ever since the chinese invented gunpowder in 1044 we've been in trouble ever since and you know
fireworks are cool nuclear warfare not so cool welcome back my friends today we're going to watch
more curtis act another nuke video as well you americans and nuking things obsessed with nukes
anyway before we get into it two things one uh kel vpn the alpha comes out next week
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keeping up to date with the latest in science and things like that anyway let's get into
today's video what if we nuke the moon people and their bombs they're obsessed with nukes
bloody americans just want to nuke everything no i do enjoy these what if videos particularly with
nukes they are fun um have you heard that christopher nolan's making a movie about
oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb that's going to be incredible the guy did interstellar
batman he's a legend um so i'm super excited about that maybe i'll have to make a video in the future
so you should subscribe if you want to see that but anyway let's watch this video i i don't think
i'm going to give my thoughts on what's going to happen here because i don't want to ruin
the surprise if you haven't seen this video because i think i know what's going to happen
so anyway let's watch what would happen if we were to detonate a very very powerful nuclear
weapon on the moon would the explosion knock its orbit towards earth causing
tidal waves and misery could the moon be destroyed showering the earth in a rain of meteoric death
during the cold war the moon was a major target for space exploration and you know military
bases so the u.s air force commissioned a serious study into the effects of a nuclear detonation on
the surface of the moon let me tell you a story that demonstrates just how crazy americans are so
in 1957 the soviet satellite sputnik successfully orbited earth right putting russia ahead so not to
be outdone the americans decided they're going to nuke the moon as you do the us believed right that
a lunar explosion visible from earth would basically showcase
american firepower and improve morale from home right but look would seeing a nuclear explosion in
the sky improve your peace of mind i don't know but i don't think that sounds like a great idea
but just quoting stuff is boring so let's conduct a very important scientific experiment with an
imaginary 100 megaton thermonuclear warhead about twice as powerful as the most powerful
bomb ever detonated we'll also place a number of curious astronauts around the moon as observers
let's push the button and slow down time that reminds me i was watching this show called uh
for all mankind an apple series it's actually really good it is incredible i've stopped watching
it because i couldn't i just kept watching it and it was you know ruining my productivity but i'll
come back to it soon i'm up to like season three it's really good guys you should check it out
series is all about like what if the soviet union actually landed on the moon first instead of us
and it goes on from there for the first few milliseconds nothing much happens outside our
weapon meanwhile inside high explosives send a shockwave to a radioactive metal core compressing
it so much that it reaches criticality and starts a nuclear fission chain reaction the 100 million
degree plasma created in this first stage sets off the second stage with atomic nuclei fusing
like they do in the core of a star very briefly our weapon contains one of the hottest places in
the universe and only now barely 10 milliseconds later does the rest of the universe find out that
anything has happened evolves and a flaming star of nuclear death is born so far so good
but everything that happens now is very different from what we're used to on earth because of one
major difference there's no atmosphere as the fireball shines it releases a flash of
x-rays and thermal photons a wave of silent heat which rushes outwards in all directions
on earth this heat would char and burn everything within a 50 kilometer radius at least
but on the moon without an atmosphere and oxygen and rich air there's no burning at all also there
are no things to burn the crunchy topsoil of the moon is made from silicate rock and metals chewed
to dust by eons of meteorite impacts mixed with tiny traces of water when heated by the explosion
x-rays from the fireball vaporize a thin cloud of rock from the lunar surface while the unlucky
dust that's inside the fireball melts into glass any astronauts watching the show within about 50
kilometers can expect to be fried and now we begin to see one of the biggest differences between
explosions in space and on earth on earth the atmosphere fights back against the plasma bubble
its expansion is violently stopped within moments by the pressure of the atmosphere
but this is not good news as the fireball rams the atmosphere it produces the most destructive part
of a nuclear explosion on earth the shockwave compressed air around the explosion rushes
out faster than the speed of sound shattering buildings and roaring so loud it ruptures organs
