system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If the Earth stopped spinning immediatly, is there enough momentum be thrown into space at escape velocity?
gpt
Nope!

So we're going to pretend the Earth is a perfectly rigid body that can stop on a dime, while the people on top are not attached at all, and also there's no atmosphere. If the Earth suddenly stopped moving, the people would continue to move forwards at their current velocity. Is that fast enough to escape the Earth?

The emphasis here is that you would continue to move *at your current velocity*. If you're not escaping the Earth right now, then your speed is below escape velocity. The Earth stopping won't make you speed up. Think of it this way: if the surface of the Earth was moving close to escape velocity, then the Earth would be basically flying apart.

I'll give you some numbers to get the scale of it anyway. The Earth's equator is about 40,000 km around (that's more or less the original definition of the metre). The Earth rotates about once every 24 hours (it's actually slightly faster than that - a day is 24 hours because that's relative to the Sun and we're moving around the Sun, but 24 hours is close enough for this estimate). 40,000 km/24 hours = about 460 m/s, or 1,700 km/h, or 1,000 mph. It's somewhere between mach 1 and mach 2 at sea level. By contrast, escape velocity is about 11 km/s - that's about 40,000 km/h, or 25,000 mph. And just to orbit in a circle means you have to go at about 8 km/s. The Earth's rotation is fast enough that it *does* matter which direction you launch your rocket - it makes like a 10% difference in speed - but it's still on the level of a supersonic jet rather than an interplanetary rocket.