Radiolab - The Moon Itself

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

There’s a total solar eclipse coming. On Monday, April 8, for a large swath of North America, the sun will disappear, in the middle of the day. Everywhere you look, people are talking about it. What will it feel like when the sun goes away? What will the blocked-out sun look like? But all this talk of the sun got us thinking: wait, what about the moon? The only reason this whole solar eclipse thing is happening is because the moon is stepping in front of the sun. So in today’s episode, we stop treating the moon like a bit player in this epic cosmic event, and place it centerstage. We get to know the moon, itself — from birth, to middle age, to … death.This episode was reported by Molly Webster, Pat Walters, Becca Bressler, Alan Goffinski, Maria Paz Guttierez, Sarah Qari, Simon Adler and Alex Neason, and produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Pat Walters, Maria Paz Guttierrez, Alan Goffinski and Simon Adler. It was edited by Becca Bressler and Pat Walters. Fact-checked by Diane Kelly and Natalie A Middleton. Original Music and sound design by Matt Kielty, Jeremy Bloom, and Simon Adler. Mixing help from Arianne Wack.Special thanks to Rebecca Boyle, Patrick Leverone and Daryl Pitts at the Maine Gem and Mineral Museum in Bethel Maine, Renee Weber, Paul M. Sutter, Matt Siegler, Sarah Noble, and Chucky P.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Pat Walters, Becca Bressler, Alan Goffinski, Maria Paz Guttierez, Sarah Qari, Simon Adler and Alex NeasonProduced by -Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Pat Walters, Maria Paz Guttierrez, Alan Goffinski and Simon AdlerOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Matt Kielty, Jeremy Bloom and Simon Adlerwith mixing help from  - Arianne WackFact-checking by - Natalie Middleton and Diane Kelleyand Edited by  - Pat Walters and Becca BresslerEPISODE CITATIONS:Books - Rebecca Boyle’s book, Our Moon: How the Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution and Made Us Who We Are,Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Oh wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

See? See? Okay, there's an eclipse coming up next in just a few days next week. Why do we care? I like how tired you, we're not worth 30 seconds into the episode, Lulu. I am tired, that tired is a pure cut. Hey, I'm Lulu Miller.

And I'm Lethif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. No, we're gonna run with that. And today we're gonna kick off with senior correspondent Molly Webster. Right. Okay. Yeah. So there is an eclipse and we're going to get you pumped about it.

No. So today, this episode is coming out on a Friday and then the eclipse is coming for us all on Monday. And so it's going to come across North America. And so it will enter the Sinaloa coast, and then it will come up through Texas and Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Matthew 10 When you mean come, does it actually hit that area at the same time, or does it actually dawn on it?

Laurenie Fabie Dreamy. So yeah, so what you're getting hit by is the shadow of the moon on the earth. Shadow of the moon on the earth. So basically an eclipse is like the moon gets between the earth and the sun. And so then it like blocks the light of the sun and the shadow of the moon is cast upon the earth. And the shadow is actually about 115 miles wide. Okay. Interesting. And so when I say it, you know, passes through these states or sweeps, it's like the shadow

of the moon is pressed upon the earth and then as the earth rotates, the moon kind of sweeps, like this shadow of the moon sweeps across the earth, passing over mountains and forests and cities and towns and maybe your house. Fully, fully blocking. Fully, fully blocking. That's why it's a big deal. It is a total eclipse, which the next total eclipse to hit our shores

is 2044. Ooh! Oh, wow. Okay. And so when we were, when I was thinking about this eclipse, I was like, okay, how, like, would there be an interesting way for our show to cover this? Like, do we want to think about this? What am I interested in? And I started to notice this funny thing, which is that everything I was coming across

was all about the sun, what happens to the sun, what we can learn about the sun, but also if it wasn't about the sun, it was something about earth and earthlings, about what we'll feel or what it'll be like, about the atmosphere, about shadows, the light, the wind. And I was like, wait, what about the moon? Like the only reason any of this is happening is because of the moon.

And yet we're treating it like it's like the you know silly best friend who only has a couple of scenes. Treating it like the photo bomber in the way of the thing. Yeah and I'm like you're caught you this the only reason this is happening is because the moon's causing it and no one's really talking about it and I feel like that's sort of the case with the moon like it doesn't really get talked about that much it sort of gets short with the moon. Like it doesn't really get talked about that much. It sort of gets short shrift. What are you talking about?

