This is brought to mind by the classic Mr.Show sketch about blowing up the moon.
Sorry if this is a repeat. A man’s mind inexorably turns to blowin’ things up real good.
Not even close. If you piled every nuke on the planet into one spot and detonated them, you wouldn’t make a gnat’s bit of difference. The amount of energy required to move the moon is IMMENSE.
And don’t forget that a nuclear bomb isn’t a great tool for moving things. It’s not enough to just create a big blast - you have to move particles in a coherent flow in one direction, AND you have to send them out of the Moon’s gravitational field. A nuclear blast just scatters stuff everywhere, and would be a pretty inefficient way to move the moon.
If you want to move the moon, a more efficient way to use nuclear power would be to put a reactor on the moon powering mass drivers that throw rocks in the same direction at greater than escape velocity. But you still can’t do it.
Without doing any math, my guess is that the amount of energy you’d need to move the moon out of the Earth’s orbit would heat the moon up so much that it would melt.
Ahhh, what a bummer. Maybe we could steer a large asteroid at it? We could at least set it spinning a bit faster.
Woops, Mods. I meant this for GQ.
Our nuclear capability is insufficient to deflect an asteroid more than about 2 miles across. The mass of the moon is several orders of magnitude larger, so we could barely move it at all. Possibly even measurements using lasers wouldn’t register the movement.
Sorry to disappoint you. 
By “out of its orbit”, I’ll assume you want it pushed away so it never comes back. The escape speed of earth at that “altitude” is 1.4 km/s. To accelerate the moon to this speed requires 8x10[sup]28[/sup] J, or 1.8x10[sup]13[/sup] megaton. That’s 100 billion 180-megaton bombs. And that’s assuming the explosive force is converted into kinetic energy with a 100% efficiency, which is impossible. You probably need at least 10 times as many.
(That’s a very rough approximation and ignores several important factors; don’t quote me on it.)
I love pointless crap like this. 
It’s tough to take, tough to take. Shoving the moon off seemed the natural progression: land on moon, play golf on moon, drive around on moon, nuke moon out of orbit.
In the Mr.Show sketch, for those who haven’t seen it, NASA holds a press conference and announces that “we have the technology, the time is now, we choose to blow up the moon.” The plan involves sending up a sign-language-fluent chimp to do the deed. But during his training, the chimp asks, “Why? Why blow up the moon?” a question the how-centric scientists can’t answer. We get the spinning newspaper and headline, “Monkey asks WHY?” and indications that the nation is PO’d over his party pooping. NASA solves the problem elegantly by replacing him with another chimp, one that can’t sign and ask inconvenient questions. It’s amusing. Maybe you have to see it to appreciate it, though.
I haven’t seen it, but your explanation makes me wish i had.
Instead of nuclear bombs, how about nuclear-powered engines on the moon’s surface?
Ignoring the probability that an engine would dig itself into the moon instead of moving the moon, could we generate the necessary amount of energy given enough time? The limiting factor here I suppose would be the amount of nuclear fuel available on Earth. Would we use it up before we reached the goal?
I suppose for the sake of argument we stick with nuclear fuels that have already been used, and not speculate on hydrogen fusion.
Err, how about a really long lever?
Seriously, is there some way to add a little nuclear kick to the moon’s orbit at just the right intervals to have a big effect over time?
IIRC China has announced or proposed the largest nuclear power plant in the world, which contains six 1-gigawatt reactors. If you had a million of those reactors, it takes a few million years to generate the 8x10[sup]28[/sup] J of energy I mentioned above.
So then the question is, do we have enough fuel for a million years? Somehow I doubt it.
Over millions of years, the moon’s orbit changes (in the distant past it was further away than it was now, or was it closer?).
The Moon is getting further away. I guess it once was so close to the Earth (presumably it coalesced from the ring of ejecta orbiting the Earth after some Mars-sized object collided with it some 4.5 billion years ago, and has been spiraling out ever since) that it would have been alarmingly huge in the sky. Needless to say, surfers would have had one gnarly riptide to contend with if they were out riding waves a couple billion years ago.
It’s interesting to note that it is purely by coincidence that we are alive at a time in the Earth’s history when the disk of the Moon appears, from our perspective, to be the same size as the disk of the Sun. Once, total solar eclipses completely blocked even the light from the Sun’s corona; in the future, a solar eclipse won’t be nearly as dark and spectacular because the Moon won’t ever be able to blot out the surface of the Sun completely. Like I said, a pure coincidence…or…is it ? :eek:
A conincidence? Nonsense. God clearly had two rocks of similar size at his disposal. He painted one orange and the other silver. Unfortunately, the silver paint was on inferior quality, which is why it is all cracked now.
Latex based works better?
Couldn’t we simply drill down 800 meters and blow one up like in armageddon?? It worked for them after all…
-XT
No, but possibly we could send Ann Coulter into space to whine at it until it simply shatters into dust.
Sure thing, Archimedes. Whadda ya gonna use for a fulcrum though?
What about just taking a big chunk out? If we couldn’t move the thing, I bet we could alter its shape (mass?) enough to have a significant effect on our tidal patterns here on Earth…
Shoot the moon, hurt the Earth?