Fast Efficient Orbital Transportation?

[Janus]

 

I don't think you can simply take the difference in these two numbers and say the difference is from radiating the waste heat of the tidal process.

 

Here is my reasoning:

 

1. The dissipation/radiating takes place near the Earths surface. Even at the equator the spin speed is a very small fraction of the speed of light, so the redshift/blueshift effect has to be very small. (If all this radiation was directed East, the effect would be some 650,000 times greater)

 

2. Any difference would be much more due to absorption/dissipation/re-radiation of solar energy hitting the Earth...still related to v/c for momentum, but the energy exchange of solar is (50,000 times if my sources are contextually correct) many times greater than tidal.

 

So I am thinking the Earth would lose some angular momentum anyway, the angular momentum robbed by the moon is a much greater effect, but the angular momentum loss from dissipating tidal energy is almost insignificant in comparison.

No, again you are trying to attribute a slowing of the Earth's rotation as being caused by the emission process. It doesn't work that way. The Sun warms the Earth, raising it temperature until the net radiation of the Earth matches that the Sun is supplying. Ergo. the Sun, by warming the Earth, increases its momentum and the Earth in turn sheds that momentum by radiating heat away. This results in a state of thermal equilibrium. (Climate change is caused by a change in the atmospheric composition that raises the temp at which this occurs.)

 

The loss of angular momentum not transferred to the Moon is caused by tidal friction converting rotational energy into heat. Which is then radiated away. In this process rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is being converted to electromagnetic radiation. The act of radiating does not slow the Earth, it just carries away that portion of that energy that was converted to heat by the process that did slow it down.

 

With the Sun, it is incoming radiation being converted to outgoing radiation and there is no involvement of the Earth's rotational kinetic energy.