How fast would the Earth have to spin in order for things to fly off it into space?
by 
NikonRob Goodbye
ANSWERS: 3
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Due to the centrifugal force at the equator one weighs 0.3468% less than at the poles. Um, that's not going to help. Lets see. Presently the earth spins at about 1000 miles per hour. It takes 24 hours to make a complete rotation which is on par to 24,000 miles (roughly). The centripetal acceleration at the equator is given by 4 times pi squared times the radius of the Earth divided by the period of rotation squared (4*pi2*r/T2). The period of rotation is 24 hours (or 86400 seconds) and the radius of the Earth is about 6400 km. This means that the centripetal acceleration at the equator is about 0.03 m/s2 (meters per seconds squared). Compare this to the acceleration due to gravity which is about 10 m/s2 and you can see how tiny an effect this is - you would weigh about 0.3468% less at the equator than at the poles. Extrapolation and more math (you can repeat as you want) means that The earth would have to rotate with a period of 1 hour and 24 minutes to counter gravity. Taking around or about 24000 miles per hour.
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I don't know, but it's obviously fast enough for socks to fly off into outer space right now....
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Well, escape velocity (the velocity an object would need to exactly counter gravity) is 11km/sec. Any object moving at least that fast would "fly off" earth. So my guess is 11km/s, of course, the speed would vary with distance from the equator.
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