Me and my pack of buffoons were drinking beer in my pal's garage Friday night when the full moon came creeping over the trees.

One of the drunks made the statement "How cool would it be if we blew up the moon?" Now I may be a drunk, but I am also a student of badastronomy and I said we probably couldn't do it, even if we shot every nuke on the planet at it.

Little did I know the argument that would cause.

I went on to explain that actually blowing up the moon would require transferring enough energy to accelerate every grain of moon dust to a velocity where it would escape the moon's gravity. I did some rough math (I was drunk, remember) and came up with about 3,000 miles per hour.

I concluded that's a crapload of energy and doubted all the nukes on Earth could do it.

Was I right or just drunk?

thanks in advance.

G

You may have been both

The moon is a frequent annoyance to deep-sky observers, forcing us to observe at uncivilized hours or not at all. If you can blow that sucker away, go for it. But try to do it without creating a destructive shower of debris. (Just kidding: life on earth depends upon the moon.)

I agree with montevianco. You were both.

If you look at some of the bigger creaters on the Moon, you are looking at the result of asteroid/whatever impacts having more energy than all of the neuclear devices ever built by all countries. This would include the Trinity device in 1945.

If something were to happen that "blew up" the Moon, we'd be dead too.

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Welcome to the BABB!

You're on the right track. What you need to calculate is the Gravitational Binding Energy of the Moon. I did a similar calculation for Uranus' moon Miranda which can be seen here. You can see it takes a lot of energy.

Find the mass and radius for the Moon and plug them into the equation. Good luck!

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Thanks Hamlet,

Based on those formulas (and provided I didn't chump the math somewhere) I get that it would take 4.6305E+17 megatons to blow the moon apart.

Is that all?

:-k
I get 1.23E29 Joules or 2.9E13 megatons. Oh well, whats 10000 megatons between friends?

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These days, every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what a photon is, but he is wrong. - Albert Einstein

I would be more apt to trust your numbers.

I guess it doesn't really matter....we don't have that many megatons, regardless of whose numbers we use.

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Well you guys could always join forces with the Citizen's Association to Blow Up the Moon!
:wink:

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Nah, all you need is a good chunk of antimatter. Just don't accidentaly blow up Earth.

It would be easier to remove it from orbit and send it into deep space to travel at relevistic speeds.

all you need is a permenant moon base and an old but unstable nuclear fuel dump

Now why does that sound familiar :-k

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Didn't that already happen about 6 years ago?

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I have to admit, I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some nuclear waste that could accelerate the moon at multiple Gs without damaging it, but if I want to get a world out of the way fast, I prefer to use an Illudium PU-36 Space Modulator. There's just one very fast moon-shattering Kaboom ...

Why not just put a Romulan cloaking device in front of it? That would seem a much more elegant solution than actually trying to get rid of it. Or without such difficult-to-get-a-hold-of technology, we could simply put a big black curtain in space in between the earth and the moon.

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No need for such a high-tech solution. Paint the moon black and put a bunch of lights on the near side which will be lit to match the stars that are currently behind it.

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You could put in enough explosives to carve the word "CHA" in the moon...


L8R

Pete

(About 3 people will find that funny)

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Actually, it would be my preference if "they" could just propel the moon away from the earth. Don't blow it up, just get rid of it. Give it to, say, Venus, which needs a moon. Just think: every night on earth would be the equivalent of "new moon" night. Now, if we could just do something about all of that light pollution. Oh, I know! Give every 10-year old boy a BB gun!

LOL!

You got a Chippendale on your shoulder?

Spoon!

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But think of that money wasted on removing the Moon that could have been used to feed starving children in Africer! For shame! [-(

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Yeah, one of those Illudium PU-36 Space Modulators are really handy gadgets to keep on hand...ya never know when some celestial body will get in your way!

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A while back on the Halfbakery, I suggested deletion of the Moon through small, rock-metabolising, self-replicating nanobots. It didn't go down too well. I was told to pick on something my own size.

A mate of mine actually pointed out that my solution would result in a Moon-sized, ravenous rock-eating robot, right next to the Earth. I then dropped my plan.

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Why all the animosity toward the moon?

What did it ever do to you?

We shouldn't blow it up......we should use it for cosmetic experiements.

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"It was a crime of passion! Not premeditated dentistry!"

Why not doing both? With the right positioning and timing of the explosion a large chunk of cheese could break loose from the moon, fall down to Africa and feed all these poor children!

a 50 BMG rifle will easily vaporize the moon.

You know, it always amuses me just how many others out there who practice megalomania as a hobby.

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Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

"You can't eat the earth! That's where I keep all of my stuff!"

(One of the three, I guess. Hoping for DVDs to appear some day.)

yeah

easpecially when they are such rank amateurs

I suspect I don't have to worry about the competition yet :wink:

BTW which soup would be good to send to Africa, remember Baker's Oven only do three varieties

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Pah, amateurs, the lot of you!

Just place half a doen giant cosmic pink elephants and a Somebody Else's Problem field on it and save the hassle of creating a mass extinction event on Earth.

Still, I don't know why you'd want to do that - we'd be wasting an entire million years supply of cheese...

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the solar system

Gotta question about this cheese business. Cheese is made from milk. Most milk for cheese comes from cows and goats, with cow's milk apparently preferred in the US and western Europe. So the question is: was it one whopping big cow that supplied the cheese for the moon, or was it a whopping big herd of cows? Who milked them? Be relieved: I'm not going to ask you to square up the age of the moon with the length of time cows have been around.

The ignorance of some :roll:









We also make cheese from sheeps milk as well, and there are more of them than cows

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