Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to causing a gravitational wave apocalypse – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare. Listen on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast page.
By the end of the 16th century, pretty much everyone knew that Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. This was a major blow to those who thought Earth was the centre of the universe, but the Dead Planets Society is here to relieve their dismay. That’s right, we’re bringing back geocentrism.
Truly making Earth the centre of our solar system is going to take more than just fudging the maths. The sun is so much more massive than our puny planet that it is nearly impossible to force the former to orbit the latter, so our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane are going to have to make some major changes to the solar system as we know it.
They are joined for this episode by Andy Rivkin at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who says that the only way to create a geocentric solar system is to make Earth the most massive thing around. Assuming that doesn’t force the planet to collapse into a black hole, this would lead to some strange effects.
For one, the moon is going to have to speed up to remain in orbit, circling Earth every hour or so until it simply shatters. The rest of the planets would speed up, too, or else they will all smash into the new enormous Earth within a decade or two. All that extra mass in our planet could even disturb other nearby stars and start to pull them towards us. The triumphant geocentric solar system might not last long, but it would certainly have a dramatic end.
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