if earth rotated the opposite direction...?
962236
Added to all that the learned have already described.\nYou would start out life\n  waking up in a oap home and start feeling better every  day.\n You get kicked out of there for being too healthy, go  collect your  pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold  watch on your first day.\n You would then work 40 years until you're young  enough to enjoy your retirement.\n You start to  drink alcohol, you party,  you're "generally" promiscuous and you get  ready for High  School.\n After High School, you go to primary school, you become  a kid, you play or\n nap all day, you have no  responsibilities.\n You become a baby with no cares  whatsoever.\n Then, you spend your last 9 months floating peacefully with  luxuries like central heating, spa treatments, room service on tap,  larger living quarters everyday...and then... you finish off as an  orgasm!
1029021
Depends how it happened. If it switched off then back on again in the other direction we'd all fry from solar radiation. Plus all our electronics would stop working. If it just rotates....well....birds'll get lost, compasses will need recalibrating, but apart from that very little.\n\nThe interesting thing is, we don't know which is going to happen, just that one of them will!
176155
They are in space.. so it depends from what angle or where are you looking as a whole picture. Since we are on earth, we take earth's orbit as the reference and draw the other planet's rotation. But from outside in space (outside earth), if you are positioned perpendicular to earth's rotation, then earth is rotating in vertical direction.. thats what i could imagine..
85444
Earth rotates. Sun on one side.
7847
well it had a 50% chance of going the way that it does, and if it went the other direction, then we would call that "clockwise" too, because then that would be the way that clocks went now wouldn't we?
122713
The direction of draining water is no different in either of Earth's hemispheres. This is a perpetual myth that has no basis in scientific fact. This website provides a good discussion about the whole thing, plus lots of information about the Coriolis Effect itself --\nhttp://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
364601
If that direction were opposite the direction of the \nearth's rotation, I think the answer is theoretically yes.\nIn reality there's not enough mass of people relative to the mass of the earth to have any effect.
457404
All the planets in our solar system rotate in the same direction with the exception of Venus which rotates *very* slowly in the opposite direction.  It was theorised that it once suffered a glancing blow from a very large object that reversed its spin.\n\nHmm - by rotate I mean on their own axis - not around the sun, in which case all planets go the same direction.
587307
Yes, you would be upside down.   You'd get lighter and lighter as you approached the centre of the Earth.   As you continued towards the opposite side, your weight would start increasing,you'd start to feel upside-down and you'd reach the other side feet-first.   If I tried this, I'd turn myself through 180 degrees when I reached the centre.   It would be a whole lot easier.
740477
The earth is round and its gravitational pull draws us to its center.  Upside-down is really just pointing away from the core...from anywhere.
1044221
I would think that you would spiral toward Australia and then back toward us with the mid point at the center of earth's mass, each time not going as far as before .  \n\nThe reason that you would basically oscillate like that, is that the force of gravity increases the closer the centers of mass are to each other (the closer you got to the center of the earth) and so you would be accelerating the entire way till you got there and you would continue going because there would be no force acting on you to decelerate you.  As you start going away from the center toward the land down under, the force of gravity would act against your current velocity, till they cancel each other out and you start to fall toward the center of the earth this time the other way.  The reason that you would not quite make it out the other side of the hole is wind resistance and other very small forces would be affecting you. \n\nAssuming I'm right, you would eventually end up rotating in 3-dimensions around your stomach (or where ever your center of mass is) at the center of the earth.
523001
It would change the Earth's rotation and the Earth would tilt on its axis. What if all of us asked the same question at the same time that violated one of  Yahoo's community guidelines? Would the system completely break down?
677346
If you were to go a million miles (or so) over the north pole, you'd see the earth rotating counterclockwise, the moon revolving around the earth counterclockwise, and the earth moving counterclockwise around the sun.  \n\nIt is the earth's counterclockwise rotation that makes the sun seem to rise in the east and set in the west.
1022265
There is no sideways in space, either.\n\nDirections are relative to perspective. The direction that is down to me is the same direction as up is to people on the other side of this round world.\n\nMaybe the earth is inside-out?
855234
Earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours or 15 degrees per hour that it goes through 0,5 degrees of rotation in two Minutes\n\nClick on the URL below for addition information concening the earth rotation. See Item 17\n\nhelios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_earth.html \n\n. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -\n\nThe diameter is 7926 Miles\n\nCircumference\n\nc = d π\n\nc = 7916(3.141592654)\n\nc = 24900.26337 miles\n\nClick on the URL below for additional informatio concerning the circumference of the earth\n\nwww.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/earth.html \n\n- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - \n\nSolving for earth rotation per degree in miles\n\n24900 ÷ 360 = 69.16666667\n\nThe earth  rotates 69.2 Miles for each degree of rotation. Rounded to one decimal point.\n\n- - - - - -s-
1017741
Lots of things would change but I think these would be most interesting/impactful:\n\n- The sun would rise in the west and set in the east. As someone else noted, time zones would reverse. TV shows would now be at 8 Pacific, 5 Eastern...\n\n- You'd lose all satellite TV and communications, since these satellites are in geosynchronous orbit now and would no longer stay over the right spot on the earth\n\n- Not sure if GPS would actually still work or not. I don't think the system cares which satellite it finds, so you might be switching between them much more often but I think the system itself would still calculate position correctly.\n\n- Weather patterns would shift; hurricanes and tornados would now rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere. There would probably be some pretty drastic climate changes.\n\n- Software for guidance cruise missiles, rockets, anything that uses gyros & calculations instead of GPS for navigation would be way off and would need to be reprogrammed\n\n- It's not a given it would happen immediately, but in short order the magnetic field of earth would also flip, so all compasses would read backwards. (This has happened several times in earth's history and will probably happen again - doesn't depend on rotation reversing, but would probably be triggered by it.)\n\n- Contrary to popular belief, direction that water flushes down the toilet or circles down the drain would NOT change...
40541
It can! Actually Earth's rotation is slowing by about 2.2 seconds every 100,000 years. The massive earthquake that recently caused the disastrous tsunamis around the Indian Ocean slowed Earth's rotation by a few micro-seconds. Don't worry, though, long before Earth stops spinning, our Sun will have left its current stable condition and engulfed the planet--in about 4.5-billion years.