You kidding, all those werewolves walking round at night in human form, feeling really, really listless and not knowing why. Sad really 
I’m no kind of planetologist, but I think one thing that’s being thrown around in this thread is incorrect.
If you blew the moon into tiny pieces in place, it would slowly re-form, not spread out into a uniform ring. It is beyond the Roche limit, and tidal forces from Earth would not prevent recoalescence.
Of course, the formation of a new moon from the bits of the old one might take a long, long time, depending on how far-flung the debris spreads. A blast just barely strong enough to break the moon up might have the parts reassembling in mere centuries, while something that sprayed moondust all over the place might leave it in pieces for many millions of years. In that case, the final product would probably be smaller than what we’ve got now. Some parts would never rejoin, either by entering independant orbit around the sun or Earth (or by striking Earth).
You would need to de-orbit the most or all of the fragments considerably to prevent the moon from coming back together entirely. If Earth were ever to form a ring, it would have to be close-in.
New terminology would be required to describe the act of waving one’s bare ass around. The teen-movie industry would stumble but adapt.
I believe the moon is vitally important to many animal species. Some only mate under the full moon or the new moon. Some may use it for navigation.
If the moon suddenly disappeared then these species wouldn’t have a chance to evolve and adapt to the change. Their extinctions would cause mass disruptions in the food chain.
And that would be bad.
Only in the short term. Without these periodic upheavals, mammals would still be scurrying about, dodging T-Rexes.
Well, it would be bad for us, anyway.
Nope. The moon provides earth with about as much protection from projectiles as a bulletproof belt buckle. Try this: stand outside and look up at the moon. The only things it would stop would be coming from directly behind it. Everything else, coming from any other direction, would hit us. Doesn’t exactly make you feel secure, does it?
Beside the werewolf extinction, it would no longer hit your eye like a big pizza pie 
::d&r::
Repeated visits are indicated…
If anyone’s interested, they yesterday had a task on Big Brother UK where they were asked to solve mysteries - one of them being “What would happen to the Earth if an alien spaceship stole the Moon”.
The “correct” answer given was that it would affect the tides and also cause “a series of cataclysmic events which would destroy the world”.
We’d need to re-name the first day after the weekend.
Oakminster, that’s partly true, but I think you’re overestimating the shield effect here. The moon appears to have blocked a huge number of impacts because we can see so many craters on the moon’s surface, but those impacts occurred over a couple billion years at least. Since the moon has no weather to speak of, we can see many of these ancient impacts today. Besides, many meteors that do cause minor craters on the moon would simply burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Consider- the moon’s mass (and consequently gravitational pull) is only 1/81 that of Earth’s. It’s only about 3,400 km across, compared to 12,800 of Earth. It’s not much help at all in blocking polar impacts, because the moon orbits (very) roughly around the equator*. And assuming that the majority of threatening meteors, asteroids, and comets come from out-orbit of the Earth**, the moon is only in position to block incoming objects a few days a month.
That’s not to say I’d like to be under the meteor that created the Aitken Basin, but I don’t think the moon really blocks that many geologically significant meteors. Even assuming that the moon blocks half of incoming meteors, the odds of a major impact in the next few thousand years is incredibly low.
*To be fair, the majority of objects in the solar system are within a few degrees of the moon’s orbit around Earth- it’s called the Ecliptic. So most meteors and asteroids would come in along this path. The exception would be comets coming in from the Oort Cloud, which are as likely to come from the solar north or south as anywhere else.
**I’m having a devil of a time getting a decent cite for this idea, but it seems to me that if most of the objects in the solar system are farther from the sun than the Earth, and an object that passes the Earth on a first pass is likely to fall into the sun or be thrown out of the ecliptic in a near pass to the sun, then the majority of threatening impacts must come from out-orbit.
But I assume Big Brother didn’t explain what would destroy the World, did he?
Given that another quesion was ‘why do we have eyebrows?’ and that the current main discussion point is whether an evicted contestant should be allowed back in (oh and one contestant is thinking of having plastic surgery on her breasts), I think we can ignore this source!
It really wouldn’t extinguish the lycanthropes, would it? It would just eliminate the mechanism regulating their…changes…
So they would eventually de-synchronize, and we’d have werewolves changing at all times of the month. They may not even stay limited to night-time. Really, you wouldn’t be able to predict when to be on your guard against the Local Wolf-Man, and have to carry a Gun With Silver Bullet at all times…Imagine having to put down the Company’s Comptroller during the monthly sales meeting before he disembowels the entire Board. Plus the local free running canines would suffer endlessly… it would be chaos, chaos I Tell ya!
OTOH, the aliens wouldn’t be able to sneak up on us from behind the Moon, a la Calvin and Hobbes, so I’d say it would be an even trade as far as imaginary threats go…
But in the final analysis, the loss of Evil Overlord Target #1 would be too great a loss…what would insane megalomaniacs plot to blow up if not the Moon? And of course Chairface would have to write his name on Venus, and we’d never see even the first two letters at this distance.
Finally, only took 6 years for that comment and another 4 to have it acknowledged. 
More importantly, would we have to worry about the risk of the broken up zombie moon zobifying the Earth?
Really though, wouldn’t it be a pretty significant change? Our crust and oceans are already being warped and have been nearly as long as they’ve been in existence, would shutting that warping down just cause the currently warped parts to slowly settle, or would it lead to earthquakes and tidal waves as the crust/ocean deals with losing a crucial input for its cycle? Also, the earth and moon orbit around a common center of mass, which I believe is inside the earth in between the crust and center somewhere. Once that tether is cut, it’ll have unregulated angular momentum compared to its current orbit around the sun. Might that not knock us backward/forward a few million miles, or cause the aforementioned earthquakes/tidal waves, or is the effect the moons gravity has on us so small as to be negligible?