There is no sight in the universe as dazzling as the moon, but medieval lore says that the radiant beauty also possessed mystical powers. In European mythology, people believed in a myth that a full moon could turn people into werewolves. The Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the human brain was susceptible to the moon’s harmful influences. But an American mathematician went so far as to say that destroying the moon would solve all of man’s problems. His eccentric theory, recently unearthed in the 1991 issue of People’s Archives, is the subject of much academic humor today.
Alexander Abian was a mathematics professor at Iowa State University. In a 1991 campus newsletter, he proposed his “Moonless Earth theory,” which held that “blowing up the moon would solve all the problems of human life.” He had no personal grudge against the moon, but rather believed that destroying it would mean the end of the seasons, which would eliminate natural disasters.
Abian’s hypothesis was based on the idea that if the moon were no longer there, the Earth’s rotation would stop, and this would change temperatures and wind patterns forever. He said that “nuking the moon” was the idea, and the means to do it was nuclear power. “You make a big hole by drilling down deep, and you put a nuclear explosive in it, and you detonate it – remotely controlled from Earth.”
Sounds pretty convenient, but it isn’t. Over the years, scientific experts and astronomers have voiced strong disapproval and criticism of this idea. Many have even said that a moonless Earth would lead to a total collapse of life on the planet. For example, Katiya Fosdick of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said in an interview with Popular Mechanics that destroying the moon would not eliminate natural disasters, but would actually cause the opposite: “I think it would create natural disasters.”
Abian may be right that if the moon were destroyed, the tides would become much smaller, but the fact is that they will not disappear completely because the sun also has some influence on the rising tides. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tides are “very long-period waves that move through the ocean in response to forces exerted by the moon and the sun.” As they rise and fall, tides affect ocean currents and determine whether the weather is cool or warm.
So when the moon disappears and the tides decrease, the weather on the surface will appear to stabilize, but it will cause other problems. Tides are responsible for maintaining ecological balance. No tides would mean disorder in biological life. Food chains will be affected, and so will cosmological timekeeping. The Earth’s rotation will gradually slow down and it will begin to freeze. “Think of half the Earth not receiving sunlight for two-thirds of the year,” Fosdick said.
Furthermore, there are several scientific reasons why the Earth needs the moon. Life on Earth cannot possibly survive without its only natural satellite, as BBC’s Science Focus also explains. There are three main explanations. The first is the intensity of nuclear energy that would be needed to blow the moon to pieces. Humanity would have to drill mine shafts hundreds of kilometres deep, spread across the moon, and drop a total of 600 billion of the largest nuclear bombs ever built.
On top of that, there’s the fiery rain of debris that the destroyed moon will rain down on Earth. Even a small pebble-sized fragment falling from the moon to the planet would be deadly to humans. The fragments would burn up, releasing enormous amounts of kinetic energy into the atmosphere, heating it up until all life was burned away. Just one impact could set off a chain reaction of crashes, filling Earth’s orbit with so much space debris that it would suffocate life on the planet. This phenomenon is sometimes called the “Kessler syndrome,” proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978 and also featured in Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel “Seveneves.”
A moonless Earth would cause another life-destroying scenario by affecting the planet’s “tilt.” Debris from the Moon would scatter and stick to the rings around the planet. Over time, the Earth’s axial tilt would become so unbalanced that most of one hemisphere would be permanently pointed toward the Sun, while the other hemisphere would be in perpetual darkness.
Yet Abian’s belief in the moonless theory remained unshaken until the end of his life. When challenged, he said, “I am raising the angry finger of opposition to the solar organization for the first time in 5 billion years. Those critics who say ‘Reject Abian’s ideas’ are very close to those who rejected Galileo.”