[HN Gopher] Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
        
       Author : freediver
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2024-04-23 04:54 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
        
       | sethammons wrote:
       | 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).
        
         | Jerrrry wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | ImPostingOnHN wrote:
           | 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.
           | 
           |  _0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl_
        
         | retrac wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | Wikipedia has an article about the proposal:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119
        
           | arethuza wrote:
           | _" the flash of explosive light would have been faintly
           | visible to people on Earth with their naked eye"_
           | 
           | That makes it sound like one of the reasons for cancelling it
           | would have been that it really wouldn't have been that
           | impressive.
        
             | eszed wrote:
             | 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.]
        
           | thfuran wrote:
           | >This is maybe now less of a concern, now that we have
           | samples returned for background comparison.
           | 
           | As I understand it, the remaining Apollo samples are
           | basically considered contaminated by earth now.
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | 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?'
        
         | Jerrrry wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0
        
         | snapcaster wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | sethammons wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | masfuerte wrote:
             | Yes, and if we do end this civilization it will be much
             | harder to bootstrap the next one. The easily accessible
             | coal and oil are gone.
        
             | snapcaster wrote:
             | 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
        
               | bluish29 wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | snapcaster wrote:
               | 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
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | A suffers from survivorship bias, right? The civilization in
           | which we exist can't have destroyed itself yet if we are to
           | have made that observation.
        
             | snapcaster wrote:
             | 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."
        
         | MeImCounting wrote:
         | 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"
        
           | georgeecollins wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | MeImCounting wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | kortilla wrote:
               | Metals wouldn't be a problem. The metals we already mined
               | will be all over the place in the form of abandoned junk
               | from before the collapse
        
               | eszed wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | MeImCounting wrote:
               | 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 _very_ _extremely_ 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.
        
               | kwhitefoot wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | ramblenode wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | vkou wrote:
             | Green fertiliser can be produced at ~3x the cost of
             | petroleum-based fertilizers.
             | 
             | Nobody does it because it's uneconomical as long as oil is
             | cheap.
             | 
             | Climate change will ruin food production, not global
             | fertilizer shortages.
        
           | short_sells_poo wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | MeImCounting wrote:
             | 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
        
           | masswerk wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | rurp wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | dotnet00 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | kortilla wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | krisoft wrote:
           | Give it time. Let's check back on this once our ability to
           | nuke ourselves is as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza was in
           | Cleopatra's time.
        
           | LeifCarrotson wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | bee_rider wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | kjkjadksj wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | LeifCarrotson wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | kjkjadksj wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | feoren wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | cwillu wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | darth_aardvark wrote:
           | > 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.
        
         | rurp wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Vagantem wrote:
       | Related animated video from Kurzgesagt - "What if We Nuke the
       | Moon?"
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEfPBt9dU60
        
       | riffic wrote:
       | like the Mr. Show sketch: "America can, should, must, and will
       | blow up the moon."
        
         | jkern wrote:
         | We're earthlings. Let's blow up earth things
        
         | sprabbage wrote:
         | "He'll do the job, no questions asked."
         | 
         | Classic.
        
         | zck wrote:
         | This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA
        
       | tzs wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
        
         | arethuza wrote:
         | _" The proposed nuclear destruction of the Moon has been
         | rejected by astronomers on several grounds"_
         | 
         | That made me laugh.
         | 
         | I wonder if this is where Neal Stephenson got the idea for
         | _Seveneves_ which has the opening line
         | 
         |  _" The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent
         | reason."_
        
           | ikari_pl wrote:
           | spoiler: we never learn the reason
           | 
           | (it's not important to the story)
        
             | MeImCounting wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | mtillman wrote:
           | Along those lines, Chairface from Tick and Tim Robbin's
           | classic "would you miss it?" defense from Austin powers.
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | I appreciated the section afterwards just as much.
           | 
           | For a man who gained infamy for wanting to blow up the moon,
           | his publications are on relatively boring topics in advanced
           | math.
        
           | aaronharnly wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | saalweachter wrote:
             | I think structurally it should have been third.
             | 
             | 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.
        
           | MadnessASAP wrote:
           | I would also like to print out:
           | 
           | > 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.
        
         | woopsn wrote:
         | > 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 x 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!
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | _> Instead you would have to somehow beam or guide the full
           | power of the sun towards the moon for several minutes._
           | 
           | So what you're saying is... we need to build a Death Star.
        
             | GolfPopper wrote:
             | 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_.
        
         | ck2 wrote:
         | What could possibly go wrong
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
         | 
         | 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.
         | 
         | DOH
        
         | henriquecm8 wrote:
         | If he wanted to remove the moon from earth's orbit, he
         | should've suggested that we mine the whole moon for resources.
        
       | jchanimal wrote:
       | I can't help but think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
       | about the aftermath of the splitting of the moon.
        
         | SamBam wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | ihaveajob wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | The_Colonel wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | askvictor wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | Symmetry wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mncharity wrote:
           | Yeah, planets are puddles.
           | 
           | 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"?
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | Been there - I even have the shirt.
       | 
       | https://www.imao.us/docs/NukeTheMoon.htm
        
       | wormius wrote:
       | "Tonight we can, will and must blow up the moon." "Earth First:
       | We're earthlings, we should blow up earth things. No to blowing
       | up the moon!"
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA
        
       | kyleyeats wrote:
       | 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.
        
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