People talk about the moon all the time. There was just like, wasn't there a whole thing about something that landed on the moon and fell over and everyone was like rooting for this thing on the moon. And I mean, just in general, NASA's going back to the moon. We already went to the moon. We haven't gone to the sun.

Yeah, fair point about the sun. We haven't gone there. But I would just say like, I feel like you to the sun. Like... Yeah, fair point about the sun. We haven't gone there. But I would just say, like, I feel like you see the moon, so you think you know about the moon. But I don't know. What do you know? Like, tell me, what do you know about the moon? Okay.

Craters. It has craters. Craters. It's a rock, I think, that is in orbit with us. It's circling us. Yeah, that's right. Does it also spin probably? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay, so just to sum up your deep knowledge of the moon is that it's a round rock that orbits the Earth. A round rock, maybe. That may or may not spin.

Yeah. And has craters. You forgot about the craters. And it has craters. And it has craters. I think you've just underscored my point. That I think we think, we feel like we know a lot about the moon because we spend a lot of time looking at it. But I would say that one, like, that's kind of the collection

of facts most people know about the moon. But it is like, dark. And that we've been there. That we've been there before. Yeah, exactly. So that's the other thing, is that we often think of the moon in relation to us. And I just felt like when I realized this, I thought, oh, the moon is our closest neighbor.

And it feels a little weird how little we know about it. It feels a little rude. And so I just started to wonder, can I know this cosmic neighbor more than it may or may not be round and rocky? Can I get to really know it? And so that led me to this idea that what we should do today is...

a moon show. Oh, nice. So, like, you want to profile of the moon. I absolutely want to profile the moon. And that is what we're going to do. We're gonna do, like, a birth, a middle age, a death. Oh, I don't want it to die. Well, just stay tuned, Lulu. Stay tuned.

OK, so the first part of our moon profile comes from managing editor Pat Walters. Yeah, so when we started working on this moon show, I got curious about where the story starts. OK. Like, where did the moon come from? New Jersey. I mean, New Jersey does make and the world just takes, takes, takes. I mean, really though, where do you have any idea where it came from?

I mean, I guess I've always thought it sort of just was something in space whizzing by and Earth's orbit caught it at some point. Maybe? I think I always thought that it was just like it's always been around, like the way it came from wherever the Earth came from and they've always just been here together. Yeah, yeah. Good guesses. Not correct, but those are both ideas that people have had for a long time. Yes, so there was sort of a number of different suggestions. This is according to Simon Locke.

He's a research fellow at the University of Bristol in England. And I studied the formation and early evolution of planets. And the moon. And he says, for most of modern history, people thought, what you thought, that the moon was formed at the beginning of the solar system, or it was a meteorite that got lassoed into our orbit. Another idea was that the moon could have actually been sort of thrown out from the Earth itself.

Like, as the Earth was spinning, a chunk of it flew off and became the moon. An idea called fission. This was apparently a Darwin idea. Not the Charles Darwin but his son I believe George yeah actually thought the Pacific Ocean was the hole left behind by the moon when it flew off into space weird totally yeah and also wrong what all scientists probably agree on is Simon says what most likely happened was a bit more explosive. Yeah, the moon formed as a result of a giant impact.

Like a giant, like of what? Like a giant impact, what does that even mean here? Well, I should say there are a couple different versions of this theory, but the one Simon told me is wild and it starts about 4.4 billion years ago. Okay, so let's begin at the beginning. Okay, so just to set the scene. The overall picture is this. We're on Earth and Earth is only about a hundred million years old.

So it's quite early in the whole history of Earth. It's really sort of the, you know, still in the overture of Earth. But even in these early days, it looked kind of like Earth does now. Just imagine a slightly smaller Earth. It probably had oceans and an atmosphere. This is Sarah Stewart. Professor at the University of California at Davis. And she and Simon explained to me

that if you were standing on this baby Earth all those billions of years ago gazing up into the night sky, it would have been full of stars just like it is now. The stars would look different because they won't yet have reached their current configuration, but it would be a starry sky. If you were staring up at it, at some point a new little glimmer would have appeared in the sky.

