Chapter 1: What cosmic event led to the Moon's formation?
It all started as a messy cosmic fling four and a half billion years ago. In the heat of the moment, two bodies got a little too close, and one explosive moment later, they were together, then flung apart, fuming and scorched. You know how it is. Everyone ends up getting hurt. They tried giving each other space, moving apart. Bit by bit, they drifted farther away.
But they couldn't let go completely. And the chaos softened into a rhythm of tides and seasons and a whole life balanced on this awkward, long-distance thing with about 380,000 kilometres between them. Every month... The moon swings by in full glow and the Earth pretends it's not obsessed.
In the moon's eyes, Earth became that majestic blue ball that it once loved, the centre around which its whole life revolves. Welcome to Life Without, where I yank a Jenga block out of our magnificent world. A piece we rely on has just vanished. My doing, of course. No heads up, no easy fixes. Just the game of life wobbling in front of our eyes.
Will the tower stand or will the whole thing come crashing down? For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis. And together we'll find out if a life without the moon is game over.
Scientists around the world would be crying themselves to sleep seeing all of their hopes and dreams evaporate with the Moon.
Piecing together this wild scenario right alongside me are Sarah Russell, a Merit Researcher in Cosmic Mineralogy and planetary sciences at the Natural History Museum. And Luke Jerram, a fantastic artist who you might know from street pianos, Play Me, I'm Yours, and he's also the artist who toured the world with his stunning replica, Museum of the Moon.
Fly me to the moon. We won't be singing that in quite the same way once the moon's gone.
Now, astronomers have a pretty good idea how the Moon was formed. Most support the giant impact hypothesis, where the young, forming Earth collided with a smaller planet called Theia. And yet we still treat it like a mystical switch for human behaviour, blaming full moons for madness, crime and chaos. Well, tonight, the Moon has had enough. It's leaving.
We're one day in, into a sky with no moon. Luke, how do you think people will react when they realise the moon is gone?
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Chapter 2: How would life on Earth change without the Moon?
Yes. But for a lot of people, day one without the moon, they might just think, a bit cloudy tonight.
But if the moon suddenly disappears in a puff, there would be this dramatic event where all of this water that's being pulled by the moon, that's suddenly relaxed. And so they move back to some quiescent state.
So at the end of one day without the moon, those who believe it's gone forever are really in a panic. The rest of us just think it's probably a cloudy night. Here we are, exactly 29 and a half days in, and the scientific community is still working tirelessly to figure out why the moon disappeared on us that night.
I think we'd feel even more isolated in the universe if there's nothing out there other than little twinkly things because the moon is this stepping stone into astronomy, into the stars. So the moon has always been that first thing that astronomers do when you get given a telescope. You look at the moon.
Absolutely. We have things like Star Wars and Doctor Who because we can look up to the moon and we can imagine that it's a world that people could walk on it, right? And that's the only object in the sky that we can do that for.
When you watch Star Wars and you see the twin moons of Tatooine, are you a bit jealous?
No, I love our moon more than any other moon. How well do we know the moon? We know quite a lot of thanks to the exploration, like the Apollo program in the 1960s and 70s.
So it's from that that we learned how the moon formed in this really dramatic event and that we can use the moon basically as an archive of what's happened to the Earth over four and a half billion years because the Earth is continuously reprocessing itself. For example, we can see from its cratered surface that the moon and also the Earth have been bombarded throughout its history.
Luke, you've taken the Museum of the Moon to more than 40 countries.
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Chapter 3: What emotional impact would the Moon's absence have on humanity?
When we presented a sculpture of the moon around cathedrals and museums, a little girl came up to me and she said, will you put the moon back afterwards? So she thought I'd stolen the real moon. That cultural shift will be profound. And over the generations, we would lose a feeling of what that experience was like to be physically looking and engaging with the moon.
Yeah, I can imagine our grandchildren saying, oh, Granny, going on about the moon again.
Do you think that losing the moon might push us to take better care of the Earth out of knowing now what it feels like to really lose something?
I'd hoped so. One of the main outcomes from the Apollo moon missions wasn't the ability to go to the moon and discover it and put a flag in it. It was that opportunity to look back at the Earth for the first time and realise that we're all on this beautiful blue planet together. The fragility and that famous photograph, the Earthrise, kick-started the whole environmental movement.
The Earth and the Moon are made of almost the same kind of cosmic DNA.
I hope we still have samples of lunar rocks on Earth that we can still study in the form of the Apollo samples and the Chinese return samples.
I think they've gone.
What? That's so mean.
Sorry about that. You've lost your library of the Earth's history.
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