but on the moon there is no shock wave no atmosphere means nothing to impede the expanding
explosion in space on the moon the fireball just grows in airy silence as there's no atmosphere
to stop it or to give it a voice this would be an amazing thing to watch from a safe distance
unfortunately there's hardly any safe viewing distance for a nuclear explosion on the moon
without an atmosphere weakening the deadly ionizing radiation that can scramble dna
anyone close enough to get a good look will be exposed to fatal amounts of radiation
but of course that's not all while all of this happens the explosion hammers against the moon
transferring about a tenth of the explosion energy into seismic waves powering an intense
moonquake the moon some fun little facts but the moon is actually shrinking inside which is causing
like quakes on the outer crust um it's kind of it's kind of like a grape wrinkly into a raisin
so yeah the moon i think it's like 50 meters skinnier over the last several million years as
are the the core cools it is much smaller than the earth and our astronauts will feel an inescapable
violent shaking no matter where they're standing comparable to an earthquake of seven on the race
to scale this shaking could seriously damage or even level infrastructure we might have built
anywhere on the moon those who hid on the far side of the moon would have no idea it was an
explosion the quaking would feel like an asteroid the size of the great pyramid had struck and it's
not over yet where our bomb explodes the ground splatters like water when a rock strikes a pond
as the explosion pushes against the surface it may excavate as much as a hundred million cubic meters
of dust and rock forming a crater a kilometer across while bedrock is pulverized to rubble
debris is shot into the sky in every direction again without an atmosphere there's no drag to
slow any of it down much of the debris scattered never returns to the moon flying off faster than
escape velocity a flurry of micro meteorites have been cast off to explore the solar system
many of which will rain down on the earth though few will be larger than pebbles any satellite
astronaut or space station in the way though will have a really bad time micrometeorites
are launched at many speeds and angles allowing them to spread all over the surface of the moon
like bullets they'll punch through our curious astronauts no matter where they stand finally
our explosion comes to an end on earth the fireball rises like a hot air balloon forming a
sort of stalk as it reaches up cooler air is drawn around it rounding the top into a mushroom cloud
but on the moon well you know by now no atmosphere no mushroom the larger the plasma gets the cooler
it becomes and the less energy it has to make interesting or terrifying things happen within
seconds of putting the trigger the bubble reddens and fades from view it would be visible from the
earth like a star flickering to life only to fade out right away a spark and then nothing
as the cloud of tiny debris reaches far above the surface of the moon it's illuminated by
the sun for a few minutes giving it an eerie beauty for anyone left to observe the spectacle
what about the moon's orbit it's basically unchanged trying to move the moon with a
nuke is like trying to move a truck by blowing on it nuclear explosions may be big but space
is bigger the united states actually did a study in the late 1950s
uh and considered this exact thing they pretty much found out that standard atomic bomb would
only create like a microscopic explosion on the moon surface and they even considered whether or
not it was even possible to blast the moon out of all that causing you know a bad time for earth so
what they worked out was their study the military study would take somewhere in the range of
10 billion and 10 trillion megatons of tnt to cause it to leave its orbit if we detonated every
single nuclear bomb on our planet we'd still only generate 7 000 megatons so if you're worried about
the moon living earth you should probably know that it's already kind of edging away
at a very slow rate um but it is in the long run it actually will come closer to earth and uh
earth will probably rip it apart so to move the moon out of its orbit we'd need to strike it in
precisely the right spot right with a force like 1.5 million times greater than our like collective
nuclear arsenal and that's assuming every joule of energy from the warheads would be transferred
to the moon's motion which is like an absolute impossibility our mighty explosion just leaves
another crater one among millions still anyone on the moon will continue to not enjoy themselves
the material that ends up raining back to the moon is radioactive and without any natural processes
to wash it away or bury it the surface of the moon will remain contaminated although fortunately the
worst of the radiation will have decayed to a level comparable to natural levels from cosmic
rays in about a year in conclusion we can say with confidence that while the moon itself does not
care about being mute and will barely notice using the moon as a nuclear test ground kind of ruins it
