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
In theory you should be able to do this. Although it would take quite a bit of effort until you even got a noticeable movement. This would be similar to how people demonstrate pulling loaded trains, but a ship would have a lot more momentum but lower resting resistance. Top Gear also did something similar to this by pulling a 13,000 tonne freight ship with a small Citroen C3 compact car. The issues they had with the tiny bit of breeze shows that this would most likely be impossible to do in practice with a human but in theory there is nothing preventing it from being done in absolutely ideal conditions.
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