What Would Happen If We Destroyed the Moon?

At some point, it was imagined (as a joke) that it was made of cheese. Then we poured all our resources into reaching it, and in the future, the human species might settle on its surface permanently. But there's a question that keeps coming up: what would happen if, instead of colonizing the Moon, we decide to destroy it? Beyond the how and why, let's visualize for a moment that the Moon exploded and no longer dominates our sky...

Destroying the Moon. Quite common in the Dragon Ball universe, first at the hands of Roshi, and then Piccolo. The Z warriors have the power to turn the satellite to dust. However, in real life, it would require an amount of energy that is simply beyond our reach.

With a mass of 7.3 x 10^22 kilograms, detonating the Moon would demand the entire nuclear arsenal of Earth... multiplied by billions of times. In fact, someone made the comparison using the Russian Tsar Bomba of 50 megatons as a reference, and the total number of required bombs would exceed 500 billion.

Yet, the strange combination of nuclear bombs and the Moon had a special place in Project A119 of the United States Air Force, whose objective was basically to detonate a nuclear bomb on the lunar surface to boost American morale with a demonstration of strength, after the extraordinary Soviet start in the Space Race. The Russians also worked on a similar project, but both sides concluded that it was better to put humans on the surface.

Destroying the Moon

That said, let's imagine the biggest "boom" ever seen by humanity, destroying the Moon in the process. What would happen here on Earth? First, our planet would gain a ring system formed by the Moon's debris. That debris plays a very important part in our exercise because many pieces would fall to Earth in the initial explosion, and the rest would come from the ring.

The video indicates that the maximum speed would be 8 kilometers per second. It's not a catastrophic number, but nobody would want to be in the path of those rocks. The Moon's light would no longer interfere with the light of distant stars, presenting clearer nights. Of course, solar eclipses would cease to exist, and tides would be reduced to 25 percent of their activity.

The real problem would be in Earth's axial tilt. The angle averages 23.4 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane, with slight adjustments in both directions over millennia. The Moon acts as a kind of stabilizer, but if it were to disappear, there would be no restriction for the axis to shift.

Thousands of years later, Earth would be spinning "sideways", the poles would no longer be cold, and the other continents would go from one ice age to the next. In short: better to leave the Moon where it is and try to colonize it once and for all.