side of the die would have its own weather system, would have its own biosquare too, right, because you would have completely if you did have some sort of life form

in there, that's rightly different from one. That's another thing that factor, because the emergence of life on Earth had a huge role in the amount of oxygen. So what would that be like for the north and south section? We would you even have life emerged there? If they were lifeless planes of extreme cold? You know, what would the atmosphere be like? Maybe they wouldn't have breathable atmosphere. You might have different, vastly or slightly different atmospheres depending

on which side of the die you were visiting. And that's what what these burning man, the physicism mathematician actually brought that up. They said, if the biospheres are bio squares, took different routes in terms of these isolated regions, you could have a nitrogen oxygen atmosphere on some faces like we have, and a hydrogen nitrogen carbon dioxide atmosphere on others, kind of like our old atmosphere for a billion years ago, right, So that's crazy, And then what would cheesteaks be like

in each of these zones vastly different. What would what would warfare be like between the six zones? I mean there's I'm surely somebody has written a book about politics of a of a cubicle world. That would be yea like who who becomes the master of that world? Right? And why how long does it take you to even discover other faces of the cube? Because you've got to be capable of climbing a space mountain or drilling through it, right, unless there are naturally occurring tunnels that can be taken.

I like the I like the tunnel route. Yeah, but what does that do to your perception too? Right, especially if you can see the bubble of the atmosphere? Yeah, I mean the interesting thing is we're talking about this earlier. Even though we live like everyone, I doubt we have any flat landers out there listening to this who think that we live on a flat world and the ocean's empty off and uh and drip off into the void, or that we live in a discworld. If you're up there,

tell us of your time traveling secrets. Do do tell us if if you do, you do hold that opinion. But now we we all know that the Earth is spherical and that we're standing on a plane that wraps around on itself, but we still have the experience. We still more or less feel like we're on a flat world because we can't we we can't see the curvature of the Earth. We can't poke our head out above the atmosphere or anything like that, so we would still

experience the cube world more or less the same. Uh. And and even as we approach those mountains, they would feel like mountains. So I can easily imagine like a map of a cubicle planet made by inhabitants of a cubical planet, like they well, you know, if they didn't know about the other sides, they would just see the world as, oh, well, we live in the valley and the mountains rise up on either side of us, and

beyond the mountains is who knows. Well, instead of having a flat or of theory, perhaps it would be like the triangular earth theory, right, because you can't quite wrap your head around it. Alright, We're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna get back to all this, So hanging there for one second. This podcast is brought to you by Intel the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel at Intel. We believe Curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and

explore the answers to life's questions. And we're back. So let's get that to gravity and why why the Earth will never be a cube or it could never have become a cube? Well particular Earth. Well, it comes down to a creatum starts Earth. You know again, like is all these particles come in, there's gonna be one to another. That's gonna be You're gonna have the center of gravity pulling things in and applying and pulling things in more or less uniformly. So like a cube just wouldn't form.

I mean, you could conceivably a significantly advanced civilization could build a giant planet sized cube. But still it's going to warp. Right still, it's gonna warp because you're going to have that uniform of gravity pulling in. It's gonna like things are gonna conform. That's this is what I thought was interesting that the weight of the material begins to overwhelm the strength of that material and then the

planet is pulled into a sphere. So you can't help that the force from rotation actually like squashing it into a sphere alike or spheroid nature is going to abhor a giant cube because the sphere is the uniform forces at work. Yeah, And just an example of this, one of the two moons of Mars Phobos. It's not large enough to produce enough gravity to become a proper sphere. So you look at that and you see that it's kind of it's sort of like egg shaped, but then

it has this gigantic crater on one side. It's called the Stickney crater, and it kind of looks like a fish that's been punched in the mouth and you just can see you like, oh, this mean that's just never going to quite become like a billiard ball here. Yeah, Like think of this all right, Say here at the park, right and say let's say, I don't know, Lady Gaga shows up too, and she just starts performing in the center of the park and everybody's interested in so they're

going to gather around to see her. Only so many people can fit in any given space. So and as the crowd gathers around her, which shape do you think they're going to take? Do you think it's gonna roughly be spherical or roughly be a big square. It's gonna be spherical or at least roughly. So it's gonna because people are gonna be drawn in towards the center of attention, and in our universe, the center of attention is always gravity. I feel like you have a secret agenda to insert

Lady Gaga in as many podcasts as possible. I don't know, it's a good reference. I mean, it's one of those things you get Lady Gaga is performing in the park. I mean, i'd go see what it was about. I'm just I'm just clocking it. Lamb. Okay, well, we we've shown that she showed up in studies before. There's that Psychology Today paper that made some arguments about decision making and Lady Gaga. So yeah, yeah, about motivational forces and

how you should probably align yourself with Lady Gaga. Rather, I really need to do some searches and find out how many peer of view papers have been Lady gagat paced. I think we should just do a podcast on Lady Gaga. Let's just get that out of the way. So anyway, I hope the Gaga explanation here work. I mean that because that's basically you know why nobody would would stand at the edge of that cube if they could be closer to the actions by standing a little more to

