I'm no astrophysicist, but my understanding is that planets tend to rotate around an axis because they are created in an eddy (whirlpool, vortex) in the matter spinning around the star during the formation of the star system. The vortex gives all the matter within it a common point to gravitate towards, collecting it into a roughly spherical form. The rate of spin of this vortex dictates the eventual rate of spin of the planet.

Anyway, this is going off into more science than this game really needs.

Actually, given enough time, even the earth will stop rotating (self axis that is).
This effect is known to astrophysicists for a long time. The moon, for example, does not self-rotate. That's why we always see the same side of the moon.

Although it is very unlikely all planets in the Sirius sector will stop self-rotation after only a millennia (31th century).

As for the "only one city per planet" problem... maybe no one gave birth during that 800 years of struggle? They all stopped aging cuz of the "advanced technology"(Did you see anyone having sex hmm? Or any kids?) LOL

I know that planetary spin can decay over time -- a great deal of time -- and moons are subject to strong gravitational influences from their host planet that makes them a different case... but I didn't want to get too long-winded on this subject.

It's anybody's guess if humanity will still be around when the Earth stops spinning; we may have moved off or died out long before that happens. Our sun will eventually lose enough mass that it will start expanding and consume the Earth, but I'm not going to worry about something several billion years off.

If the Earth stopped spinning right now, we'd be doomed. The sun-side would become an infernal wasteland; the dark-side would become a frozen wasteland; with only the "twilight" border between the two left as habitable... and that would be plagued with terrible weather effects as the hot atmosphere, saturated with large amounts of evaporated water from the boiling oceans, encountered the cold atmosphere. Well, perhaps not doomed... but driven into a subterranean existence.

Edited by - Crash-Drive on 24-03-2003 10:30:08

It says that New Berlin takes one standerd year to rotate fully. Maybe most of the planets in the Siruis sector take much longer to rotate than 24 hours.