Kingdom Come

A torus is a type of oblate spheroid, informally called a donut because it has a hole in the middle.

Various astronomers both amateur and professional have, in fact, spent a great deal of time and mental energy proving that such a planet is feasible, though it would need to be somewhat larger than Earth.

It wouldn’t be a perfect ring with a perfectly circular cross-section, either.

Instead, it would need to be slightly egg-shaped in cross-section, thicker at the outer edges than it is towards the centre (the hole in the donut).

We won’t delve deep into mathematical equations here, but if you’d like to see some workings that led to these conclusions, try this article by Oxford professor and mathematical modelling expert Anders Sandberg, or this one by an anonymous blogger.

Living on a donut Earth

So if a toroidal planet can exist… what might life there be like? How would conditions on a donut-shaped Earth differ from those we experience in real life?

Such a planet would still have an equator and poles.

Actually, it would have an inner and outer equator – one on the inside of the ring, one on the outside – but just as on Earth, the equator would wrap right around the donut planet’s ‘waistband’.

And the North and South Poles would still be at the top and bottom, respectively.

It’s just that each pole would be a very narrow ring on the donut’s uppermost and lowermost surfaces, as opposed to a specific point as it is on Earth.

September 2024: Scientists have uncovered a vast donut-shaped structure buried thousands of miles beneath our feet.

Researchers from the Australian National University tracing the paths of seismic waves generated by earthquakes found a donut-like structure which runs in a ring around the edge of the liquid outer core, and could be responsible for driving our planet’s protective magnetic field.