Have you ever wondered what would happen if the Moon was destroyed?
Perhaps the thought has never crossed your mind, or maybe you’re more of a worrier and it’s just one of many things keeping you awake at night.
Well either way, you may have seen a story doing the rounds that experts have warned Nasa it could accidentally ‘destroy the Moon’ (probably in capital letters) by its ‘thoughtless exploitation’.
First things first. There’s a little bit missing from that sentence. Experts actually warned that the Moon’s resources could be destroyed by Nasa, not the whole Moon.
Last year Nasa pledged to begin excavating Moon soil in 2032, while on Monday a commercial lander, Peregrine Mission One funded in part by Nasa, blasted off in search of minerals, water and other resources that could be used to help build permanent bases.
Unfortunately shortly after lift-off the unmanned Peregrine lander suffered a series of technical issues and is now probably dead. Not ideal for the first US mission to the Moon since the Apollo landings half a century ago.
But that’s another story.
Back to destroying the Moon, which would actually be pretty tricky.
The Moon is around 74 million million million tonnes. That’s pretty big. Researchers believe that even if we extracted 1% of it – that’s a hell of a lot – it still wouldn’t affect either the Moon’s orbit or its effects on us, like tides.
Scientists’ main concern right now is irreparable damage to unique scientific sites.
Craters that have never seen the Sun could hold many secrets. Ice at the bottom of them may hold clues to where water originally came from.
They’re also the perfect place to house telescopes searching for alien life, away from the light and noise of Earth – but radio signals from robot rovers and satellites around the Moon could get in the way.
All very important, but slightly less dramatic for most of us.
Still, what exactly would happen if the Moon disappeared?
The first thing you’re probably thinking is: tides. And you’d be right.
Without the Moon pulling Earth’s seas back and forth, tides would be much weaker – between about 65% and 75% less extreme.
They would still exist because of the Sun’s gravitational pull, but that’s much further from us than the Moon (93 million miles versus about 240,000 miles).
Big deal, we’d never get caught out at the beach and have fewer storm surges, right?
Wrong.
Tides don’t only affect the coast, they’re part of a much bigger ocean current system that helps stabilise the planet’s climate, essentially a massive conveyor belt moving heat around the place.
Without them, temperatures could be much more extreme – something we definitely don’t need right now.
And don’t forget the many species that rely on the tides to survive, both on land and at sea.
With weaker tides, animals like crabs, mussels, starfish and snails would struggle to survive, and so would those that eat them. If the tides disappeared it would quickly upset important food chains around the world, and could lead to mass extinctions.
Animals would suffer a lot if we accidentally destroyed the Moon to be honest. In another scenario, nocturnal species would also struggle to hunt without moonlight to help them. This would leave them hungry, and their prey thriving, which would have drastic consequences on the habitat around them.
And another biggie. If the Moon disappeared, the Earth could topple over. Or stand up straight.
Neither is ideal.
The Moon’s gravity has kept Earth’s tilt at a relatively steady 23.5 degrees, with a little wobble here and there.
Without the Moon, our planet could wobble about a lot more, causing havoc with the climate and seasons. If it’s upright, there would be no change in the seasons, and everywhere would get the same amount of daylight all year around.
But if the Earth tilted drastically, it could lead to much more extreme seasons – and even ice ages, which are thought by many to have been caused by just less than a one degree change in the Earth’s tilt. Imagine 10 degrees…
There would be one bright side to destroying the Moon however. If you can survive the extreme weather and find enough food to eat in collapsing ecosystems, without the light of the Moon in the sky the stargazing would be off the charts.
In fact, that’s why many astronomers secretly (or not so secretly) hate the Moon and would actually quite like to destroy it.
On a podcast discussing exactly just how to do that, Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggested one way would be to rope in some of the solar system’s other residents, perhaps smashing Mercury or Pluto into it.
Joining Dr McDowell on the Dead Planets Society podcast, Rutgers University’s Professor Haym Benaroya suggested digging holes around the equator and dropping bombs into them, but that still isn’t as simple as it sounds.
‘We’ve blown the Moon into pieces,’ said Dr McDowell. ‘But if we only have just enough energy to break the chemical bonds of the rock, and the little pieces are still in each other’s gravity field, they’ll come back to each other.
‘What happens then is you’ve actually made the world’s biggest ball pit.’
So, in short. Nasa isn’t going to destroy the Moon, and probably no one else will either.
It’s really quite difficult.
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