A friend and I have been having an ongoing debate for years. We were at a pub on a wharf, watching shipping container ships and cruise ships come into dock, and he posed the question. With no wind, no waves, perfect conditions, could he move the ship at all?
In: Planetary Science
Yes. There are these people who pull an 18 wheeler with their teeth on TV. We can use ropes to pull a sailboat or fishing boat a few feet and secure it against a dock. So we CAN use ropes to move boats, period. It’s only a question of “how fast”. Everything we normally use to move container ships– tugboats, motors, pulleys, heavy ropes attached to trains — is a variation on “pull or push”. The question is not “if”; it’s “how fast”.
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