There is no sight in space as dazzling as the moon, but medieval lore says that the glowing beauty also had mystical powers. In European mythology, people believed the 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 is sensitive to the harmful effects of the moon. But one American mathematician went so far as to say that destroying the moon would solve all the problems of human life. His eccentric theory, which recently appeared in People’s 1991 Archives, is the subject of much academic humor today.
Alexander Abian was a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University. In a 1991 academic bulletin, he proposed his “Moonless Earth theory” that “blowing up the moon will solve all the problems of human life”. He had no personal grudge against the moon, rather he believed that toppling it would mark the end of the seasons, thus eliminating natural disasters.
Abian’s hypothesis was based on the idea that if the Moon ceased to exist, the Earth’s rotation would stop, and this would change temperatures and wind patterns for good. He said that “shooting the moon” was the idea and the means to do it was nuclear power. “By deep drilling, you make a big hole, put an atomic explosive in there and detonate it – by remote control from Earth.”
It sounds quite convenient, but it’s not. Scientific experts and astronomers have expressed strong disapproval and criticism of this idea over the years. Many have even said that an Earth without a moon would lead to the 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 cause quite the opposite: “I think it would cause natural disasters.”
Abian may be right in saying that if the Moon were destroyed the tides would be much reduced, but the fact is that they will not disappear completely, as 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 and determine whether the weather is cold or hot.
So if the moon disappears and the tides decrease, the weather may appear to settle on the surface, but it will cause other problems. Tides are responsible for maintaining the 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. “Imagine half the Earth getting no sunlight for two-thirds of the year,” Fosdick said.
Additionally, 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 also explains. There are three main explanations. The first is the intensity of nuclear energy that would be required to blast the moon to pieces. Humanity would need to drill mining shafts hundreds of kilometers deep all over the moon and drop a total of 600 billion of the largest nuclear bombs ever made.
Added to this is the fiery rain of debris that the shot down Moon will shower on the Earth. Even a small fragment the size of a pebble hitting a planet from the moon would be fatal to humans. The debris would burn up, releasing vast amounts of kinetic energy into the atmosphere, heating it until all life was incinerated. Just one collision 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 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-destroying scenario by affecting the “tilt” of the planet. Debris from the moon disperses and clings 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 and the other would be in perpetual darkness.
Nevertheless, Abian’s belief in the moonless theory remained unshaken until the end of his life. When challenged, he said, “For the first time in 5 billion years, I’m raising a faint finger of defiance against the solar organization. Those critics who say “Reject the ideas of Abian” are very close to those who rejected Galileo.”