The moon has a big part in shaping the environment of Earth as we know it. It controls the tilt of Earth’s axis, the length of its days, the strength of ocean tides- and by extension, a large portion of Earth’s climate.
And while we’ve seen many brilliant ideas over the years on how we could tackle Earth’s climate issues, there is one that stands apart from the rest- even from the most unusual ones. This brainchild belongs to a mathematics professor (at Iowa State University), Alexander Abian.
Who, in 1991, argued in a campus newspaper that blowing up the moon using nuclear weapons might solve many of the environmental problems that we’ve been facing since the industrial age- and some natural disasters that have been around since the very beginning.
[Read: Canada Looks To Prosecute Crimes Committed On The Moon]
The professor argued that blowing up the moon would stop the Earth from wobbling. This will lead to a cascade of events that will cause numerous changes to the Earth’s environment. Including, he argued, the elimination of seasons, and extreme weather conditions like heatwaves, hurricanes, snowstorms, and more.
The professor even went as far as proposing a way to blow up the moon. He argued that we could blow up the moon with careful coordination and a lot of nuclear force. His exact plan involved drilling a really deep hole in the moon, planting enough nuclear weapons in it, and then detonating a button on Earth to blow up Earth’s only close friend.
Not all different ideas are great, unfortunately. NASA’s NEO (Near Earth Objects) Division predicts that even if, hypothetically, we agreed that blowing up the moon would change the Earth’s environment for the better, Professor Abian’s “Moonless Earth Theory” would still be a bad idea because blowing up the moon would make it extremely likely one or more of its “chunks” would come flying towards Earth and deal a lot of damage to its life on the ground.
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