the left of the right, Like, why would they? Why would they form it? They wouldn't because they want to see what's happening. We want to be closer to the action. They're being pulled towards her right, so she wants them to be pulled toward her. Yeah, so that's basically why we we can't have a cubicle planet. But it's it's fascinating to think about it, and and we may it may be overlooking some some key ramifications here. So by

all means, for sure we are. Yeah. So by all means, if we missed anything, or if you have any crazy thoughts about how anything would work on a cubicle planet, you should let us know, just as some other people have let us know about things via listener mail. And I have a whole stack of them here. Let me go through and read a couple of them. Jackie writes in and says, Hey, they're listening to the Bees Versus Wasts episode and listening to your comments on how bees

would make a bad and non aggressive mascot. Um. I can go one better when it comes to unthreatening mascots, the Pretzels. My high school in Freeport, Illinois is the proud home of the Freeport Pretzels, apparently named after a beer and pretzel making company that used to be located in town. I just thought you might be amused by this. Thanks for the brilliant podcast. I just can only hope that those are the big, soft, puffy pretzels instead of

a little crunchy wan. Yeah, doesn't make it even better. Well, It's what I love about that too, is that the company is not even there. They're no longer tied. It's not like it's a major sponsor or a major economic force in the area. They just remember the pretzel factory that was, so they're still the fighting press and that's what they do. I'm going to remember the Pretzels, public their work, and how does that mascot costume work. You'd have to be super twisted to say I'm thinking like

to slay retiree. We also heard from a listener by the name of Carlo and Carlo Retzin and says, greetings from sunny Dominican Republic. It's pretty awesome. I am relatively new to your podcast just a few months now and want to congratulate you on your excellent work, very interesting

and diverse subject matter, approach, creative. But I find myself not listening to my radio on driving to and from work now as I'm usually glued to your show as well as stuff you should know, I must admit regarding this podcast, I believe an interesting example of socially accepted liars and lying are actors. When you think about it, they might just be the most admired professional liars around.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Well, that's that's that's interesting because you know, we we talked about lying liars and how lying is in a way like reshaping reality and creating a false reality in which the participant and the listener is is a part of. And yeah, to a certain extent that the theater, somebody gets up

on the stage and they just start lying their butt off. Well, and I remember when we were talking to Dr Ellen Arkin, professor at George Tech and Robotics, and he was talking about his decepticonic Believes. I don't know if that's like the real name for the bo I think that was the ternament ended up being on their own arm by the media, you know, science journalists, but you know they're they're trying to figure out how to program lying and deception.

And he was talking about how we are constantly self deceiving and how and I was thinking about the actors. He was saying, why do we pay good Funny to go to a theater and see these pixels projected on a screen just so that it moves us in somewhere brings up some sort of emotions. So yeah, absolutely, the actor's biggest players out there and we pay them to be. Yeah.

We heard from a listener by the name of Jim who wrote in with a Higgers guy to the Galaxy reference on the whole I Don't Eat the Panda episode about our relationship between animals and food. They pointed out that there is a quadruped in the books that basically it's a cow that's been genetically engineered to want to be eaten and to verbalize this desire. Because therefore the cow wants to be eaten, we're just giving into its wishes by eating it. In therefore it's moral, which ends

the whole problem right there. Boom. Yeah, I love an elegant but ridiculous answer, you know, to a to a quandrit And certainly that's that's kind of like that's what his Checkers guy is all about. We also heard from a list of my Name with John John writes and says and your Don't Eat the Panda podcast today, you found it hard to grasp that people could raise monkeys

as pets and still eat monkeys as food. It is really not much different than having fish in your fish tank or birds in your bird cage and still eating fish or chicken without giving it much or maybe for Julie the vegetarian, having a chia pet but still eating chia seeds. How do you what do you have to say to that man? I gave this up at his only timing out. It was so hard for me etho seeds and then look over and see the innocent chia

pet sprouting forth. Yeah, I just at first I started turning it to the window so it couldn't see me eating its seeds, and eventually I just had to take it out of my diet. Yeah, well you don't see as men anymore because said like the chia pet has been hunted near to the point of extinction, so except for in variety stores. Yeah near you. Yeah, and I think that Turner has a big reserve of them up the north. But it's but it's only a matter of time until he opens that new chain. It's like a

chia pet salad store. It's gonna be like super Crackers or something. Super Salad. Now, super Salad is the real one. Super Crackers is the one from Party Gap. Yes, it's gonna be that. Um so hey. We also received a lot of other emails, and we seem to be getting more and more of them, to the point where I can't really keep up with uh. I mean, we tried to respond to a lot of these, but are we

are getting a lot of them these days. But bear in mind that that we definitely read them all, even if we don't get to read them on the air, or if we don't if we don't, actually we'll get there. I can touch with you. Yeah, yeah, but but they are greatly appreciated. And the other way to interact with us is of course to find us on Facebook and Twitter. You can find us on both of those as blow the mind, and we update those feeds all the time with all sorts of cool stuff, so check it out.

It really do send us an email because we will read it and it certainly helps us. Uh inform us the sort of topics that we want to cover for you, and we always love to hear what you guys want to know about next, so send us an email at Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.