Destruction of the Moon

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Not to be confused with Disrupted planet.
The destruction of the Moon as it appears in the 2002 film The Time Machine

The destruction of the Moon is a hypothetical global catastrophe scenario explored in fiction[1] and, informally, by scientists.

Analysis

Completely destroying the Moon to avoid the debris reassembling into a satellite would require an amount of energy larger than the Moon gravitational binding energy, estimated to be 1.2 × 1029 J.[2][3][4] This equals a bit less than 600 billion 50-megaton nuclear bombs, such as the Tsar Bomba,[5][4][2][6] roughly equivalent to the full energy output by the Sun in six minutes.[4] For comparison, the impact that created the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest lunar impact structure, had an energy of roughly 4 × 1026 J, 300 times smaller.[7] Bringing the Moon's orbit within the Roche limit of Earth (within about 18,000 km (11,000 mi)) would also destroy it.[3]

Without the Moon, tides would still happen—the Sun's gravity also causes tides—but they would be substantially reduced,[8] a quarter of the size of the current spring tide.[9] The sudden disappearance of the Moon however could release water pressure and create large potentially catastrophic waves around the oceans.[8] The reduction of tides could have profound negative consequences on coastal ecosystems.[10] Tides also help to drive ocean currents; without the Moon, weather extremes and major weather events would be more common.[10]

In 1993 numerical simulations suggested that the Moon is necessary to keep the Earth's axial tilt stable. Without the Moon the axial tilt of Earth could therefore oscillate chaotically from 0° to 45° on the scale of tens of thousands of years, possibly reaching 85° on timescales of several million years,[11] with severe climatic consequences.[9][4][6] More recent studies however suggested that, even without the Moon, Earth's axial tilt could be relatively stable on the scale of hundreds of millions of years.[12] Without the Moon, neither solar nor lunar eclipses would exist.[9]

Violent destruction of the Moon would likely bring substantial debris to impact Earth. Such debris would be slower, and thus each debris fragment have only about 1% of the kinetic energy with respect to an asteroid of the same size, therefore their impact would be less destructive.[9] However, their sheer quantity could lead nonetheless to substantial atmospheric heating, possibly leading to extinction of life on Earth.[4][6] The mathematician and Usenet personality Alexander Abian proposed that the destruction of the Moon would stabilize seasons and eliminate natural disasters from Earth.[13] Apart from being practically unfeasible,[5] Abian's claims have no scientific basis— destroying the moon would actually cause natural disasters.[8]

Natural satellites can and do get destroyed. The rings of Saturn possibly originated from the destruction of a former moon, called Chrysalis.[14] The capture of Triton by Neptune possibly destroyed some of the previous moons of Neptune, by crashing them on Neptune or Triton itself.[15][16] In turn, tidal interactions also cause Triton's orbit, which is already closer to Neptune than the Moon is to Earth, to gradually decay further; predictions are that 3.6 billion years from now, Triton will pass within Neptune's Roche limit and be destroyed.[17] The Mars moon Phobos is expected to meet a similar fate.[18] Phobos gets closer to Mars by about 2 cm per year, and it is predicted that within 30 to 50 million years it will either collide with the planet or break up into a planetary ring.[19] Outside the Solar System, exomoons might collide with planets, removing life from them. [20]

See also

References

  1. ^ Davis, Lauren (23 September 2012). "Who destroyed the Moon best?". Gizmodo. Retrieved 19 March 2024.
  2. ^ a b Ward, Cassidy (5 December 2023). "IF THE MOON DISAPPEARED, WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR EARTH?". SyFy. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  3. ^ a b Cain, Fraser (17 July 2015). "How could we destroy the moon?". Phys.org. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  4. ^ a b c d e Paoletta, Rae (10 July 2017). "What Would Happen If We Blew Up the Moon?". Gizmodo. Retrieved 17 March 2024.
  5. ^ a b Helman, Christopher (26 November 2012). "U.S. Planned Cold War Mission To Blow Up The Moon? Is That Even Possible?". Forbes. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
  6. ^ a b c "What would happen if we blew up the Moon?". BBC Science Focus. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  7. ^ Potter, R.W.K.; Collins, G.S.; Kiefer, W.S.; McGovern, P.J.; Kring, D.A. (2012). "Constraining the size of the South Pole-Aitken basin impact". Icarus. 220 (2): 730–743. Bibcode:2012Icar..220..730P. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2012.05.032.
  8. ^ a b c Turney, Drew (19 April 2023). "A Brief History of the Ludicrous (And Misguided) Plots to Blow Up the Moon". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved 17 March 2024.
  9. ^ a b c d Siegel, Ethan (2 March 2017). "7 Ways Earth Would Change If Our Moon Were Destroyed". Forbes. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  10. ^ a b McFall-Johnsen, Morgan (7 May 2018). "What would happen if the moon suddenly disappeared?". Popular Science. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  11. ^ Laskar, J.; Robutel, P. (1993). "The chaotic obliquity of the planets". Nature. 361 (6413): 608–612. Bibcode:1993Natur.361..608L. doi:10.1038/361608a0.
  12. ^ Lissauer, Jack J.; Barnes, Jason W.; Chambers, John E. (2012). "Obliquity variations of a moonless Earth". Icarus. 217 (1): 77–87. Bibcode:2012Icar..217...77L. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.013.
  13. ^ "YIKES!: GOODNIGHT, MOON Shoot the moon? Hell, says Prof. Alexander Abian, why not just blow it up?;". People. 1991-06-24. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
  14. ^ Beckwith, Walter (19 September 2022). "Destruction of Saturn's Former Moon May Explain Planet's Tilt and Young Rings". AAAS. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  15. ^ Siegel, Ethan (27 August 2020). "How Neptune's Triton Destroyed Nearly All Of Its Moons". Forbes. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  16. ^ Tillman, Nola Taylor (4 December 2017). "When Triton Crashed the Party at Neptune". Space.com. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
  17. ^ Chyba, C. F.; Jankowski, D. G.; Nicholson, P. D. (July 1989). "Tidal evolution in the Neptune-Triton system". Astronomy and Astrophysics. 219 (1–2): L23–L26. Bibcode:1989A&A...219L..23C.
  18. ^ Zubritsky, Elizabeth (10 November 2015). "Mars' Moon Phobos is Slowly Falling Apart". NASA. Retrieved 19 July 2021.
  19. ^ "NASA – Phobos". Solarsystem.nasa.gov. Archived from the original on 24 June 2014. Retrieved 4 August 2014.
  20. ^ Hansen, Bradley M S. (2023). "Consequences of dynamically unstable moons in extrasolar systems". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 520: 761–772. arXiv:2210.02603. doi:10.1093/mnras/stac2847.
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