# Blowing Up the Moon?! **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 28, 2003, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790 "2003-03-28T15:35:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![syntax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/41988e/32.png) [@syntax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/syntax)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/1 "2003-03-28T15:35:25Z")
Read an article at WWN ([http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/conspiracies\_story.cfm?instanceid=53679](http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/conspiracies_story.cfm?instanceid=53679)), about a secret plan by the Russians to blow up the moon to get rid of their harsh winters with 600 megaton nukes. Although this can be safely dismissed as a ridiculous story, I wondered what would be the consequences of such an act? Would the earth be affected by the explosion, or by debris? Would it really improve Russian weather, and what would happen to the global tides? Any other interesting repercussions? ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/2 "2003-03-28T15:57:37Z")
And they say the midwest is in great distress and NASA blew up the moon … Cecil on the subject: [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001027.html](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001027.html) Among the fatalist scenarios he lists, I tend to buy this one: > [@](#): > > (2) End of life as we know it. In his book What If the Moon Didn’t Exist? Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been (1993), astronomer Neil Comins speculates that life would never have evolved from the primordial soup if not for the moon and accompanying tides. With weaker solar tides and thus a lesser distance between the littoral reach of high and low tides, there would have been fewer tidal pools, the petri dish for so many forms of life. As one commentator puts it, no amphibians = no land animals = no us. However, at the risk of appearing ungrateful, I have to point out that, evolutionarily speaking, we’re kinda past the lizard stage. The riposte to this is that even now tidal motion helps keep the oceans churned up, circulating nutrients and generally helping to promote life beneath the waves. No churning = no circulating nutrients = no life. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/3 "2003-03-28T16:02:18Z")
You would need an awful lot of 600 megaton nukes to disintegrate the moon- enough to counteract the gravitational binding energy and put all the material of the moon on orbit around itself. (anyone know the figures?) A huge amount of this material would impact the earth… and continue to do so for millions of years. So unless you want to create continuous meteor shower with enough energy to fry the earth’s crust, it is not recommended. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/4 "2003-03-28T16:14:19Z")
Aha! At a guess it would be 1.25 x 10[sup]29[/sup] watts to destroy the moon… if [Bradbury](http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/PlntDssmbly.html) is correct. how many megatonnes of TNT is that? ---
**Author:** ![DreadCthulhu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/db5fbb/32.png) [@DreadCthulhu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DreadCthulhu)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/5 "2003-03-28T17:51:22Z")
Well, watts is a unit of power, not energy, but if that is 1.25 x 10^29 Joules comes out to 29,875,717,017,208 megatons of TNT, assuming the program I got on this site [http://www.jennessent.com/unit\_conv/Manual/no\_frame/energy\_work1.htm](http://www.jennessent.com/unit_conv/Manual/no_frame/energy_work1.htm) is correct. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2003, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/6 "2003-03-28T23:14:52Z")
Somewhat easier than blowing up the Moon outright would be to lower its orbit enough that tidal forces from the Earth would pull it apart. When the movie _The Time Machine_ came out last year, I (with a little help from **The Bad Astronomer** ) calculated the energy required in [a Cafe thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=103183&perpage=50&pagenumber=2#post1920297), and it comes out to about ten million megatons, assuming perfect efficiency. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Controvert](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dec6dc/32.png) [@The\_Controvert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Controvert)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/7 "2003-03-29T00:01:08Z")
It’s not too hard if you have a Mark 1 Death Star Battle Station, or even a partially constructed Mark 2 Death Star. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/8 "2003-03-29T00:39:42Z")
I think we should be working on blasting the moon into intergalactic space before we consider blowing it up. We’re already four years behind schedule. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/9 "2003-03-29T00:51:54Z")
Isn’t there the little detail of the mass? Just because you blow something up doesn’t mean it is disintigrated. The mass would still be there, abeit in another state. It might dissipate over a larger area, but that could ages. Silliness. ---
**Author:** ![Rabid\_Squirrel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Rabid\_Squirrel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rabid_Squirrel)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/10 "2003-03-29T01:56:07Z")
I suppose you could covert it into pure energy, but I’m guessing a sizable chunk of the solar system would vanish with it. What about converting the moon rocks into a ring around earth? (Besides the massive problem of debris whanking all orbital objects) ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 5:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/11 "2003-03-29T05:53:10Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rabid\_Squirrel \* > \*\*What about converting the moon rocks into a ring around earth? (Besides the massive problem of debris whanking all orbital objects) \*\* You might be able to pull that off (No pun intended) with some sort of automated mass-driver. And a lot of patience. 'Might run into some trouble when you hit the molten mantle, though. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2003, 6:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blowing-up-the-moon/164790/12 "2003-03-29T06:49:33Z")
It is debatable whether the moon has a molten core, although it may have a small one… it does not seem to be active enough to procuce a magnetic field of any strength, but if you were stripping the moon down by mass driver you would probably need to extract the heat energy of the tiny core to power this process. Stripping the moon in this way would need the larger value of ~10[sup]13 [/sup] megatons rater than just ~10[sup]7[/sup] to bring it within Roche’s limit. Using wellaimed mass drivers would allow for the material to be aimed so as to avoid hitting the earth, and you could build thousands of large habitats out of the moon’s material… however the absence of he moon in a single massive lump would remove the Earth’s daily tides and have all the effects mentioned in Cecil’s [column.](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001027.html)