Next night, that dot would have gotten bigger. Night after that, a little bit bigger still. And by the time it got big enough for you to tell what it was, which is a planet that's rushing towards Earth at 20,000 miles an hour, it would have consumed the entire sky and then smashed into the baby Earth. Damn. Dramatic. Yeah. The energy the collision dumped into the Earth was the power of the Sun. And as a result, you vaporize, vaporize, so turn to gas, the rock

of Earth, and of course the planet that hit it. And what's left is this sort of huge swirling ball of gas, a big spinning cloud, but made out of vaporized rock. And Simon says this cloud is extremely wide. Ten times the size of the present day Earth. Incredibly hot. At 2,000 Kelvin or so. And spinning super fast. The central part is rotating with a sort of three hour day. But it doesn't stay that way for very long.

It's cooling really rapidly, causing the vapor to condense into droplets of magma. Clouds are forming that are magma clouds. Sarah, start again. The magma droplets fall. As rain, basically. And the magma rain would have been torrential. Pretty quickly the magma rain starts clumping together with bigger lumps of molten rock. And at some point several of these lumps clump together and start pulling nearby stuff towards it and using that to grow in mass.

And this lump of magma, this will eventually become the moon. And the rest of this rocky gas cloud, that will become the Earth. Yeah, the moon is forming within this huge extended Earth. But this gas cloud version of Earth, it's contracting. It's getting smaller as it cools and more and more of the gas turns into liquid magma until eventually, Simon says, There's this sort of wonderful, dramatic moment where the moon, which has been forming inside the gas cloud of Earth, would emerge from the Earth as sort of this newly born satellite. And begin orbiting the Earth.

And that, according to Simon and Sarah's theory, is how we got our moon. What? So it literally popped out of us? Yeah. And how long did this whole process take? The moon probably takes about, you know, on the order of 10 to a few tens of years to form. Ten years? Yeah, it's fast. What? about, you know, on the order of 10 to a few tens of years to form. And the...

Yeah, it's fast. What? That took less than one of us. Less than me or you. Less than our life. Yeah, and what I think is so amazing about this moment is that it didn't only give birth to the moon. This event is really significant, not only because it formed the moon, but it also actually formed the Earth,

if you think about it. Like before that giant impact, there was a version of the Earth, but it was different. It was smaller, it was made of different stuff. It wasn't like tilted off at a slight angle away from the sun in the way that it is now. Like, if the giant impact hadn't happened, it's not just that we wouldn't have a moon,

but Earth wouldn't really be Earth in the way we know it. This moment when the moon became the moon is also how Earth became Earth. Cool, yeah, amazing. And not only were they born in the same moment, but they're also sort of twins. What do we have here? Like, when you look at a moon rock. What's that?

Hold that, by the way. Oh, I can hold it, oh my God. Which actually got to do recently at a museum in Maine. It's quite heavy. Yeah. It looks surprisingly familiar. In some ways it's like not that dissimilar from rocks that I've held before.

It just looked like a chunky gray and black rock. But obviously it's from the moon. It's a rock. Which is insane to think about. But yeah, it is just a rock. And it turns out it's not just that moon rocks look like earth rocks, but if you were to break them open and examine their geochemistry, you would find that earth rocks and moon rocks are almost identical. Wait, can I just understand? Because okay, so if you tell me they're the same,

I would be like, oh, of course, everything in the universe, or everything in the solar system was made at the same time, of course this thing is going to have the same as that thing. Is Mars the same? No. This looks quite different. I got to hold a piece of Mars at that museum too.

What? Yeah, it's awesome. I believe this is a piece of Mars. And looks totally different than a moon rock or an Earth rock. Looks more metallic, kind of red with green streaks through it, and according to Simon, is also geochemically very different. Because all of the things that were happening in the galaxy as the solar system was forming produce different amounts

of different elements. In different parts of the solar system. Yeah, exactly. So Mars looks different than Venus or Mercury, but Earth and the moon look the same. And nothing else in the solar system looks quite the same. Why if the moon and the earth are made of the same stuff and both were sort of born out of this one explosive moment. Why didn't the moon just become a little earth? Yeah, just because it's so much smaller. So it is only about 1% the mass of the earth.

But what that means is that the moon can't really hold onto an atmosphere. If you open a bottle of air on the Moon, very quickly that will get driven off into space. So it's not big enough, meaning it doesn't have enough gravity to hold that stuff down. This is why when you see, you know, the astronauts bouncing across the surface of the Moon, they can do that just because the gravity is so much lower. And so the force that's holding on to our atmosphere

just doesn't work as well when the gravity's that much lower. Okay. And without the atmosphere, none of the rest of it can happen. Oh, that is kind of shocking. And it makes you, cause it's like, you know, so often we talk about like,

it's like, oh, the Goldilocks zone about like it's like oh the Goldilocks zone And it's like we're in the right spot like like distance from the Sun and everything yeah exactly like it's like oh This is perfect for being habitable, but then you look at the moon You're like oh if it makes life and earth seem pretty Special and rare and unique again in a way Yeah pretty special and rare and unique again in a way. Yeah. Like, if that giant impact that gave birth to the Earth and the Moon had gone down a little bit differently, and some chunk of Earth had gotten blasted off into space

and we had ended up smaller, we might not have been able to develop oceans, birds, dogs, babies, music. We might have just ended up like a slightly bigger version of our cold, dry, airless twin, the moon. Managing Editor, Pat Walters. All right, Molly, where are we going from here? That felt kind of like a punctuation point for dusty, dead moon. Honestly, by Pat's description, it sounds kind of dead to me too,

but I want to liven it up. I wanna take you up there and liven it up. But there's nothing alive. What are you gonna do? It's true, there are no palm trees or anything up there, but there is, after months true, there are no palm trees or anything up there, but there is, after months of reading about the moon, it turns out there's just so much stuff happening there. I am sort of a pressure cooker of facts and I just have to tell them to somebody.

So you are my captive audience and I'm going to tell you all about the moon in 10 minutes or less. Are you ready? Let's do it. So the moon does look a lot more like Earth than I would have expected. Huh. There are the craters that Lettif remembered. Right. Plus it has a bunch of mountain ranges. Okay. A point that's higher than Everest. Scientists have found moon caves. Oh. And they've also found volcanoes that are billions and billions of years old.

With lava? With lava. Whoa. It's very, very dry, old lava. Okay. But really, the first thing I learned about the moon that really arrested me and made me want to know so much more about it is that the moon is covered in soil that kind of looks like sand.

People will call it moon dust, but it's incredibly sharp. Like a little grain of it? Yeah, a tiny, tiny grain of it is like razor sharp. And it is that way because there's no wind on the moon or flowing water. There's nothing to like erode and give you that soft, fine surface. So, let's say you're on the moon, you take off your boots, and you try to do the beach with your toes in the sand thing. Just the instant you put your foot down, it'd get all cut up? Likely, yeah.

Like how? And then probably before that happened, depending on where you were, it would either burn up or freeze your foot. What? You wouldn't, because like the temperature on the moon is super extreme. It's like one scientist said to me, it's either kill you hot or kill you cold. And that's because on the moon, if you're in the sun, it can be something like 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wow. But if you're out of the sun, it can be negative 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. But if you're out of the sun, it can be negative 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Whoa. That's like 500 degrees different. Yeah, it's a 500 degree difference. And the strange thing is that you can actually get that 500 degree difference within centimeters

of two different objects. You can have one molecule that's 250 degrees, and you can have another molecule that's minus 250 degrees, and they're only centimeters apart from each other. What? Wow. How can that even happen? Well, since there's almost no atmosphere on the moon,

there's not a way to transfer heat through space, right? So when a hotter molecule gives off heat, there's no way to pass that to a colder molecule. So then you can get two things extremely close together with extremely different temperatures. Huh? The other thing that this lack of atmosphere causes is that on the moon, there is no sunrise or sunset. What do you mean? You just turn from day to night or night to day. It just goes from light to dark or dark to light.

Just like boom. What? And so, Lulu, ask your question. What is your question? Well, I guess my questions were like, what is that? Is it like from... What the freak? How does that happen?

Yeah. Just so fast. And so, such a change so fast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the only reason that shift is gradual on Earth and we have a dreamy sunset and a dreamy sunrise is because our atmosphere and the clouds and stuff are like trapping the light and like, diffusing it. So it's like the atmosphere is like a dimmer? Is that what you mean kind of? For us, yes. But since there's almost no atmosphere on the moon, there's nothing to do that. So it's kind of like just pulling up a blind and it's like, boom, there's the sun. Huh. Whoa. Okay. So, okay. So, so far we have, so there's the dirt, there's the, there is the temperature extremes. There is the lack of dawn and dusk. Do we need like a seventh inning stretch? Like, do we need a quick?

Yeah. I would like to adjust the thermostat, to be honest with you. I'm about to keep going. I'm about to keep going, so I need you to like, collect yourself. Okay, all right. Okay, keep going. Because what those temperature shifts do on the moon

is they actually cause the moon to shake. Really? Yeah, there are moonquakes. What? So many kinds, for actually so many different reasons. The ones I think are sort of super interesting are the ones that are caused by the tides? With our tides?

With our tides. Oh. And basically how that works is the moon causes the tides on the earth, which means the moon's gravity pushes and pulls the water in the oceans on the earth. Right. Which then changes the gravity of the Earth, which actually fiddles with the Moon itself. Again, it's like a feedback loop.

And the way that it fiddles with the Moon is kind of complicated, but stick with me. Basically the Moon is just one plate, whereas if you think of the Earth, we have plate tectonics, we have different plates that smash into each other, but the Moon is just one, and so Earth's gravity is just pulling on one single plate. And if you're one plate getting pulled on, the only thing you can do is change your entire shape. So the plate, aka the moon, goes from being a sphere to an oblong object to a sphere to an oblong object. Whoa.

Holy. I know it's so rad, and moonquakes are happening quite often. And so when you look at it during the eclipse, it will probably be having a moonquake. It will? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, most scientists said 100%.

It will be shaking. So just know, when you look up there, it's trembling. Stage fright. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah. I know. And I guess when you're, like when we're looking at the moon, the whole thing is kind of grayscale,

right? Are there colors on the moon? Everything is pretty gray. One thing I did hear was that when things land on the moon, like an asteroid or a meteor, there's like a whiteness to it. It's really bright. It's almost like newborn material that has hit from far away in the solar system. And then over time, as it starts getting pummeled by

the solar wind from the sun and different types of charged radiative particles from space, that those cause that whiteness to kind of like heat and condense and heat and condense, and then it becomes dark. And so the moon seems like it's a place of light and shadow. I feel like having this conversation with you, the veil, the wool is pulled from my eyes. Because I think you were very successful in your premise. But more than that, like it's like, it's this, most of our images are either the ones we can see with the naked eye, where it's this, like, comforting twinkle.

It's this source of light in darkness. And it's so twinkly and forgiving and welcoming. And then it's like, no, take off your shoes, welcome to this place. The dust is daggers. You're gonna bleed if you scrinch into the dust, temperature extremes, I mean, it is probably both twinkly and dagger dust, and then also cold and alive and probably 1000 other things because

we still don't know it that well. Like in all of time, we've only spent three and a half days up there. It hasn't, we haven't actually spent that much time on the surface of the moon. Oh really? Yeah. Three days and like a handful of hours. We've only, that feels, I mean, quite literally like we've only scratched the surface. Exactly. We really don't know this friend of ours that well, actually. Huh. And like, one of the things that came out of these conversations with scientists is just how many questions they still have about the moon and like how much we have yet to discover about it. And it's just like, you know, they would just rattle them off. Like, what is the history of impact events on the moon?

Or what is the moon like below the surface? Or why don't we ever see moonquakes on the far side of the moon? What is the little bit of lunar atmosphere that is up there made of? And how can the moon help us understand other planets? Like the list goes on and on. Like someone sent me a 120 page NASA book that was a lot about the questions on the moon. So it just feels like what we've done here is like,

this is what we know about the moon day to day right now. Yeah. But that could just get blown up again as we learn more. But still, I just, I don't know, it's like instead of going to bed thinking about the little boys fishing off the moon, which is a nice image, I'm going to think about the long ago volcanoes exploding on it. Young lunar craters. That's what you're going to go to bed thinking about.

I am, for real. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Yeah. We will continue to moon you after this short break. Yeah. Hey, it's Molly Webster from Radiolab. So one thing to know about me is I love collecting objects from the natural world. So if I'm on a hike, I'm going to pick up a twig or a shell.

And if I pull on a coat that I haven't worn in a while, it has inevitably a pinecone from some hike in the pocket. And why do I collect these things? I love being reminded of a place that I was at or something I discovered. And I also like having these items around because they connect me to other people. I can explain what the piece of rock on my mantle is or why I have that pinecone in my pocket. And at the show, as senior correspondent, I feel like I create an audio version of these collections for you, the listener. I can show you the facts I've been gathering, the things I've been thinking about, whether that's taking you up to the moon or inside a butterfly's chrysalis.

