Thank you for the response! You gave me some very helpful information.



That's what I thought, so it's good to have it confirmed.



This is helpful to me. I often see vague references to how Earth electronics could stop working if the planet's magnetic field diminished, but I didn't know if there was anything to that idea. The bit about Mars is a great point. Obviously we have a complicated robot trundling around on Mars without a problem. It's specifically computers that I'm interested in, and if they would still work fine outside of a planetary magnetic field, that's important to me. And when I think about it, science fiction depicts computers working just fine in space, and there have to be computers of some sort on the objects we put into space too. This is good to know.



Atmoplane. I like that. So if an atmoplane was thinner, a person could see things more clearly at a greater distance, but a thicker atmoplane will obscure more distant objects. Would the distant object's illumination affect how well it could be seen? Say the object was the world's biggest digital watch, would it be easier to see at a distance, during the day, if its illumination button was pressed? Or would the brightness of day render any additional illumination redundant so far as clarity over distance went?



Regarding tidally locked objects, I was under the impression that they do rotate, it's just that they rotate once per orbital revolution, which is why the same side always faces the object it orbits.

It's hard to describe exactly what I'm thinking of when I ask this question. Say the Earth did not rotate at all, and also did not orbit. Say it existed so far away from other celestial bodies that it was not appreciably affected by their gravity, and was not moving through space. It just sits there. This is just an analogue description for what I'm thinking of, so disregard the fact that this is probably impossible because everything is moving through space, and disregard the fact that it would just be a dead chunk of rock in such a situation. Say it had artificial sunlight caused by enormous sunshine satellites that generate miraculous perpetual energy, an atmosphere, protection from cosmic rays, a simulated day/night cycle, so that we could live there. Can you think of anything weird that would happen with such a planet? There would be no coriolis effect, and I assume the magnetic field would be less significant if the planet wasn't spinning. It's possible that this question is just too weird, and I'm willing to accept that.

Thanks again. I always appreciate your scientific insight.