Why Would Aliens Obliterate Our Moon?

Discovery

Why do we keep taking pot shots at the moon?

This started when pioneer special effects filmmaker Georges Melies poked the Man in The Moon in the eye with a Jules Vern rocket in his fanciful 1902 classic, Le Voyage Dans la Lune. Then, in 1916, rocket pioneer Robert Goddard proposed sending a rocket to the moon loaded with 15 pounds of photographic flash powder in order to record the explosion made by the impact. This was revisited in the late 1950s when the U.S. military considered the possibly of exploding a nuclear bomb on the moon just to show off to our Space Race adversaries, the Soviets.

GALLERY: The Science and Fiction of ‘Oblivion’

In 2009, NASA’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), mission sent the rocket booster’s upper stage crashing intro the lunar south pole in an experiment to excavate any trapped ice. There was some public hysteria that the impact would knock the moon into a different orbit, and bring global catastrophe. “I just want NASA to leave the moon alone. Consider it an anti-littering position,” an angry ex-Marine-turned-English teacher wrote to me. His head might have exploded if he knew that NASA deliberately crashed a 31,000-pound Saturn V rocket booster into the moon in 1971 that unleashed much more energy than the LCROSS booster, and left a nice-looking fresh crater.

In the new sci-if movie Oblivion evil space aliens destroy the Earth’s moon (photo above). This messes up our planet in completely inexplicable ways: earthquakes, volcanoes, and strange weather. Now, these aliens aren’t terribly smart because an infinitesimal fraction of all the energy it took to pulverize the moon could have been used to whack the Earth with a re-targeted asteroid.

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