Always nice to meet a fellow enthusiast. /secrethandshake
I think it would be worth the consequences just to see that happen.
Because it’s awesome. Roland Emmerich should get on it.
I could, but I’ve outgrown that kind of thing, since the last time.
Hmm. I wonder if that is a fixed ratio? Wouldn’t surprise me if there were a fixed numeric constant on the order of 60% that accounts for the decreasing gravity (for homogeneous, spherical, etc. objects).
We’re also both neglecting that, aside from something like a slowly working mass driver, most scenarios would put a lot of thermal energy into the rock. Basalt has a specific heat of something like 840 J/kg-K; an event that increased the temperature to the melting point of basalt would be a non-trivial fraction of the total energy.
Yes - for a spherical object with constant density (which is what I assumed…), the energy required to dissect is 3/5GMM/R (G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the object and R is the radius), while your method (multiplying the mass times the initial escape velocity) amounts to GM*M/R.
Yeah.
Also, it could only be done at night.
Wouldn’t happen for obvious reasons. Night is the only time open to travel to the sun.
The energy needed to do so is FAR beyond anything anything we could put out. To answer your other question. Not having a moon would lead to some very bad things. The big two being the loss of tides and doing all kinds of crazy stuff to the speed and rotation of the earth.
Some years ago, maybe 30 years ago, a man named Smbat (Alexander) Abian proposed blowing up the moon in order to create a ring around the earth so that we could have 24 hour daylight. To call him a nutjob would be an understatement. I knew him personally. He is deceased so libel is not an issue. His daughter uselessly threatened me with a libel suit after I went into some detail on another site.
:rolleyes:
Why does there always have to be someone being negative?
Heh.
So blowing up the moon or sending it away are both(at this time) out of the question.
What about sending it towards the earth in a degenerative orbit?
I’m fairly sure the short answer is “Um, orbits don’t do that,” but what exactly did you have in mind?
It’s more energy intensive to change a circular orbit into a crash than to change a circular orbit into an escape orbit, but a factor of roughly 2.
Perhaps slowing it down a bit. Would that drop it into a lower orbit?
Yes, there’s a promising line! Perhaps instead of blowing it up, we could simply absorb it into the mantle of the Earth’s own crust. Voila greater land mass!
How much slower would the Moon need to be to lose orbit and fall into the Earth? Could such a slowdown be achieved with our current global arsenal of nukes or what have you?
The experts should be along soon to explain how useless nuclear weapons are for blowing up and changing the course of celestial objects. I’d think the simplest approach is to put a solar powered rail gun on the moon and starting shooting chunks of it off in the opposite direction of it’s path. My quick calculations show that I have no idea to fgure out what that would require, but it seems to me by the time you’ve shot half the moon away it should stop altogether. But if that stuff stays in the same orbit, you’re just making a giant clown car out of the thing as the pieces come around and slam back into the moon again. But don’t get fooled by the idea of the moon orbiting the earth. It’s orbit is around the sun.
ETA: Hmm? What is the sun orbiting? The galactic core?
That’s just silly because of the expense.
It’s much cheaper to speed Earth’s orbit so it hits the moon because the nukes and rockets are already here — unless the shadow government secretly put them there so it could make the moon land on Russia.
Man, if anything happens to the moon, the OP and his minions will be the first ones the cops wanna talk to. And come to think of it, I noticed the moon is much smaller than it was when this thread began!:eek:
Well, it sounds like a lot of you guys know what you’re talking about, but I have to ask… Suppose I did the naive thing and went to the moon, dug a super-deep mine shaft all the way down to its center, put the combined nuclear arsenal of every earth nation in there (plus the additional nukes we had built while spending a century or so developing our moon-mineshaft-digging technology), and set them all off at once.
What would happen?
I’m not an expert at all, I just want to see if my guess is right when someone else comes along and answers this: Hardly anything at all. We probably wouldn’t even notice anything happening on the surface.