for everyone trying to spend some time there or to build something useful so maybe we should just
not do that so a nuclear weapon exploding on the moon let's assume it's bizarre bomber uh
the 220 hydrogen bomb the most powerful nuclear
bomb ever exploded the energy released by this is like 217 peter joules which
that's enough energy for roughly 5.5 million households for an entire year
so back to the moon so we know the moon is frequently hit by astros right so in order to
ask like this effect of the bomb let's check how big the asteroid has to be
to produce the same energy released so we know the formula for kinetic energy we go
to wikipedia so we can assume speed of impact it can be anything from like 25 and 70 kilometers per
second and then we can solve for mass so a modest speed of 30 kilometers per second i guess there's
probably more slower rocks than past ones so by solving the equation you can come to some pretty
staggering numbers the rock that would deliver the same impact would have to weigh about 483
000 tons so if you put that into perspective it's about the weight of the burj khalifa the tallest
building in the in the world anyway so how big does this asteroid have to be so your typical
space rail can weigh between 1.2 tonne per cubic meter to 7 ton per cubic meter or more so for this
exercise three ton per cubic meter is probably a pretty good number so that results in a
volume of 161 000 cubic meters so since we're terrible at visualizing volume let's put it into
shape so if it comes in the shape of cube it'll have side 54.4 meters long not that big right so
if it was the shape of sphere it would have diameter of 67.5 meters
so with the size of asteroid you know we can check how many rocks like that are flying around
with the size of like 70 meters you fall in the less than 100 meter category right
and that size isn't even tracked to smaller care i guess so for reference uh there's about 25 million
asteroids bigger than 100 meters in diameter so so if the moon was hit by this asteroid
it would get a new crater like 1.3 kilometers in diameter so that would be like the 36 37 smallest
craters out of more than like 1440 recognized on the moon so would the moon's orbit change if all
the energy of the impact would be directed in the exact opposite current orbital tractor it would
cause the moon to slow down by like 2.9 nanometers per second that's several orders of magnitude
lower than what we currently measure in terms of moon's orbital speed so that means that over the
current orbital period the moon will travel about 6.8 millimeters less thus the orbital period will
be longer by zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero six seven s there might be one too many zeros
this was our last video of the year twelve 000. that was a great video i think the visuals in
this one maybe one of the best i've seen it was such a good story have you ever noticed how all
the craters on the moon around like look through a telescope or some images all the craters around
what the hell's going on there because like you'd assume if something hit it you're at an angle like
an asteroid or a comet surely it would like skid and leave like an oval shape right but they're
all round and so scientists used to actually think uh they were all calderas from volcanic
activity from volcanoes exploding right but we realized uh that what we saw a giant asteroid hit
jupiter's outer atmosphere should make a levy and it exploded which confused everyone because
uh you know it's a gas giant so why would an asteroid hitting the outer gas layer cause it
to explode and we realized what was happening is uh this this phenomenon some people like to call
kinetic death it's basically where you something has so much kinetic energy it's moving so fast
uh it has more kinetic energy than chemical energy holding it together it's kind of like when you
throw a snowball at the wall just explodes right now if you throw a snowball at the wall it leaves
a round imprint throw it at the wall like straight in front if you throw it at the wall on an angle
it actually also just leaves a round imprint as it explodes and this is what happens when
asteroids and comets hit the moon they explode because they're moving so fast
what's holding them together is is less than the kinetic energy and that just explodes on
impact like a snowball hitting the wall from any angle leaving a round crater fun little fact carl
sagan was actually on the team of 10 who did this the calculations for the study of the
nuke on the moon and uh he was actually the reason we even know about it because he accidentally
i don't know it was accidental disclosed the information about it the name of it uh
in an interview and then a writer who was doing carl sagan's biography noted that
and then it actually resulted in the head of that program to come somewhat clean on it and scarily
this was actually like technically feasible they had the means to do this thank you to kurz kazakh
and the team another great video i'll leave it there make sure you subscribe guys if you want to
see more of these because i'm going to be watching more first kazakh and i'll catch you next time