> You’d need a relatively large asteroid, one that’s about a kilometer across, that was made entirely of antimatter: material that annihilates away with normal matter to produce energy (normally in the form of photons) via Einstein’s E = mc². Too weak of a blast, and the Moon would fail to blow apart, gravitationally re-forming over time. If you gave it too strong of a blast, you’d bombard the Earth with rapidly-moving debris that would make the infamous Chicxulub impact look like a mere pebble. But with just the right magnitude, you would create a massive ringed system around Earth made out of debris: debris that would only gradually de-orbit and strike our planet.
Hand-waving the destruction with "Imagine that we somehow made the moon vanish." would be SO much shorter. And more realistic.
Vs. a huge antimatter asteroid impact would effectively give the Earth a ringside seat to a nuclear explosion. With all the attendant benefits for Earthlings: burned to death by the flash, or killed by the radiation, or shredded by the shock wave, or crushed by high-speed debris, or ...
We don't just go and blow up the Moon right off the bat. that step should be closer to the end of a considered, comprehensive, calculated Geo-engineering plan.
Hand-waving the destruction with "Imagine that we somehow made the moon vanish." would be SO much shorter. And more realistic.
Vs. a huge antimatter asteroid impact would effectively give the Earth a ringside seat to a nuclear explosion. With all the attendant benefits for Earthlings: burned to death by the flash, or killed by the radiation, or shredded by the shock wave, or crushed by high-speed debris, or ...