Moonshine and madness. :dubious: :smack:
No it’s brilliant. Come on guys, the moon is what? the size of a quarter? Check it out, you hold a quarter up and presto! it covers the moon. Sure the moon might be a little bigger but it’d fit like a treat.
aside from the logistical problems mentioned before, doesnt everything fall apart big time if theres no tides anymore?
[Father Ted]
No, you see, that quarter is very small, while the moon is far away…
[/Father Ted]
But I mean the sun at night lands in Flagstaff and that’s why the rocks are all red. I mean it doesn’t crush anyone 'cause it’s about the same size as the moon right?
Have I mentioned I miss Calvin and Hobbes?
“Am I missing anything here?”
How could we see this resort at night without the… ummm… moon?
Personally, I think NASA should paint a big black stripe down the middle of the moon so it resembles buttocks.
[sub]get it?[/sub]
Bryan, come join us on the “dark side”.
Wouldn’t that make it look more like Uranus?
Give that man the big kewpie doll!
:o
Long weekend it’s been, long and …er drinking, no sleep, camping ya see? Like I…
aw hell, forget it.
Man, like a missing tooth, I can’t leave this one alone. Besides, it’s time to class this thread up a bit. (Does every thread involving planets eventually have to degenerate to the point where someone makes the Uranus pun?)
Take the following with a few grains of salt – this is all based on a layman’s knowledge of astronomy and Physics, mixed with some intuition.
Probably the most aesthetic result of bringing down the moon would be if some friendly but not overly intelligent super-being just tried towing it from orbit. As the moon neared Earth, tidal forces would rip it apart somewhere within the Roche limit (http://pegasus.phast.umass.edu/a100/handouts/roche.html), resulting in attractive Saturn-like rings that would be greatly appreciated by those survivors of the resulting meteor storms. Not quite sure what those same tidal forces would do to Earth, given that it outmasses the Moon by a factor of 80 or so, but I’m willing to bet that for a sizeable fraction of the Earth’s population, including California, Japan, and most of the rest of the Ring of Fire, meteor impacts will be the least of their problems.
But let’s think about the original proposition, again disregarding trifling matters of transportation. Does the moon just get plopped in the ocean, or do our hypothetical super-beings take the time to match it with Earth’s rotational velocity? I’m not sure it really matters, but it might affect how various inhabitants of Earth (from humans to lichen) meet their grisly fate. If the moon was just transported instantaneously without accelerating it to Earth’s rotational speed, then the towering supermountain of fiery death would appear to advance around the globe at 1000 mph, plowing a huge furrow, even as gravitational forces tore it apart and accelerated the chunks towards the surface. Friction would cause the Earth to decelerate catastrophically. At least parts of it. Tectonic plates would buckle like a Yugo hitting a freight train. Real estate prices everywhere, even in the Boston area, could reliably be expected to fall.
But what if the beings behind this project accelerated the moon to match the Earth’s rotational velocity? Tidal and gravitational forces would rip it apart. The moon’s diameter would put even the farthest material well within the radius of a synchronous orbit, so none of it would be moving fast enough to remain aloft. So you’d have a band of fast moving space junk falling in a wide swath along the equatorial zone. If you wanted to film a documentary of the Earth’s last hours, you’d probably want to do it from the polar regions.
Note that I’m disregarding the moon’s own rotation – because it rotates relatively slowly (once every 28 days or so), I’m fairly sure that this force would play only a minor role in the forthcoming Armageddon as the moon very slowly augered its way into the Earth’s mantle.Are you guys spying on me? I swear, I re-read Jack Vance’s “The Face” two days ago, and just last night I re-read Larry Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away.”
Coincidence? Hm…
Trinopus
Wellll… if you very carefully took the moon apart, and rail-gunned it to geosynchronous orbit, and lowered it down on a million Space Elevators to the ground, you would possibly end up recreating the Original Earth/Moon parent body;
as the Moon is much less dense than the Earth, the total gravity will only be a small fraction higher (anyone want to do the maths?)
but you will have a slightly larger planet to play with.
Er — not really worth doing in order to get an extra continent or two.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Yes, yes it does. 
Well, Finagle, since you’re gnawing at this missing tooth anyway, how about considering the Mickey-mouse scenario posted above, where they simply hollow out the moon, leaving the Disney-fied remains of the (vast majority of the mass of) moon in orbit and only bring down a hollowed-out (and, one presumes, structurally reinforced) moon? Again, this would probably require the intervention of some less-than-bright passing super-alien … :dubious:
But if you reduced the moon’s diameter even a little bit, there would be no more solar eclipses. I think a lot more than the Fundy Tourist board would object.
Well, if you distribute the moon’s mass evenly over the surface, wouldn’t the gravity just be additive; 1 G for earth + 1/6 G for the moon = 1.167 G total. A typical 110 pound human would thus gain about 18 pounds, and anorexia would reach pandemic proportions.
No, it wouldn’t be additive. The moon isn’t 1/6th the mass of earth, it is something like 1/80th. Something to do with squares and inverses. Y’know, science stuff. I saw it on Baywatch…
Your’re confusing total gravity with surface gravity, Squink. You’d have to use F = (Gmm’) / r[sup]2[/sup] and plug in the combined Earth + Moon mass (6.047 x 10 [sup]24[/sup] kg) and work out the new radius of the Earth with all the Moon’s material spread over it.
You’re right. I’m wrong. Which episode of Baywatch was it ?I shall watch it over and over until I understand the physics ! 