What Would A Cube Earth Be Like? (Part 1)

If you are not a member of the flat Earth society you know and understand that the Earth is a large sphere (oblate spheroid to be exact).

But let's forget about all that and for fun let's imagine that the Earth was instead a large cube. What would that experience be like?

First, if you execute a Google Image Search for cube earth a variety of images pop up, most of them are grossly wrong.

There are no images that are free-for-reuse so I will just have to subject you to my dismal artistic skills as demonstrated in the image below. This is a crude representation of what a cube Earth would really look like and I will explain its main features in this post.

Gravity Pulls Inward Symmetrically

Each bit of matter pulls on every other bit of matter in the Universe and the force is always attractive. The strength of the pull from that chunk of matter drops off as you move away from it (it decreases as the inverse square of the distance but let's stay away from math for this post).

This means that on Earth we are all being pulled towards the centre of mass for the Earth which also happens to be the centre point of the Earth because it is very nearly symmetrical.

So the solids (i.e. rocks) that make up the Earth have a shape and that shape is spherical. The oceans that lay on top of this solid surface has a surface and that shape of the surface is spherical. The atmosphere surrounding both the solid rock and the liquid oceans has a shape and that shape is, you guessed it spherical.

Oceans On A Cube Earth

Water flows downhill, towards the pull of gravity and will only stop when the energy is minimized. If you covered a cube Earth with an even layer of water that water would flow 'downhill'. In this case downhill would be towards the centres of each face on the cube as shown in the figure above.

The vertices (corners) of the cube are actually farther away from the centre of mass of this cube Earth. Walking towards the corners would feel like walking uphill even though the surface is flat.

The end result would be six oceans centred on each the face of the cube and bulging outwards as shown in the figure. Looking down on the cube Earth from space you would see a circular ocean on the face nearest you and bulges on the faces that are edgewise to you.

Note that only on a boat on these oceans would you feel something like a level surface but I will get to that soon.

Atmosphere On A Cube Earth

The gases of the atmosphere are also fluids and would behave in a similar fashion to the water. If you covered the cube Earth with an even layer of gas, these gases would also flow 'downhill' away from the corners of the cube and towards the centre of each face of the cube.

This means that if you traveled to any corner of the cube the air would thin out just like when you climb a tall mountain. Depending on how much atmosphere this cube Earth had the air may thin out enough to even be called a vacuum.

Imagine that, reaching the vacuum of space while staying on the surface of your planet. It would be useful for the rocket industry no doubt.

This would also mean that each edge could be in vacuum, or a near vacuum, which would means that each face of the cube would be its own isolated biosphere. That is until Humans evolved on one of the faces and crossed over this natural barrier to discover 5 more new bio-habitats to invade.

The Forever Tilting Ground

The surfaces of this cube Earth are flat but the direction of gravity would not be perpendicular to the ground. This would means that to stand 'up' you would have to tilt your body at an angle to the ground.

This would also mean that any building you built would have to be tilted at the same angle to the ground.

A city on this planet would look very weird with all the buildings tilted at a angle to ground.

Once again imagine that, every building in every city would like like the leaning tower of Pisa.

In fact as I mentioned above, the only place where you would stand vertically on this planet would be on the deck of a ship on one of the central oceans.

There Will Be No Lakes

Since the surface of the ground, although flat, is tilted with respect to the gravitational field this would mean that there would be no lakes as they would all drain out over the lip that is closest to the centre of the cube face. Any rain that fell would collect in rivers that went straight to the ocean with no pausing at lakes.

However this planet would be great for generating hydroelectricity as there would be exploitable slopes to build dams just about everywhere.

Closing Words

If you could find a material strong enough to resist the hydrodynamic pressures that force large astronomical bodies into spheres one could conceivably construct a cube Earth. It would be a weird place to live on and I suspect that the weather systems would also be remarkably weird as well.

You may also realize that if the flat Earth hypothesis were true then the water on that flat Earth would also have to bulge outwards as I described above (towards the centre of mass). In addition it also means that we would have to stand at an angle to the centre of mass and not perpendicular to the ground as we currently do. Just sayin' you know.

Thank you for reading my post.

Post Sources

There are no direct sources for this post, it was mostly derived from my training in physics but the topic was inspired by articles and web pages like this one: The Cube Earth Society.