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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arscott" data-source="post: 4055574" data-attributes="member: 17969">If the earth stops spinning, most of the earth's surface will become uninhabitable--it will either be always day (and thus too hot to survive) or always night (and thus too cold).  I imagine the edges, where it will always be dawn/dusk will still be hypothetically inhabitable, but other side effects will still apply, such as:-Really weird weather at the border regions caused by the permanent day/night zones and the cessation of the Coriolis Effect (IE: when the earth stops spinning, so do the hurricanes).-Changes to, or elimination of, the earth's magnetic field (which owes much of it's existence to the earth's rotation).  The magnetosphere protects the planet from certain types of cosmic radiation.-Massive Crop Die-off (From weather/radiation effects described above, as well as the lack of day/night cycle.  Most plants need a certain amount of light or a certain amount of darkness each day.  Eternal twilight won't cut it.)That said, I don't think there's any natural effect that could cause the earth to just stop spinning like that.  Any such effect would have to be supernatural (or at least really, really bad science).As far as an Asteroid hitting the earth, the idea that we'd somehow regress back to a previous period in history is over-simplifying things.  Whatever the result, it is unlikely to resemble a particular era of history.Consider--The asteroid's biggest effect is that it will kill many crops by blocking out the sunlight and otherwise screwing around with the weather.  The society of the middle ages was basically an agricultural society where wealth is derived from your control of (farm)land.  But traditional agriculture just stopped working.The 'winners' of such a scenario would be the ones who manage to ensure their food supply.  But the two basic methods would be force (beating people up and stealing their food) and science (making corn that grows with less sun).  This is very different from the stone age, where resources were plentiful enough and humans were scarce enough that they rarely came into competition, and where getting food was a lot more about hunting/gathering it than engineering it.</blockquote>

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