Corrected entry: In 2020 they talk about the first 20-megaton explosion to create the lunar colony. Then we find out that these blasts have knocked the moon off its orbit causing it to break up. However even a single moderately sized crater on the moon would have been created by a blast an order of magnitude greater then this. How could such small blasts knock the moon out of its orbit while countless meteor impacts have had no effect?
Bishop73
18th Nov 2003
The Time Machine (2002)
Correction: All we hear is that the FIRST blast was a 20-megaton explosion, and then later, that the attempts to colonize the moon had knocked it out of orbit. We have NO idea what went on between the year 2030 and 2037, and to say that the moon's orbit was disrupted by 20-megaton blasts is an assumption, nothing more.
Its impossible. A bomb 10,000 times the strength wouldn't do a damn thing to the moon. Not even hundreds of them.
Correction: The mention of "blasting" was associated with lunar mining. Presumably, much of the mined lunar material was being freighted away from the Moon (perhaps and probably back to Earth, but also to other destinations), thereby depleting the Moon's mass over time. We know today that the Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth already under its current mass. Removing the Moon's mass gradually would affect its gravitational relationship to the Earth, eventually leading to the Moon's breakup due to gravitational tidal forces. The "blasting" would have only been the beginning of the calamity.
Sounds ridiculous. Got any idea how much mass they would need to remove from the moon before it would actually affect its orbit? trillions of tons. You need such a big operation of constant removal of huge amounts of material from the moon, for centuries. Not likely. Also, the craters on the moon are caused by meteorites that slammed into it with the power of hundreds if not thousands of megatons of TNT, for billions of years.
Why ridiculous? You have no idea how much material was removed, nor do you have any idea what a future civilization is capable of removing.
They would have to be removing trillions of tons of material from the moon for decades. In 7 years you can't remove enough mass from the moon to affect its orbit causing it to break up, not unless you have Superman doing the work.
Again, you have no idea of a future civilization's mining capabilities.
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Correction: For the moon to be knocked out of orbit, an object the same size and density would have to strike the moon and at relatively the same speed in the opposite direction. Even if the largest asteroid in our solar system struck the moon (Ceres which is almost 600 miles wide), the moon wouldn't be knocked out of orbit or even destroyed. As to all the comments about mining the moon to reduce its mass, even with unknown future technology, it's a ridiculous assumption. To reduce the mass of the moon by 100th of 1% (0.01%) you would have to remove about 7.35 quadrillion tons, so not trillions. A 1% reduction in mass would require 7.35 sextillion tons removed (not that a 1% reduction in mass would result in the moon being knocked out of orbit), which is over a quintillion tons a day for 7 years straight (1,000 mining facilities each mining out 30 billion tons a second, and currently we don't even mine 16 billion tons on Earth in one year). And a lighter moon would cause the moon to be pulled closer to Earth, not further away. Certainly a movie set in the future can have moon be out of orbit without creating a mistake. But to claim it was from blasting from 20-megaton explosions and mining isn't plausible due to the sheer size of the moon. Remember, the moon is bigger than Pluto.
Bishop73