With today’s technology? What would it take to blow up the moon, realistically? I mean, would it be possible to do it like they tried to blow up the asteroid in Armageddon (drill a deep hole, set a nuclear bomb in it, detonate). Given enough Megatons, would this destroy the moon, or just make it angry?
How big of an object (ie asteroid or comet) would it take to destroy the moon from a collision? Say some planetkiller asteroid is flying along, but the moon takes the bullet for us by happening to be in the way at the right time, and gets clobbered instead?
How would this affect earth? How bad would pieces of blown-up moon falling on earth be? How about the change in tides from no longer having a moon? (evenings would be a lot darker too, I imagine).
I’d think any explosion/force great enough to clear the mass of the moon out of Earth’s gravitational well would also have a pretty adverse affect on the Earth.
This is a recurring topic here. Searching reveals several threads as well as Cecil’s column. Here’s a good post from Measure for Measure that has links to some columns, etc.
I think we can all agree that smug, tide-causing jerk needs to be taken care of.
However, I don’t think we have anywhere near enough explosive for the job. I wonder what all the nukes on Earth would do to it. I am not a planet destroyer (IANAPD), but I can’t imagine we’d be able to take care of more than even 5%.
This reminded me of something I saw 20 years ago or so where this nutjob was proposing to blow up the moon and cause the pieces to soft-land in the oceans and fill them in so that we would have more land mass to use. No word on where all that water was supposed to go, let alone how we were to accomplish ‘soft landing’ continent sized pieces.
Blowing up the moon would require accelerating all of its mass to the escape velocity of the moon. The escape velocity is 2400 m/s and the mass 7.3477e22 kg; this comes to 2.1161e29 joules. This is quite a lot of energy; the sun for instance produces 3.846e26 W, so blowing up the moon would require over 9 minutes of the sun’s total energy output.
Alternatively, we could use about 4000 trillion bombs of the scale used on Hiroshima.
There is a remote possibility that we could divert an asteroid or comet (the moons of Mars would actually make pretty good projectiles) and make a decent dent in the Moon. Not enough to destroy it completely, though. The moon is big.
Could we knock a piece of the moon off, accelerate it, but keep it in the moon’s orbit so it comes back around and hits the moon again? Could we break it into several pieces and create a giant Newton’s Cradle that way, sans strings and frame?
There is a sci-fi novel called Moonfall - the moon is struck by an extrasolar asteroid with a huge velocity, it breaks up. The earth gets hammered with falling rocks, but the bulk of the shattered moon stays in orbit, and could smear out into a ring or could coalesce back into a smaller body.
The science seems pretty good, so it was a fairly good read.