Posted on 05/01/2018 7:32:11 PM PDT by SamAdams76
If you simply flew up into space and sawed the moon in half with a giant hacksaw, most likely, nothing would happen. This is because gravitational force would hold the two halves together, sort of like a couple of magnets.
But what if you were able to get a couple of giant crowbars and put a person on the other side and then count to 3 and totally separate the two halves of the moon?
With enough strength applied, you could theoretically push the two halves far enough apart where the gravitational force no longer pulls them together and now the two halves start drifting apart.
This is where the fun begins.
It would be a pretty awesome sight from planet Earth, that I can tell you. Now if you left them in the same orbit (around the Earth), they'd eventually meet up with each other so you would have to find a way to push them into different orbits - maybe if you put a bunch of thruster rockets on one of the halves...I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm sure others will have better ideas.
So in essence, if we are going to successfully split the moon apart, we will need to apply enough delta V to one half of it to put it into a drastically different orbit. No mean task!
Here on Earth, in addition to the spectacular sight, we'd get reductions in tides with and increase in variability if spring and neap tides.
Long term, one of the moon halves will go into a more elliptical orbit, diving down close to the atmosphere of the Earth and perhaps even skim off much of the atmosphere, resulting in widespread extinction of species and other unfavorable effects.
In conclusion, splitting the moon in half, while certainly a tempting endeavor, should probably not be seriously attempted as the end result could well be catastrophic with respect to planet Earth.
But what IF flibberty flork?
Now I’m not going to be able to get to sleep.
What if the sun was split in half?
Our moon is (quite remarkably and most improbably!) precisely the right size, at exactly the the right orbital distance, (from both the Earth AND the Sun!) to regularly present an eclipse of our sun so perfect that it reveals the corona while just covering everything else except for solar prominences and few brilliant tiny peeks through cracks between lunar mountains.
The only reason to split our moon in half would be to remove from sight from future generations A Miraculous Wonder we could not likely reproduce, even if we HAD the power to spit the moon in half.
Okay, so you’ve split the moon in two, theoretically. And since we’re talking in ‘’ifs’’ here what if one of those chunks just started drifting too close to our orbit and our planets gravity pulled into into us, huh, huh? Whose going to take the blame for that?
Beaver: Golly Wally, what am I going to do now?’’
Wally: “Gee Beave, when Dad finds out ya split the moon in two, why he’ll go ape!’’
Beaver: Aw, yer not gonna squeal , are ya?’’
Wally: ‘Course I’m gonna squeal, ya did it didn’t cha’?’’
The sun is a star. Would be kind of hard to do that.
I don’t know about you people, but my moon already has a giant crack, right down the middle. It’s not really that bad however. Sometimes you’ll hear rumbling, and experience an occasional eruption, but that’s life.
Well, thats a heck of a first-world problem yu have there.
Sam. They are not keeping you busy enough at work, dude.
What if it were like the game Osmos and the bigger half got sucked into the earth and decimated a huge continent?
Darn! And I was tempted to do just THAT, just here next week! Well, FINE, then, splitting the moon is out...how about draining the oceans? (As long as we’re casting absurdities into the cosmos, might as well make it a goodun).
I grew up thinking “Oh, it’s not a miracle in the sky like ancient peoples believed, it’s just the moon getting in between us and the sun.” and then learning more, and discovering just how perfect everything has to be, for us to see the kind or perfect eclipses we do.
By golly, it’s a bloomin’ miracle in the sky after all... ;-)
Coincidence?
Aliens did it as an experiment to see what it would do to the societies and religions of planted species?
God did it?
From The Tick. "Spoon!"
-PJ
Where would you find a saw blade long enough to go through all that Cheese?
You could get some cheap azz Chinese saws from Harbor Freight.
Of course, you’ll spend more money on several and it would take more time than a quality tool from Lowes....
There is an interesting book by Neil Stephenson that involves the moon getting blown to smithereens, and the damage it causes to Earth wipes out the planet for 5000 years. People survive in space and come back when the earth is finally ready.
Dang, you beat me to it!
Yeah, that was a good one. I think that Stephenson grossly underestimated the number of people who would have been Diggers - there are a lot of caverns in this world, and with two years to work on them they’d support a lot of life. And, after all, they wouldn’t have had to dig for geothermal power, it would have been on the surface for them, more than they could possibly have used, which was the problem, after all, wasn’t it? But great story. I love Stephenson’s work.
It’s only a moon if you can see both cheeks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.