Hey Bill Nye, 'What If the Earth Were a Cube Instead of a Ball?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think
Hello. My name is Hayes. Bill Nye, I want to ask you a question. What would happen if the earth was a cube or if it wasn't, but what would happen if it was? Would the gravity be weird or the same? Thank you for answering my question.
That is a great question, and I can give you a real science answer. The earth is not a cube because it has enough stuff. It has enough rocks and metals and water and lava and everything that all pull on each other equally. And every time you do that, you get a ball. You get a sphere.
In other words, if you made a cubicle earth and it was orbiting the sun and so on, after a few years—pick a number, a few million years—it would squish itself into a ball. And so when we study asteroids, we go out there with spacecraft and look at asteroids: Dawn, Vesta, Hayabusa 2. We observe asteroids that are not cubes but are very rough. They're regular shapes. They're not balls. They don't have enough stuff to become balls or spheres.
But you are alive when the first pictures from Pluto came back to earth, and Pluto is apparently right there having just enough stuff to make it into a ball. It's cool. So it's because everything is pushing or pulling in the same direction all the time on everything else that it resolves itself or it ends up as a ball.
Try this: get some marbles and a big rubber band, and put the marbles on a tabletop. Put the marbles in the rubber band and just kind of wiggle it around. You'll see it will become a circle. If you try to make it into a square, the rubber band will slowly bring it all back into a circle. And so a planet becoming a ball is like the rubber band and the marbles, but all in three dimensions instead of two—in a ball instead of just a circle, a circle rotated through a circle.
That's a cool question. So the reason planets are spheres or balls is because they have enough gravity pulling all the stuff together at the same time that you end up with no sharp edges, no irregular bumps. It's cool, except this is in outer space; there's no sound—it just goes…