MovieChat Forums > The Time Machine (2002) Discussion > 'moon breakup'....WTF????

'moon breakup'....WTF????

posted 13 years ago by farmerne
48 replies | jump to latest

So...the big global catastrophe is a "moon breakup", apparently from doing some mining with nukes on the moon. Is this the best the writers could come up with?

Apparently they have zilch scientific literacy. The moon has survived collisions with miles wide asteroids, that make a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker, and has come out of it just fine.

From the mess of the entire story in this movie, one strongly suspects that there were plenty of re-writes on the screenplay by several persons before finally making it to the screen.

[–] 12 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Tsavo 11 years ago

It depends on how and where the nukes where placed man. Even planets have weak points, it's not that improbable to destroy a planet, and we have some pretty powerful nukes. You're right in that it's unlikely, but not impossible.

[–] sebaser 11 years ago

Even planets have weak points,

No they dont

we have some pretty powerful nukes.

no we dont, even the strongest nukes are like silent farts

but not impossible.

wrong again

There is only one thing that we can use to destroy a planet. Antimatter.
And guess what, we have none ( ok, few particles for research purpose ) bot we will need few kilograms, if not tons.

If you detonated every nuke ever made at the same time, earth wouldnt even flinch. Sure most of us would die from radiation and nuclear fallout, but earth would be back to normal in a blink of an eye, few thousand years and nobody would even notice anything happened.

Even if earth would collide with an asteroid size of the moon in few million years it would collapse right back into its old shape from the gravitational force, and im not even sure it would do much real damage to the planet.

You would need a really insane cosmic event to destroy a planet. Like 2 planets colliding, a supernova or black hole, anything less will do nothing.

As for destroying the moon ?
No weapon could do that, and even if it could it mass would stay the same.
So moon in parts has the same effect on earth as moon in 1 part, so no earthquakes, no tide change, absolutely 0 effect.
Not counting the fact that it would instantly collapse back onto itself.

[–] last-c 11 years ago

If the Moon were to fragment, the mass would be spread linearly through the orbit forming some sort of a ring around the earth, which would diffuse the gravitational effect as the mass is more thinly spread, and also many fragments would de-orbit and fall on the Earth, causing overkill in the magnitude of thousands of dino-killers.

Well, yes, most of the mass would crumple back together, but a small percentage of change in mass might be enough to cause incremental changes in our tilt, or tidal effects/climate change from ocean streams and etc.

How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands.

[–] sebaser 11 years ago

Im talking about the case in this movie.
We saw the moon was just flying around in parts next to each other, when its physically impossible.

But yeah, i dont doubt that losing the single point mass of the moon would destroy the earths climate as it is, but im not sure if it would create that much destruction. If something the earth crust being not dragged so much in every direction would make for less earthquakes, at lest i think thats the case.
And i dont know enough about the weather to say how much global climate is affected by the tide flow of the sea. One thing is for sure, it wouldnt destroy our race, we tent to menage and survive even in extreme weather conditions.

[–] last-c 11 years ago

But even a mild crisis would devolve our civilization back to dark ages from which we would NEVER recover. And even if we survived as a species, we would live like the Elohi for the rest of our days.

How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands.

[–] sebaser 11 years ago

Ofc we would recover, if there is something that is holding us back its religions and political structure of nations.
If something a clean slate might bust our progress as a race. We got to the point we are at today in mostly 200 years, since wouldnt have to invent math and language, we would start at a better place and with better knowledge even in case of total destruction. Even few books on math and physic would turn a man into the most powerful magician back in the middle ages, and with proper education and knowledge we could get to this point in 100 years from scratch.
We already know what percentage of iron and carbon produce best steel, we know what are most power efficient fuels, we know a lot of about mechanics and physics, we would could produce modern materials even with basic equipment.

Sure some wars could drag on for centuries, stopping any global progress all together, but they would eventually end.

And even if all this knowledge was lost, over 10 thousand years i bet we would end in the same place digging up interesting artifacts of our old civilization with better tech we have today, we arent getting any more stupid, if something for some unexplained reason average intelligence is growing even without natural selection in human race.

[–] Panthro44 11 years ago

I believe what happened in the movie is that detonations on the far side of the moon (the side that never sees the Earth) changed the moon's orbit, making it move closer to the Earth. Once the orbit was compromised, the moon slowly started spiraling into the Earth. Eventually, it approached the Earth's Roche Limit (in short, small body gets too close to big body, and big body's gravity destroys small body). It's the same process that gives Saturn it's rings.

Now, the moon is a big body for the Earth to destroy and turn into a ring system. It would've taken thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands, to break down all the moons pieces. He goes 800,000 years into the future, and when he does, the moon is somehow flung back out to a stable orbit (this is unexplained in the movie). My best guess is that it had a near collision with the Earth (killing billions, most likely) but was going fast enough that it could be thrown back out. Far fetched, but it's the reachable conclusion. As far as we know, the Eloi and Morlocks were the Earth's only survivors. We have no idea how the oceans look, or even other continents. It could've been really catastrophic.

[–] hipkat333 10 years ago

How could something so big and made of cheese hold such an effect on our planet? Totally unreal.

[–] Madness20 9 years ago

Is there even a credible astrophysics expert source saying this would be completelly unrealistic?

From what i can get from the movie, on 2030 they where using nukes to open underground chambers that would be enough to even affect the moons gravity itself(and as the publicity said, you'd even be able to "dance easier with the lower gravity"), so all in all, it was massive underground explosions that were meant to desintegrate chunks of the very mantle within it. It appears that the explosions actually cracked the crust appart and the moon was partly blown into pieces, and since the centre of mass shifted quite a lot, the moon feel out of it's own orbit and part of it fell on earth, which seems a very decent explanation to what has happened, and not really that unrealistic.

On our very own solar system there's at least two belts of asteroids that for what is theorized, it's the remnants of ancient blown off planets that for the lack of a dominant gravity centre and the gravity from the sun and nearby planets, was never able to regroup into a new planet, and on this movie case, 800.000 years would still be very little time for a new smaller moon to reform in that interval.

So unless someone has a great explanation of how this kind of studied phenomena would be impossible to happen on our moon, i find it a rather good explanation for how the apocalypse came to happen that obliterated most of life on earth.

[–] wireless-phil 9 years ago

In the lst 10 to 15 years, someone had the idea tat we sould blow-up the moon.
Why I'm not sure but it was in the news back then.

Imagine what would happen if we did.

[–] veselinasenov 9 years ago

It appears you have not understood correctly. The Moon has not break up, because of our work there, it simply altered her orbit, making her cross the Lagrange Line, the point beyond which the tidal forces of two massive cosmic objects begin a titanic battle for domination of the space which now they both inhabit. One, usually the smaller one being utterly destroyed to pieces as happens with the Moon in that movie.