Everyone alive in the UK today. As long as they have access to Freeview, they get it on the ITV channels 
Heh, I just looked up Space 1999 and came up with the following;
% We need the moon.
Cause it is good for Earth. %
Holy cow, that’s on the air over there? Well I guess if we can still see “Are You Being Served?” you folks are entitled to some old stuff of ours in return. (And yes, I remember seeing “Space: 1999” when it first aired.)
Pushkin’s link succinctly sums up the problem with pushing an intact Moon away from the Earth.
By the way, the reason we have a moon in the first place appears to be because the Earth collided with a Mars-sized planetary body early in solar system history, with the debris from the impact coalescing into the Moon. This page has some still images from a computer model simulating the impact itself. The modern Moon is a rather different thing from early Earth in terms of structure and solidity, but I think you can still get a sense of what sort of destruction could entail from a collision between the Moon and any body large enough to affect its orbit.
But most marine life is found within a couple hundred kilometers of shorelines. Productivity in marine environments tends to be much higher close to shore, and estuaries, for example, are among the most productive environments in the world (although not quite as high in diversity or efficiency of nutrient recycling as coral reefs). Intertidal environments tend to have much higher diversity than their littoral and pelagic counterparts (coral reefs are a pretty notable exception.) So I’d guess there would be quite a few extinctions, but you’re right about solar tides, these would allow a few of the obligate intertidal organisms to survive, although greatly reducing the volume of habitat. The real threat would be big chunks of moon hitting us and causing Permian-like extinctions, but the effects of just losing a lot of tidal volume would be pretty dramatic - thousands of species would go extinct, if not tens of thousands.
I’d also be worried about estuarine organisms that regulate their exposure to salt water by moving through estuaries and fish that use estuaries as nurseries. As the solar tides create much weaker currents, bays, lagoons, and estuaries would have much lower input of salt water and freshwater species might begin to dominate. There’s a lot of partitioning in estuarine environments according to salinity, and shrinking the range of salinity variation could have a big impact on species for which that is their competitive or physiological advantage.
In addition, there’s a number of species that use the moonlight as a cue for reproductive or bouyancy-changing activity - these would suffer, and who knows whether they would go extinct or not, but it’s a definite possibility. Many of these species are found in clear, relatively shallow water - like the coral reefs.
Assuming no large moon-part impacts, there’s still a significant threat of major extinctions, although nothing like the Permian or K-T extinctions. Heck, we’re already doing a good job of imitating those without blowing up the moon. 
I concede the point. (To be honest, the whole horns thing was just stuck in my mind from a recent long, involved discussion about what a ring, generally, would look like a planet’s sky. Naturally, if the ring is closer to the planet, the planet’s shadow on the rings creates a larger “break.” I probably shouldn’t have done more than mention the Earth’s shadow in passing in this case.)
If the moon were to disappear, what would happen to the rotation of the Earth?
It wouldn’t slow down as quickly. Tidal friction is causing the rotation to slow at some geological pace and without the moon, this would mostly disappear. At the very least, the guys who maintain atomic clocks would welcome the freedom from having to throw in leap seconds every now and then.
Personally, if someone was going to wave his rear at me, I’m more comfortable describing it as a “moon” rather than a “ring”.
It would stop slowing down. Not sure if anything else would happen- that would probably depend on the details of how the moon disappeared.
Catching up a wee bit late…
What you’re referring to here really are coastal and shallow shelf environments, which =/ intertidal environments. Coastal settings are highly productive (talking here about primary marine productivity) wherever nutrients are brought to surface waters by upwelling at continental shelf edges, which can be as much as a couple hundred kilometers out from the shore (e.g., much of the east coast of the U.S.). Tides are not the sole means of distributing those nutrients across the shelf; there are long shore currents and other types of wind-driven circulation that can accomplish this feat.
Intertidal environments (which are littoral) are very restricted in scope - they are literally bounded by the low tide and high tide marks on the beach, and only the lower interidal zone has much by way of nutrients (thanks to greater contact with the water). The intertidal zone itself is not a hot bed of diversity - it’s not the most welcoming environment for organisms, which have to be able to withstand periodic inundation, dessication, and pounding by waves.
Without tides, those creatures especially adapted to the intertidal environment would probably go the way of the dodo, but the bulk of life existing somewhere out on the shelf is not going to be adversely affected.
Estuarine and coastal marsh organisms that rely on regular influxes of nutrients/flushing of waste by tidal variations would indeed be adversely affected. The greatest problems would be in areas with mesotidal (2-4 m) and macrotidal (> 4m) ranges, less so in areas with microtidal ranges (< 2m).
Agreed. These are the organisms I mentioned earlier, the biological intricacies of which we don’t know very well in many cases.
Been reading Niles Eldridge, eh?
Actually, I don’t disagree that a lack of tides would cause problems for lots of organisms, but I don’t think it would be on the order of past mass extinctions. I wonder how even the current extinction event would compare at the family or genera level, rather than at the species level. Keep in mind that when we look back a past mass extinctions, we are only judging those on the basis of what we can see in the fossil record, which severely underrepresents past diversity owing to lack of preservation. It would be neat if someone could weigh in here with a projection of the loss of diversity at the family or genera level, which I’m not capable of doing.
By the way, this page has links to some basic descriptions of each of the past five mass extinctions we know of in Earth history, plus a reference to the sixth mass extinction thought to be taking place now.
And, approximately, solar tides would be about the size of neap tides today.
Sorry to bring this thread back from the dead, I’ve been out of town.
Your’re right, I am talking about shallow-water environments, which host the majority of marine life. Littoral can mean shallow water environments as well, and that was the sense in which I was using the word (you can still find textbooks that define littoral as between high and low tide, but I don’t know a lot of people, marine scientists included, who would say “littoral” in conversation when they can use the perfectly good word “intertidal” - perhaps convention is different on the East Coast, I don’t know.) If you like, sub-littoral is a technical term for shallow water out to the continental shelf.
No, it’s not, but the deep sea and centers of the great oceanic gyres are relatively low-nutrient, low-biomass environments. I recall them also being low in diversity (although with an unusual amout of phyletic diversity, but not so much that shows up in conventional measures of species diversity), so in comparison, intertidal environments can be pretty diverse. Especially when you consider rocky intertidal, mangrove swamps, and salt marshes over the relatively low diversity sandy beaches. My memory may be faulty on this, but that’s what I’ve got left from formal education years ago.
I didn’t want to conflate the two issues: It’s a separate issue whether most marine life is in the deep sea or the sub-littoral from the issue of how many species would go extinct if tidal volume were greatly reduced. I don’t off the top of my head have any numbers, but I think thousands to tens of thousands of species isn’t an unreasonable estimate for the number that would be impacted by such a change in tidal range. If anyone wants to look up numbers of species dependent on these environments, I will happily go with whatever reliable source they can find.
I haven’t read any Niles Eldridge in a while, but I’ve certainly been influenced by his thinking. 
Just the numbers for the influence of invasive species and habitat destruction are enough to send quivers through my spine - I kind of think we’ve just gotten started with our influence on the biosphere, and that it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. At least we don’t have the technology to destroy the moon yet, and the really evil TV characters have their focus on other targets: