Note that by "nuking the moon" they just mean exploding a nuclear bomb on the moon mainly to show your enemies that you can and perhaps learn some interesting thing about the moon by watching the physical effects.
There was someone who wanted to go a bit farther than just a bomb or two [1]. He wanted to completely destroy the moon.
> to avoid the debris reassembling into a satellite would require an amount of energy larger than the Moon gravitational binding energy, estimated to be 1.2 × 10^29 J.[2][3][4] This equals a bit less than 600 billion 50-megaton nuclear bombs, such as the Tsar Bomba,[5][4][2][6] roughly equivalent to the full energy output by the Sun in six minutes
That's 33.33 quadrillion GWh. Or about two trillion times the annual energy consumption of Earth.
If we somehow harnessed windfall energy on that scale, hmmm what to do, what to do... let's blow up the moon!
There is no way to store or transport the energy though, it corresponds to hundreds of millions of tons of mass fused every second. Instead you would have to somehow beam or guide the full power of the sun towards the moon for several minutes. Pretty cool light show, for those who dare to look up... but don't miss!
Nah, a sunbeam. (Courtesy of E.E. "Doc" Smith, Second Stage Lensmen, First serialized in Astounding," Nov 1941-Feb 1942.)
Smith was the "trope-maker" for much of modern space-opera & SF. And as his stories went on, the scope of combat and forces involved just kept getting bigger. The Death Star is barely a capital ship by the standards of later Lensmen books, where a task force will regularly involve hundreds of immense ships, plantary masses worth of antimatter, and squadrons of armed and mobile planets. ("Starkiller Base" eat your heart out.) By the very end, exotic-matter planets were being used as ammunition.
In the Xeelee Sequence humanity uses a neutron star as a missile to try and attack the Xeelee Ring - which is quite big (millions of light years across).
Even the Enterprise-D only outputs 6.8 x 10^19J from its phaser arrays. Looks like we’ll be waiting over 300 years for a single destructive device to destroy the Moon!
I like that "the heating of Earth's atmosphere by a hail of falling lunar debris would be destructive to all life" is only the second of three cited reasons for the proposal's rejection.
As it's currently structured there are three objections.
1. We couldn't do it.
2. It would have disastrous side effects.
3. It wouldn't fix the problem you're trying to solve, and it would in fact make it worse.
Objections 2&3 should be swapped, "all life on Earth would be vaporized" should really be issue #3.
> And if it helps, he made it Over fifty years later and nobody thinks about nuking the moon very often anymore. Good job, Sagan.
Mission failed, I am now thinking about nuking. A lot. Makes me wish I was a senior DoE officer in the 50s when you could nuke stuff to see what happened when stuff got nuked.
I think it is important! It is an unspeakable unknowable dread hanging over the entire story. Its brought up later in the book and remains a very scary, very foreboding mystery. It implies either an unfathomably powerful and malicious force or an unfathomably powerful and uncaring force, both of which are terrifying.
Radiation and high energy particles left in orbit destroyed one third of all satellites at the time after the next few months as they passed through that cloud.
Worth pointing out square/cube factors here. You can't have an ant the size of an elephant because while an animals strength goes up as its length squared its weight goes up with its length cubed. And a piece of rock the size of the moon doesn't shatter into seven pieces the way a piece of rock a meter across would. It splashes.
It's also easy to forget the brown-dwarf-hot body inside the Moon (and the star-hot one beneath our feet). Thanks to the rock insulators between us and them, and our universal heat sink. A disassembled Moon exposing mantle material... even with T^4 blackbody energy scaling, a bolide rain a year later very won't be a problem for humans. Comparing lunar mantle with Sun, say 6x cooler, 390x closer, and say <10x angular smaller - 390^2 beats 6^4, leaving what, a new 100x "Sun"?
Oops, estimation fail, thanks! Attempt to double spend "closer" - on both "smaller" and "cooler". A sun-hot Moon gets you only a second Sun. A lunar-mantle-hot Moon gets you merely an extra dim red dwarf "sun". The "100x" brighter was wrong. More like 1000x dimmer?
The ChatGPT looks surprisingly ok. It struggled where textbooks and such are less than wonderful. So it raises the irrelevant Sun's core, and says "The Sun's energy output is vastly greater due to nuclear fusion reactions, emitting a massive amount of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. The Moon, lacking such reactions, emits no comparable energy.", perhaps reflecting the textbook "Sun shines because fusion" vs "Sun glows because hot, and hot things glow (with color and intensity proportional to temperature^4), and fusion is why it's still hot billions of years after forming". Though in a way it's true - "The Moon lacking such reactions, and being small, has cooled off and greatly dimmed since its last big formation impact". :)
The "Brown dwarfs typically range between about 1,000 and 2,500 degrees Celsius at their surface, far hotter than the Moon's mantle." seems inconsistent with [1].
Although curiously, most processes theoretically capable of exposing large amounts of lunar mantle would likely generate a decent fraction of that heat just on their own merit.
My god, I saw this comment and thought it'd be fun to pick up something by Neal Stephenson. After all, I loved Cryptonomicon back in college. But it's 880 pages! As a slow reader, this is sadly not something I'll ever get to.
You've been misled by the publisher. Seveneves has about 600 pages. After that, the pages are filled with some kind of fan fiction sort-a related, but pretty dumb, novella (confusingly named "Part Three").
Now, seriously. While the first two parts are great, the third is awful. You can actually skip the part 3, it is completely superfluous (and again, dumb), the story works without it better.
The last part was a nice change of pace after the super depressing middle section. It was a relief to see how the humanity was able to survive and adapt.
> It was a relief to see how the humanity was able to survive and adapt.
Could be, but the execution of that was very lacking. The story arc, characters just don't cut it. Additionally, I was particularly disappointed at the genetic determinism, which Stephenson surely knows is extremely dubious. I suspect that the only reason he wrote / included this part into the book is the allegory of the seven Eves.
I found the same thing with "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" - the first part was great, the second awful. I'm wondering if Stephenson just can't handle multi-act stories.
I agree and even though I usually have a lot of complaints about Stephenson's later books, I just keep reading them for some reason. There are real high and low points. He's the only author who I've read completely and I love to complain about him.
Stephenson is just very inconsistent. Some of his work is real treasure, some just meh. He's famous for building fascinating worlds, getting some action going, but then not being able to deliver a satisfying ending (e.g. Snow Crash, Diamond Age).
Anathem is for me his only well-rounded book where he delivers on all fronts.
I disagree with The_Colonel. Part 3 has a different setting from the rest of the book, but is still part of the overall story. It is a logical extrapolation of the first two parts, and specifically follows up on a plot twist that appears at the end of part 2.
Listen to the audio book. I did, and it's very good.
I wouldn't call myself a slow reader, but I just don't have the time to sit and read paper books very often. Instead I listen to audio books while driving, doing chores, etc.
I have a family member who is a slow reader, but thanks to audiobooks, finishes over a hundred books a year.
Or Life As We Knew It for a good YA novel, post-apocalyptic survival after a huge asteroid nudges the moon to a different orbit and destroys the climate on earth.
Obviously much smarter people than me were coming up with the reasons to not nuke the moon. I'm not convinced. Learning how the nuke acts in a vacuum is interesting science. Seeing it from Earth is something of a power play. Affecting the moon's natural radiation and potentially destroying some undiscovered life seems really unlikely to me. But again, I'm about the furthest thing from an expert. I'm shocked we've not nuked it "just because," like the whales, you got to nuke somethin' (Simpson's reference; no, I don't support nuking whales, though, I'm pretty sure we have, and I think that is much worse than nuking the moon).
It would affect the Moon's natural radiation. It would vaporize plutonium and other isotopes and this would be attracted by the Moon's gravity and eventually settle as a powder all over the Moon. (We did it to the Earth already. You can't find anywhere on the planet without detectable plutonium in the air or water.) This is maybe now less of a concern, now that we have samples returned for background comparison.
Blowing up the Moon would still be a very compelling scientific experiment. I can't think of a cheaper or easier way to get spectroscopy of a sample from below the surface. And aside from the fallout (literal and political) there's not much downside.
If you picked the right spot at the right time of the month, could you get a mushroom cloud in "profile"? That would look pretty cool, though maybe still not large enough to see with the naked eye. I don't have a good intuition of the scales involved.
[Edit: Or, wait: a mushroom cloud depends on atmosphere, doesn't it? So... What would a blast-created cloud of dust look like in a vacuum? Just a cloud? Yeah, not so impressive a visual.]
The smartest people on the planet wanted to nuke the moon; it was a great idea.
It wouldn't make the classic mushroom cloud - it would be a spectacular sphere of luminescence; and by far the most powerful display of power to had ever been accomplished by man.
In fact, von Neumann, citing his infamous Chaos Theory, wanted to preemptively strike the USSR.
It's the stuff we didn't do we don't want to come to light the most.
Indeed, it was less than half a decade later that Operation Fishbowl [0] commenced, a series of high-altitude nuclear tests, and they were pretty awe-some displays.
Why nuke the moon? Detonating a series of nukes in high earth or lunar orbit would demonstrate just as much capability with far fewer risks. Hell, you could even detonate them in an elaborate pattern (stars and stripes?) just to show off.
On a galactic scale, I wonder what the average time is between a species evolving intelligence, mastering technology, then using that technology to wipe themselves out of existence?
That's the most likely answer to the question, 'where are all the aliens?'
I'm not convinced it's a Fermi paradox solution. I'm not saying civilizations don't sometimes destroy themselves but
a). the one civilization we know of didn't do it yet and
b). doesn't this require something inherent to life for this to explain the fermi paradox? it seems like this just moves the question from "where are all the aliens" to "why does every civilization regardless of environment/planet/etc. ALWAYS destroy themselves" which doesn't seem like an easier question to answer?
we've seen many, many cases of civilizations not making it. In the case of the Mayan Empire, it is looking like they killed off their civilization via climate change -- weather models show that the increased agriculture and removal of the surrounding jungle would have dropped annual rainfall, leading to the drop in water levels that we know happened in the cinotes (where they got all their water), leading to the collapse of the civilization (lost knowledge and culture). By the time Cortez arrived, nobody knew how to build nor maintain their megalithic structures.
Now, total extinction of a civilization meaning all of a civilized species, maybe we saw that with neanderthals and other early hominids.
True, I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War. For something to be a Fermi Paradox solution it has to explain the _complete_ lack of life we see. Something being hard or requiring luck isn't enough due to the vastness of space. It would still occur countless times even if rare
> I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War
By being just lucky in many times. I imagine a scenario where one mistake happened and people took the wrong decision in one moment. It is not like if you repeated the cold war 1000 times you will end up fine in most of them. Lets remember that submarine in Cuban crisis, if this Soviet officer did not give his authentication we wouldn't get into that point. If you repeat the scenario with 1000 officers from this era, I wouldn't like our chances.
But the fermi paradox isn't about explaining why one specific civilization isn't present. It's about the _complete_ lack of alien life we observe. In the vast cosmos, there isn't any civilizations that have "got lucky" I don't see how this explanation addresses the core point
Sure, but compared to what? I don't know what you would call the bias of "imaginging bad stuff happening in the future, and for some reason the bad stuff is inevitable regardless of planet, lifeform, etc."
It is one of the leading Late filters; that excellence in the species cannot compensate for the inefficiencies in extracting energy to continue existing; leading to environmental/social problems, inevitably leading to either environmental collapse, preventing space colonialism, or social collapse.
Nuclear energy is a popular crux, but not needed per se.
I am totally unconvinced by this whole "technology is a great filter" argument. First of all I have my doubts that, even at the height of the cold war, nuclear war would've extinctic all of humanity and nowadays with much less ordinance definitely not.
Equally climate change is very unlikely to extinct all humans and dont even get me started on all the other "extinction risks" such as rogue AI or bioweapon because they are merely sci-fi and again would almost certainly not get everyone.
We definitely dont have a convincing solution to the fermi paradox and if we did it would certainly not be so trite and silly of an idea as "technology kills"
It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.
I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible.
I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.
Surely any post-collapse society could just mine the cities for metals. And presumably with a much reduced population there would be plenty of arable land for growing oil bearing crops obviating the need for most fossil fuels.
It's disputed whether even modern ethanol production is energy-positive. But trying to start an entire biofuels production chain from scratch would certainly not be net positive, as you would need to already have mechanized agriculture and a petrochemical industry to get that efficiency.
Coal liquefaction would probably be superior to biofuels, as it seems we will give up using it before it is depleted.
Iron is arguably the most important, and also degrades - past, as I understand it, the point at which it can be recovered by low-tech processes. The longer it takes to bootstrap a second industrial revolution the harder it would become.
Yeah this is the issue with metals and likely the largest barrier to a post collapse society. Likely ironworking would end up looking like pre-industrial japan where iron was veryextremely valuable and of relatively low quality compared to the west due to the problems with smelting it from iron sands.
This is why I propose long term technological advancement without a second industrial revolution.
I agree that civilizations (including humans) are unlikely to completely wipe themselves out, but it is not at all certain that we could recover to our present technology after a cataclysmic event.
Once we mine out all easily accessible fossil fuels, we'll cross a certain point of no return. After that point, a 19th century type industrial revolution will no longer be (easily) possible. Let's say a truly cataclysmic war happens and we just lose access to modern technology. Would we be able to regain it at some point? Could we rebuild a modern civilization without having access to the most energy dense and convenient fuel known to us even today?
Sure, we wouldn't go extinct, but if we are no longer able to travel beyond our own planet, we may as well have filtered ourselves out from the galactic stage.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I do believe there is a technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less easily accessible surface metals that would allow humans to achieve high technology and do the whole space colonization thing without an industrial revolution. It would take an order of magnitude or two longer and would be iterative and generational as opposed to explosive and revolutionary and might be more sustainable for it. Obviously I have no data to support this but its my intuition that its possible and perhaps even common for other life in the galaxy
A full scale nuclear war and the resulting fallout would be unimagineably devastating. Whether that kills 100% of humans or only 99.99% doesn't really matter. The natural world we rely on would be obliterated along with us. There would be no remaining governments or modern technology. Rebuilding an advanced society in a
post apocalyptic wasteland would take an incredibly long time, if it's even possible.
Even then, the question would be "Should we?". If our current society ends by violently destroying virtually all life on the planet it will have been the biggest failure of a culture in history by a huge margin. Any survivors might very well develop some incredibly strong prohibitions against unchecked technological change.
Yes nuclear war is very scary. Yes it would be catastrophic to the ecosphere and human society. It is also incredibly unlikely that it would result in the extinction of humans. Also the idea that a post-collapse society would have some taboo against technology is possible but even if true would not hold for long or be particularly widespread. Any group who abandoned that taboo would quickly become more powerful than those who didnt.
Heres some good reading on post collapse society and extinction talked about more in depth. Long story short theres been lots of exaggeration and fear mongering about nuclear war. Clearly its apocalyptic and we dont need to exaggerate anything about it to make it scary. Its already scary. It would be better to have realistic conversations about this.
While I also think that this is unrelated to the Fermi paradox, the global threat and real impact of a nuclear exchange wouldn't be direct impact, but the ecological crisis of a nuclear winter.
I would imagine it's a pretty short timespan, relatively speaking. Technology can progress exponentially in a way that biology does not. Once a society gets to the point where they can create existential risks faster than they can manage them, in an accelerating fashion, things are likely to collapse in pretty short order.
Our own society has created a number of serious risks for ourselves that our evolved minds aren't great at mitigating in just the last century. Now think about how tech is accelerating and what might be developed in the next 1000 years. We're either going to figure out a new structure for managing existential risks or die trying.
As usual with the filters, the problem always is that the filter has to be so significant that it's essentially guaranteed to happen. Else the galaxy should still be full of aliens. We seem to keep scraping by with close calls, so it doesn't seem all that guaranteed that a technological civilization wipes itself out before it can establish itself among the stars.
We've had several close calls in the last ~80 years. I have no idea what the actual probabilities of inciting WWII and causing a nuclear winter were in the Korean war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer exercise, and various computer errors and false alarms that occurred, but if you're rolling the dice on existing every 10 years, the chances of taking over the galaxy in a million years are remote.
I think you meant WWIII, but it does bring up another interesting possibility—WWII could be seen as the release of pressure which had been building, in some sense inevitable. If we were only slightly less belligerent as a species, we might have been able to put it off until nukes were invented, and what a mess that would have been. If we were only slightly more belligerent, we could have blown ourselves up in the Cold War. Of course, belligerence isn’t a tunable parameter that you can tweak without changing all of history, but it is funny to think that we just happened to land right in the sweet spot.
But none of our technology can really let us spread at this stage. We’re barely detectable from nearby solar systems.
It’s very possible that the technology required to travel between solar systems is where the filter occurs and we’re in a narrow window of having enough technology to look around at nearby planets before we wipe ourselves out.
Billions of forms of life on this earth over billions of years and we are the only ones to make cities and send junk into space. I’m not sure why we have this fallacy expect other alien life to look anything like humanity.
On the other hand, there were billions of forms of life on this earth, and the first and only one to develop advanced technology took over the entire planet in the blink of an eye.
Why would we not expect the apex species on other planets to likewise dominate their ecosystems?
Bacteria took over the planet. We are merely a host. We aren’t even long term habitants of all the continents much less the ocean. Meanwhile bacteria have colonized even the air currents on earth.
Technology is evil and evil kills everyone OMG cut to credits of B-movie sci-fi flick.
No. That's trite and silly. There's a much, much more likely answer to the Fermi Paradox -- so likely it's obvious. So obvious it's boring. So boring that everyone ignores it. I don't understand why. It's so blaringly obvious that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is:
Intelligent life is unbelievably, inconceivably, staggeringly unlikely. Quadrillions of universes lived and died without any life emerging -- at least any that could create a civilization. It has literally never, ever happened before, because the odds of it happening are one in 10^billions. It's nearly completely impossible. Which is why uncountable eternities with uncountable cycles of uncountable universes have passed with no life ever emerging ... except, except just this once.
Just this once, it happened. And what are the odds that, given life occurred on one planet, that it would be on that planet that its lifeforms looked around and asked "what are the odds of life? Shouldn't life be everywhere? It's everywhere on this planet!" What are the odds that it would be us lifeforms that life happened to? Well, 100%. So it looks easy. But it's not.
See? Boring. Life is staggeringly close to impossible. It will take another 10^10000000 universes being born and dying before it ever happens again. There is absolutely nowhere else in our entire universe, as big as it is, where intelligent life happened.
But you'll continue to ignore that answer, because deep scary biblical lessons about how the AI plague is consuming the universe and the Mass Effect reapers are going to come one day because we're making noise in the Dark Forest ... well, those just make better Sci-Fi books.
And yet if you shuffle a deck of cards, that particular order of cards will never again be seen in the universe, or hundreds of other universes full of card-shufflers. It is staggeringly close to impossible that you could have possibly gotten that order of cards. Are you really so sure that life didn't require more particulars to be exactly right than one specific order of a 52-card deck? It's so blindingly obvious that everyone just refuses to see it.
You are not the only person to ever think that life might be super rare in the universe. This is not a unique or even a rare opinion. People can speculate on other reasons for its rarity while still knowing it's likely to just be a naturally rare event. And there's no way you (you personally, and I guess humanity as a whole) can know it's as rare as 1 in 10^1000000 universes either, so your hypothesis is as evidence free as other hypotheses.
Meh, the boring answer is that it's probably common, but interstellar detection and signalling is very hard, and interstellar travel is impossible with the materials available in a single star system.
Personally, I'm in favor of nuking the Moon. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a steady rate. I consider this an act of secession.
Not only would nuking the Moon teach it a lesson, it might also keep it in our orbit. All we have to do is nuke the far side of it enough times to stop the outward movement. If we do it too much, it's an easy fix-- just nuke the near side.
Anyone who opposes this idea is for a moonless Earth, and all the chaos that would bring. I call them anti-tiders. They're the most despicable people on the planet.
There was someone who wanted to go a bit farther than just a bomb or two [1]. He wanted to completely destroy the moon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
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