And in turn, our collection, in a sense, becomes your collection. You get to take the facts and the stories and the points of view from Radiolab out into your world. And you can share them on dates or at holidays with your family or in long car rides with kids and teachers and friends and family. And the collection just lives out in the world further and further and further and further. the world further and further and further and further. So I'm here today to say, if you enjoy our cabinet of curiosities, if you want to expand it,

to add to it, please become a member of the lab. You'll get access to exclusive content that doesn't make it into our podcast, ad-free episodes, merch, and more. But there's also a reason to join right now, which is that for a limited time only, you'll receive a graphic t-shirt featuring Zuzve, which is a quasi moon of Venus that our co-host Lutif helped name. You can check out the t-shirt and what it means to be a lab member by going to radiolab.org slash join. Your lab membership truly, truly, truly does support independent journalism and

it fosters curiosity and creativity in the world. You can become a member of the lab today by going to radiolab.org slash join. Thank you as always for listening, for supporting, for collecting, for joining the collection. Back to our show. the collection back to our show. Lulu. Latif. Radiolab, back from break. On our lunatic journey here. With the story of a celestial-sized what if.

How you doing, Alan? Good, man. Good to see you. Good to see you. Comes to us from reporter Alan Gaffinski. OK, so I guess to begin, Alan, you should tell Latif the highly intellectual place where this quandary was born. Right, just like every good radio lab story,

it all started watching, uh... Hello, everybody! One of the Minions movies, Despicable Me. Put it down! Must have been with my niece and nephew tuning in on the couch, probably half scrolling Twitter or something like that. Sure, yeah. Anyhow, the bad guy in the movie is named Gru, and for reasons that aren't really worth

going into right now. We are going to steal... Pause for a second. The moon! He steals the moon. He shrinks it down to the size of a grapefruit, pulls it right out of orbit. And in his moment of victory, floating up in space, holding the moon in his hands... I've got it! I've got the moon! The movie jump cuts back to earth.

You see this wave stop, and then there's this werewolf. He suddenly changes back into a human with no clothes on. I mean, these just immediate and absurd consequences of the moon disappearing. And while it's really just a short scene in the movie, it got me curious about, you know, like, what would happen if the moon just... ...just disappeared? Like, what physically would happen? Right, right, like down here on Earth.

Right. Which, can I just say, I don't... Would there be that much? Like, I know the poets would be sad. I'd be sad to lose my object of evening contemplation. But besides maybe tides, does it have, like, does it do that much here? Well, I started searching around to see

if anyone had thought about this, and I quickly found someone who was kind of the perfect person. Can you hear me? Hi, hello. Hello, hello. How are you doing? if anyone had thought about this, and I quickly found someone who was kind of the perfect person. Can you hear me? Hi, hello. Hello, hello. How are you doing? I'm doing well.

Sorry, I gotta stand so the baby falls asleep. And we're like right on the edge of nap time, so you might hear a few more whimpers, but I think we're set. So this is Mika McKinnon. I am a geophysicist with a Master's in Disasters, possibly the best degree title ever. That's a real thing? Yes, yes.

I did geophysics of catastrophic scale landslides. That's what I did my grad school in. Today when she's not helping agencies like FEMA plan and prepare for disasters, you know, helping save lives. I am a science consultant in the entertainment industry. So I sit with directors and come up with interesting science to support their plot lines. Cool.

Tell me about it. So I put this question in front of her. What would happen if all of a sudden, just one day, the moon sort of disappeared? Yeah, so do we want to have a destroyed moon or a vanished moon? Oh. Why don't you tell us what would happen

if it was destroyed first? Okay, so the moon got destroyed. Say we shot a bunch of nukes at it, detonated them, something like that. Suddenly we would have a whole bunch of meteorites crashing down on Earth. A whole bunch of impact events. A whole bunch of meteorites crashing down on Earth.

A whole bunch of impact events. So... Death, destruction, suffering and misery. Immediately. So destroyed, I actually think is less fun than the moon disappearing. Because I think the very, very first thing that would happen if the moon disappeared is confusion. Everyone would go, wait, what?

But like in all languages? Yeah, simultaneously. Mequa? Yeah, okay. And I would think that there'd be a lot of instantaneous conspiracy theories about this too. Oh, for sure. Who did it, you do it, let's bomb you. Yes, so the human aspect is just gonna be a mess.

