There is no spectacle in the universe as dazzling as the moon, but medieval lore says that the glowing beauty also possessed mystical powers. In European mythology, people believed a myth that a full moon could turn people into wolves. The Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the human brain was susceptible to the harmful effects of the moon. But an American mathematician went so far as to say that the destruction of the Moon would solve all the problems of human life. His eccentric theory, recently published in The People’s Archives 1991, is a subject of much academic humor these days.
Alexander Abian was a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University. In a 1991 campus newsletter, he proposed his “Earth without a Moon theory,” according to which “exploding the Moon would solve all the problems of human life.” He had no personal grudge against the moon, but believed that its decay would mean the end of the seasons, which would eliminate natural disasters.
Abian’s hypothesis was based on the idea that if the moon no longer existed, the Earth’s rotation would stop and this would change temperatures and wind patterns for the better. He said the “moon nuke” was the idea and the means to do it was nuclear power. “You make a big hole by drilling deep, put in atomic explosives and detonate it – by remote control from Earth.”
It sounds convenient enough, but it’s not. Over the years, scientific experts and astronomers have voiced strong objections and criticisms to this idea. Many have even said that an Earth without a moon would lead to a total collapse of life on the planet. For example, speaking to Popular Mechanics, Katiya Fosdick of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said that destroying the moon would not eliminate natural disasters, but would cause just the opposite, “I think it would create natural disasters “.
Abian may be right in saying that if the moon were destroyed, the tides would become much smaller, but the fact is that they will not disappear altogether, because the Sun also affects the rising tides to some extent. 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 sun.” As they rise and fall, the tides affect ocean currents, determining whether the weather is cold or hot.
So if the moon disappears and the tides recede, the weather may seem to settle on the surface, but it will cause other problems. Tides are responsible for maintaining the ecological balance. No tide would mean disorder in biological life. Food chains will be affected, and so will cosmological measurements. The Earth’s rotation will gradually slow down and it will begin to freeze. “Consider that half of the Earth doesn’t get sunlight for two-thirds of the year,” Fosdick said.
Plus, there are various science-based reasons why the Earth “needs” the Moon to be there. Life on Earth cannot survive without its only natural satellite, as BBC Science Focus explains. There are three main explanations. First is the intensity of nuclear energy that would be required to blast the Moon to destruction. Humanity would have to drill mine shafts hundreds of kilometers deep, all over the Moon, and drop a total of 600 billion of the largest nuclear bombs ever built into them.
Added to this is the fiery rain of debris that the exploding Moon will pour on Earth. Even a small pebble-sized fragment falling on the planet from the Moon would be lethal to humans. The fragments would burn up, releasing large amounts of kinetic energy into the atmosphere, heating it up until all life burned away. Just one collision could set off a chain reaction of collisions, filling Earth’s orbit with so much space debris that it would choke out life on the planet. This phenomenon is also referred to as “Kessler Syndrome”, proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978 and also seen in Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel “Seveneves”.
A moonless Earth would trigger another life-destruction scenario by affecting the “tilt” of the planet. Debris from the Moon will be scattered and attached to the rings around the planet. Over the years, the Earth’s axial tilt would become so disharmonized that most of one hemisphere would face the Sun continuously and the other would be in perpetual darkness.
However, Abian’s belief in the moonless theory remained steadfast until the end of his life. When challenged, he said, “I am raising the finger of defiance at the solar organization for the first time in 5 billion years. Those critics who say ‘Get rid of Abian’s ideas’ are very close to those who rejected Galileo.