Right now, as you're listening to my voice and watching this video, you're flying around in space at a speed you probably don't realize because of the way the earth rotates.

If you're standing on the equator, then you'd be traveling at a speed of 1670 kilometers per hour from west to east or counterclockwise as viewed from above the North Pole.

Every planet in the solar system rotates in this direction, except for Uranus and Venus.

So Earth has been rotating pretty normally all things considered, but we know that it's gradually slowing down at a rate of about 2.3 milliseconds per century.

Therefore, a day on earth today in 2019 is roughly two milliseconds shorter than a day was back in 1919.

Eventually, billions of years from now, Earth will cease rotating entirely, but Earth will probably never begin rotating in the opposite direction like Venus does.

But just for fun, what would happen if it did like right now, the easy answer is that everybody would probably just die from whiplash and getting flung around at thousands of kilometers per hour if it just happen immediately.

But that's kind of boring.

So let's imagine in fantasy land that nobody dies and it just starts happening.

How would society and your daily life be affected?

Let's start with the immediate effects.

Every satellite in orbit right now would be immediately obsolete because they're functioning on the assumption that you know something stupid like this won't happen.

Imagine if every satellite was orbiting Earth in the wrong direction, and that's the consequence that we'd be dealing with so GPS and cell services would probably be pretty majorly disrupted for a while.

Time zones as we know them, would also be pretty messed up.

Humanity rather arbitrarily drew lines across the Earth's service and decided that this mess is how we measure time across the planet's.

Under the current system, a new day begins at 12 a.m. Just to the west of the international date line here, and continues westward for 24 hours until reaching the eastern side of the Dateline.

On the other side.

Once Earth makes an entire rotation.

If Earth pulled a switcheroo and began rotating in the opposite direction, this would completely change.

The sun would rise in the West and set in the east, and the time of day would therefore have to flow from the east of the international Dateline.

The first big cities to celebrate the New Year would be Honolulu and Anchorage, while North America would be the first continent in New Zealand would be the last significantly populated place to get a chance to celebrate.

But a lot more would change on the surface of Earth over time than just well time.

The seasons of Earth wouldn't change because those are determined by Earth's axial tilt and not her rotation.

However, Earth's climate would gradually change over time dramatically, because that is influenced by her rotation.

As the planet rotates, the push and pull of its share momentum decides the direction of the oceans currents, along with atmospheric wind flows.

This is what produces the range of climate patterns that we see across the Earth's surface.

If you change the direction of Earth's rotation, all of this changes in some pretty wild ways.

Let's talk about Europe first.

One of the most important ocean currents in the world is the Gulf Stream, which carries warm ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico and Florida upto Western Europe.

Combined with the jet stream winds which carry clouds and rain water from Canada to northern Europe, the European continent in our normal spinning world is a warmer and wetter place than it otherwise would be.

If Earth rotation reversed, this would be totally different.

Based on a computer simulation that was run in 2018 at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Western Europe would be a much colder and snow your place.

That would be about 10 degrees Celsius lower on average and when mawr resemble the climate of Russia today, while the UK and Ireland would be really, really colder and when mawr resemble northern Alaska and Canada, these changes would take place gradually over time but would be quick on a geological timescale.

The computer simulation produced these results after only 7000 years into the future, but every other continent in the world would suffer from extreme climate change as well, perhaps none more so than Africa and the Middle East, with changing wind patterns and ocean currents shifting to North Africa and the Middle East, the deserts would disappear.

The entire Sahara would vanish, replaced by a dense green forest that would stretch across the entire Middle East as well North Africa and the Middle East, when more resembled the climates of France and Germany.

Today, with milder climates and a lot of rainfall, the Mediterranean Sea would almost become a freshwater lake with a tremendously increased amount of rainfall in the area.

The Outback Desert in Australia also vanishes under these conditions, replaced with a vast interior step.

Interestingly, it appears that the climates of western and eastern Australia will switch places with more grasslands and rainfall in the West and more arid steppes in the East.

Pretty much every major desert in the world today vanishes, but new deserts pop up in some unexpected areas where they haven't ever existed before.

Like, for example, North America, the entire Southern US, from Texas to Florida to North Carolina, is transformed into a vast, hot, arid desert that resembles the climate of Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

Today, the West Coast, on the other hand, get significantly colder and snow here, and more resembles the climate of Quebec.

Today, South America also changes dramatically.

The new largest desert in the world is located here across modern day Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

This great South American desert effectively becomes the new World Sahara, with another vast desert in the north covering much of Colombia, Venezuela and Guyana.

South America becomes the world's most desert covered continent with what remains of the Amazon rainforest in between.

And finally there's Asia.

India mostly remains the same, while China changes significantly, a vast desert similar to the Gobi and Mongolia pops up across the entire Southeast.

Much of Southeast Asia surrounding this desert, like northern Vietnam, becomes an arid steppe.

Manchuria becomes a warmer place with forests than rain.

Welcome shot cut in Russia weirdly transforms into a pretty mild place with a lot less cold and snow than the rest of Russia.

If the world started spinning backwards today, everything about our way of lives, from time to geography would change dramatically with less desert coverage.

Overall global temperatures will cool slightly by about 0.2 degrees Celsius.

It is impossible to predict exactly what kind of influence this would have on history.

I'll leave that discussion down for the comments.

But either way, it's fascinating to think about how a seemingly simple things like the direction of Earth rotation can have such an enormous impact on both history and society.

The processes that govern how the Earth operates are complicated, but anybody can learn how it all works.

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