But let's look at ignoring the people. We'll come back to that. Ignore the people. The moon has some major spheres of influence. So in the first place, tides. As you noted, Lulu, as the Earth rotates, the moon's gravity is actually tugging on it, sort of pulling the oceans in and out. All the time.

It's like a little gravitational massage. And so to take away the moon, the tides would be a lot smaller. By what percent? A lot. Like a 65 to 75 percent reduction. Huh. So suddenly your tidal range gets tiny and this would impact everything. And so if you were at the beach... Standing in the sand, she says, probably the first thing that you'd notice is it sounds eerily quiet.

Probably the first thing that you'd notice is it sounds eerily quiet. Yeah, it would be quieter. The waves calmer. But as you walk closer towards the water, the stench would be eye-watering. Looking at the water, it'd be full of dead crabs and fish. Because you know with the water moving less. Everything that is a filter feeder, like all the little barnacles and mussels and clams

and all that are having less food show up. And if all of your like clams and like crabs and everyone start dying off, then everything that eats them dies off. Oh. Then everything that eats them dies off. Then everything that eats them dies off. And so you have an entire coastal system, ecosystem food chain collapse.

And for the animals that weren't immediately affected by the tides, the difference in the night sky would leave many of them just totally lost. Eels, jellyfish, others literally used the moon to navigate. And there are other species that actually use it to time their reproduction. Like the Great Coral Reef is one that's so precise. All the reef is like, all right,

so sometime between October and November, we're gonna pick a full moon. Then they wait a few days, and then four hours after moonrise, they all release their reproductive goodies. And so you have like these giant pink clouds that you can see from space. So you just start going like, okay, so if there's no moon, what happens with all of that? The eels would maybe be chasing their tails. The jellyfish bobbing toward the bottom.

Coral reefs dead and vacant. Not good. Yeah, but it sounds like all of this is watery stuff. I mean, don't discount the watery stuff. That's most of the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, watery stuff is most of the planet. Fair, fair, fair. Good point. And as Mika points out, the water is going to affect the land.

Again, because the tides aren't moving water, the warm water is going to be pooling out in the ocean. Concentrating and piling up all in one place. And because warmer water means harsher hurricanes. Do you think roots collapsed? Do you think sands go down? The hurricane season is going to start even earlier and last even longer. I mean, entire states might have to be evacuated.

And as we move inland, we're going to be running into ecosystems in total flux. So let's look at the Serengeti and the wildebeest. Okay, great. Typically, on new moons when it's the darkest is when wildebeests are most vulnerable to their number one predator, lions. You know, the lions can sneak up on them more easily in the dark. So to protect themselves, the wildebeests stay packed together and don't eat or move much, holding tight, waiting for a brightly lit, moon-filled night. But if it's perpetual new moon...

...perpetually moonless nights... Well, eventually the wildebeest are gonna have to come up with a new plan and they're herding animals so they're all gonna have to agree on a plan together to do something. They could travel, expose themselves and probably get eaten or stay hunkered down and quickly eat up everything around them. And weirdly, if they go that route, they're going to make themselves even more vulnerable because there'll be no foliage left for them or anyone else to hide behind, so the lions will be swarming them and they're going to be fighting back.

Chaos on the Serengeti, chaos on the Serengeti. Exactly. But, this chaos on land, it might not be bad news for everybody. Take for example, the badger. Badgers pee more. Wait, sits again? Badgers? Badgers urinate more.

So badgers pee better and more on new moons when it's darker and less on full moons when it's brighter. Are they a little shy? So that's the joke, except for what it is, is they're peeing in order to mark territory, saying, hey, I'm ready to mate. And it takes them like 90 minutes to get it on. So they want to be in darkness where they're less likely to be spotted and eaten. They like doing it with the lights out.

Exactly. Badgers prefer dark nights for their romantic endeavors. So they might actually do quite nicely without a moon. Yeah, yeah. The badger population would moon. Yeah, yeah. Badgers. The badger population would explode. Just skyrocket. But when you're asking about like who are the winners, who are the losers, one of the

winners would be geophysicists. Why? Because we would finally be able to tell the difference between several theories that we've had that we're like, I can't really tell. Like what? Can you give us one? Yeah. So a perpetual question is whether or not the moon is responsible for the Earth's magnetic field. What?

