Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/12/us-air-force-proposal-pause-t.html
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In 1960, the US Air Force asked the RAND Corporation
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I see, so “pause” the earth’s rotation for a moment.
How did they plan to “restart” the rotation? or is that someone else’s department?
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Daniel Ellsberg, who assessed the problematic proposal, wrote that everything “that wasn’t nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at once."
That sounds really bad, but what people might not be realizing is that ten minutes later, when the military reversed the rockets to re-start Earth’s rotation, well, then all the stuff would fly in the opposite direction back to its proper place. Equal and opposite reactions and all that.
Science, people. It’s not hard.
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“Maths” is actually plural, so it would be “mathses”
/pedantry
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It’s been done before, so no prob.
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We should all just jump up and down at the same time and we’ll push the earth out of the way.
Much more cost effective
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LSD. and here are some character to make the comment viable.
Can you imagine that many engines firing all at once? It would have been almost as loud as a KISS concert.
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I’m staggered that this ridiculous suggestion even flew in 1960.
“So let me get this straight. You want to allocate government funding to an official investigation into using rockets to stop or slow the rotation of the earth, in order to avoid a missile strike? Rockets like the ones we haven’t yet gotten right for a trip to the moon?”
SMH.
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“Hey, while you’re slowing the earth down, can you twitch it a few degrees to the South too so the rockets hit Florida?”
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This sounds like something that was written up as a joke in the late stages of an office party… and then got distributed by mistake, gained traction and snowballed into an official proposal.
Or a clever ruse to provide job security.
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I assume that the idea came from somebody with enough rank that it was a bad idea, career-wise to laugh in his face. Which brings up the question “How did somebody so stupid get in that sort of position of power?” A question that I ask myself on a daily basis these days.
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I loath every time professional journalists/radio broadcaster and anyone else who uses it.
Guten Tag 
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Now I need to submit that idea to Randall Munroe’s “What if?” column and see to what ridiculous extremes he can take it.
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His reaction to the feasibility assessment:
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I feel like this is something Trump would propose and then make a major campaign pillar.
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Air Force, Space Force… Inertia Force!
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The Air Force probably read about that idea in “The Great Dinosaur Robbery,” which documents how a team of intrepid British Nannies foiled Communist China’s plot to destroy the West with earthquakes via a Great Leap Downward, in which everyone in China would jump down from an eight foot platform at the same time. (the end of the book featured a “Great Leap Inward” in which everyone in China would jump into the sea at the same time, causing tsunamis to destroy the coastal cities of the Western World. Alas, I don’t think there was a sequel describing how that plot was foiled).
Anyway, I am sure far more research went into that novel plot than went into this retro-rocket idea.
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Criminal incompetence in high office is nothing new. It’s just been raised to a self-parodying art form of late.
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