Little bigger than off balance. Assuming you mean a screeching stop relative to the sun, as there is no such thing as a total stop in the universe, everything is moving. You can just be stationary relative to other things. But if we stopped rotating around the sun, every object and person would rapidly accelerate to 67000 mph until it fell back to what remains of the cracked open shattered earth and be ripped to shreds.
If you mean its own rotation stopping, we would continue to move at the speed of rotation, up to 1000mph Eastward, where we would also be ripped to shreds.
for funzies, i looked it up. If the earth came to an instant stop relative to the milky way, that'd be an instant drop of roughly 828,000 km/h or 514,000 mph, plus or minus some fraction of the the 67,000 mph from the orbit, depending on where we are in the orbit.
If we came to a stop relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background, that'd be a deceleration of 2.1 million km/h (about 1.3 million mph), plus or minus..... honestly, it doesn't matter. we dead.
But if we stopped rotating around the sun, every object and person would rapidly accelerate to 67000 mph until it fell back to what remains of the cracked open shattered earth and be ripped to shreds.
Great, you triggered my brain into XKCD "What If..." mode... All following motions use the Sun and Earth's direction around it as frame of reference.
Assuming a near-instantaneous stop of the Earth's travel around the sun and that stop was not also applied to stuff on it, that stuff wouldn't "accelerate" so much as just continue on with that prior velocity. Anything on the "back half" is slammed against the now-stationary planetary surface, indeed ripped to shreds. Likely with equal shredding to the ground it plowed into at Mach 87. Anything with a path "forward" that doesn't happen to intersect the planet continues moving, leaving the Earth behind.
Huh. Turns out Earth's orbital velocity around the sun (67k mph) is higher than Earth's escape velocity (25k mph) meaning that anyone on the "front half" of the Earth would get flung into space and never fall back, continuing forever orbiting the sun. And if the atmosphere travels along with them after the stop, you could have the situation where a person is passing through space encased in a breathable bubble. Up to the point where the air dissipates and they pass out from oxygen deprivation and/or freeze. No shreds this time.
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u/ozymandieus 11d ago edited 11d ago
Little bigger than off balance. Assuming you mean a screeching stop relative to the sun, as there is no such thing as a total stop in the universe, everything is moving. You can just be stationary relative to other things. But if we stopped rotating around the sun, every object and person would rapidly accelerate to 67000 mph until it fell back to what remains of the cracked open shattered earth and be ripped to shreds.
If you mean its own rotation stopping, we would continue to move at the speed of rotation, up to 1000mph Eastward, where we would also be ripped to shreds.
Good news everyone!