Okay. So here on Earth, we've got the outer crust where we're all hanging out. Under that, we've got the mantle. Under that, we have the liquid outer core and then there's the solid inner core. And this liquid core moving around this solid core, that's what generates our magnetic field. And the Earth's magnetic field, it's like our shield. It's what protects us from all the nasty, nasty radiation of space. I mean, it literally deflects cosmic cancer-causing particles

that are bombarding us, and yeah, it's all thanks to that metal moving inside the Earth's core. So, why is the metal moving inside the Earth? Why is the outer core moving? Do they? Yeah, why? Right? We don't know. Is it the Moon? That's one of the ideas. Thinking goes that in the same way the Moon's gravity pulls the water of the oceans... The gravitational massage is having that same impact to a smaller amplitude on the inside.

Causing some of that metallic movement. And I mean, if this theory's right, well, then the Earth without a moon is really no Earth at all. If we lost our magnetic field, I mean, it wouldn't happen right away, but if it started slowing down, if it started getting weaker, goodbye remaining life. Man, that is all of this is such a bigger effect than I would have ever fathomed. I'm kind of in awe. I feel like the big takeaway from this is we don't want this scenario.

This is not like a world that we wanna live in. No, we don't want this. Without the moon up there, really just everything, there's gonna be death. There's definitely gonna be slow and confusing death. So I would like to keep the moon, please. Thank you, moon. Thank you, rock, for all that you do for us. And in just a couple of days,

the Moon is, you know, taking center stage, slipping in front of the sun and showering a huge swath of North America in temporary darkness. And so to end this journey... Thank you for calling, Andy. May I help you? We thought we'd drop back down to earth and kind of bounce all over the country. Eagle Pass, Texas. Otabelle, Oklahoma. Colbert, New Hampshire. Erie, PA. To hear how people are preparing to celebrate. We're actually sitting here talking about it right now. Contemplate, endure. It's gonna be the largest congregation of people that our

community has ever seen. This epic celestial event. Everyone is trying to do something unique to their to their place. So we have the biggest mass wedding in the state of Arkansas. Over 300 couples getting married during the total eclipse. With the Saturday, let's do a black man career for the day. We will have solar eclipse edition candy bars. They're going to open the doors at two o'clock for baseball fans to come in and see the eclipse. Which sounds like a good idea, but what if you're the guy down in concessions? I mean, let the hot dog guy go enjoy the eclipse.

You know, like, that's not gonna hurt anybody. Well, there are the potential for some disaster-like issues, I guess. Traffic is going to be kind of insane that day. Cell phone service might go down. In parking, it's gonna be difficult to feed everybody. Really, a half day of f**king school? Like, my kid gets to school at 8.30 and then I have to pick him up at noon.

What the f**k? But, you know, it is kind of cool. I'm looking forward to seeing totality, feeling the temperature drop, hearing if there are any animals that might be confused as to what's going on. It's just going to be a lot of fun with a lot of people who are all there to do one thing and that is to look up at the sky. This episode was reported by Molly Webster, Pat Walters, Becca Bresler, Alan Gaffinski, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

Sara Cari, Simon Adler, and Alex Niesen. Produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bresler, Pat Walters, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Alan Gaffinski, and Simon Adler. It was edited by Becca Bresler and Pat Walters, fact checkers Diane Kelly and Natalie A. Middleton, original music and sound design by Matt Kielty, Becca Bresler, Jeremy Bloom, Maria Paz Gutierrez, and Simon Adler. Mixing help from Ariane Weck. Special thanks to Rebecca Boyle, whose new book is Our Moon, How the Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are.

Also to Renee Weber, Paul M. Sutter, Matt Sigler, Sarah Noble, Chuckie P., Sarah Stewart, and Patrick Leverone and Darrell Pitts at the Maine Gem and Mineral Museum in Bethel, Maine. Radio Lab is supported by the Simons Foundation, whose In the Path of Totality initiative celebrates the April 8th total solar eclipse. More at inthepathoftotality.org. For those of you in the path, enjoy the eclipse. Enjoy it responsibly with your special eclipse glasses. For those of you who are not in the path, well just go look at the moon. It's out almost every night. Free show for you. Watch the moon, listen to the episode. Thank you for listening. Until next time. ["The Moon and the Stars"]

Hey, I'm Liz Landau and I'm from Washington, DC. Here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Akedi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna,

David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambhadam, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sarah Khare, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox Assignment Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.