What would life on Earth be like if our planet were cube-shaped?

It’s coming home. In the season one finale of Dead Planets Society, our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte are taking on everyone’s favourite planet: Earth. But fear not – they aren’t destroying it entirely, just reshaping it a bit. Gravity naturally encourages objects in space to form spheres, but in this episode, Earth is getting cubified.

Transforming Earth into a cube is difficult, so our hosts have turned to geophysicist and disaster researcher Mika McKinnon for help. No matter how you do it, Earth is going to be uninhabitable for a while. But once things settle down, life on our home planet would be drastically different.

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For one thing, if Earth were moulded into a cube but kept the same mass and amount of water, the oceans would pool up into six seas – one on each face of Cube Earth – protruding from the surface like a huge lens. The atmosphere would behave similarly, not reaching the edges or corners. This would leave a narrow uninhabitable zone around each sea, with bleak mountains beyond the atmosphere.

Space exploration would, in some ways, be simplified – all you would have to do to get into the vacuum of space would be to build a shielded rover and trundle off towards the edges of the world. With no air to hamper things, those edges would be perfect for space launches and telescopes. But the constant earthquakes triggered as gravity tries to make the planet a sphere again might make things tough.

Then, in the second part of the finale episode, our hosts and McKinnon take on what life will be like on Cube Earth. Days will seem different, as each sunrise and sunset will happen suddenly across each face of the planet. The world’s new shape and the six bubbles of atmosphere would encourage something like island evolution, potentially producing strange wildlife and enormous sea monsters.