Vanished Moon!
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All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. C. C? Yeah. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Lulu here, Breaking News. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the moon...

has disappeared. Repeat, the moon has disappeared. What? Just kidding, April Fools. Is today April 1st? It is. Good morning, Alan.

I know. I can't resist a good prank, but rest assured the moon is actually there. It is still there. Tsk, tsk. It is still very there. But Alan, you did a story about what would happen if the moon disappeared. That is right. I did. You kind of reported out scientifically what would really happen here on Earth, and it is wild and fun and surprising. And so I thought in honor of pranks—

This day of pranks, April Fools, we could play that here today. But first, I do wonder, Alan, like, have you had any experience with April Fools pranks? Have you pulled any good ones? Have you been fooled? You seem pranky to me. Oh, the one that sticks out to me the most in my mind was when I was young and I had a package of...

Wow.

The one that I remember the most from childhood, my dad liked to prank us. And one year, one year he packed my lunch with dog food. And there was no other lunch. I just got to lunch. And I think there was an apple. I think it was like an apple and dog food. And I was like, all right, thanks, dad. You got me.

Anyway, so here is basically our radio version of wet dog food in your lunchbox, but hopefully much more pleasurable. And before we play it, I will say that we are getting really close to new terrestrials. We've got a spring batch that'll be coming out soon. New stories, new songs from this guy over here. All right.

And stick with us through the story because at the end, you're going to hear some special Alan songs that you've probably never heard before. Oh, nice. So, but yeah, in honor of April Fool's, here we go. I'm going to play this fun story that you brought to me and Latif Nasser at Radiolab. You had a, you know, you had a big question. Here we go.

Okay, so I guess to begin, Alan, you should tell Latif the highly intellectual place where this quandary was born. Right. It all started watching one of the Minions movies, Despicable Me.

Must have been with my niece and nephew, tuning in on the couch, probably half-scrolling Twitter or something like that. Sure, yeah. Anyhow... I have been working on something very big. The bad guy in the movie is named Gru, and for reasons that aren't really worth going into right now... We are going to steal! Pause for effect.

he steals the moon. He shrinks it down to the size of a grapefruit, pulls it right out of orbit. And in his moment of victory, floating up in space, holding the moon in his hands... I've got it! I've got the moon! The movie jump cuts back to Earth. You see this wave stop. And then there's this werewolf. He suddenly changes back into a human with no clothes on. Ha ha ha!

I mean, these just immediate and absurd consequences of the moon disappearing. Right, right, right. And while it's really just a short scene in the movie, it got me curious about, you know, like what would happen if the moon just disappeared.

Like what physically would happen? Right, right. Like down here on earth. Right. Which can I just say, I don't, would there be that much? Like I know the poets would be sad. I'd be sad to lose my object of evening contemplation. But besides maybe tides.

Does it have, like, does it do that much here? Well, I started searching around to see if anyone had thought about this, and I quickly found someone who was kind of the perfect person. Can you hear me? Hi. Hello. Hello, hello. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Hi.

Sorry. I got to stand so the baby falls asleep. And we're like right on the edge of nap time. So you might hear a few more whimpers, but I think we're set. So this is Mika McKinnon. I am a geophysicist with a master's in disasters, possibly the best degree title ever.

That he was masters in disaster. That's a real thing? Yes, yes. I did geophysics of catastrophic scale landslides. That's what I did my grad school in. Today, when she's not helping agencies like FEMA plan and prepare for disasters, you know, helping save lives. I am a science consultant in the entertainment industry. So I sit with directors and come up with interesting science to support their plot lines. Cool.

Tell me about it. So I put this question in front of her. What would happen if all of a sudden, just one day, the moon sort of disappeared? Yeah, so do we want to have a destroyed moon or a vanished moon? Why don't you tell us what would happen if it was destroyed first? Okay, so the moon got destroyed. Say we shot a cannonball at it or something like that. Suddenly we would have a whole bunch of meteorites crashing down on Earth, a whole bunch of impact events happening.

So, death, destruction, suffering, and misery. Immediately.

So destroyed, I actually think is less fun than the moon disappearing. Because I think the very, very first thing that would happen if the moon disappeared is confusion. Everyone would go, wait, what? But like in all languages? Yeah, simultaneously. Me quoi? Yeah. Okay. And I would think that there'd be a lot of instantaneous conspiracy theories about this too. Oh, for sure. Who did it? You did it. So the human aspect is just going to be a mess. But let's look at the...

Ignoring the people. We'll come back to that. Ignore the people. Ignore the people for a little. The moon has some major spheres of influence. So in the first place, tides. I mean, as you noted, Lulu, as the Earth rotates, the moon's gravity is actually tugging on it, sort of pulling the oceans in and out. All the time. It's like a little gravitational massage. Right.

And so take away the moon, the tides would be a lot smaller. By what percent? A lot. Like a 65 to 75 percent reduction. So suddenly your tidal range gets tiny and this would impact everything. And so if you were at the beach. Standing in the sand, she says, probably the first thing that you'd notice is it sounds eerily quiet. Yeah, it would be quieter. The waves calmer.

But as you walk closer towards the water, the stench would be eye watering. Looking at the water, it'd be full of dead crabs and fish. Because you know with the water moving less. Everything that is a filter feeder, like all the little barnacles and mussels and clams and all that are having less food show up.

And if all of your like clams and crabs and everyone start dying off, then everything that eats them dies off. Oh. Then everything that eats them dies off. And so you have an entire coastal system ecosystem food chain collapsed.

And for the animals that weren't immediately affected by the tides, the difference in the night sky would leave many of them just totally lost. Eels, jellyfish, others literally use the moon to navigate. And there are other species that actually use it to time their reproduction. Like the Great Coral Reef is one that's so precise. All the reef is like, all right, so sometime between October and November, we're going to pick a full moon. Then they wait a few days and then four hours after moonrise...

They all release their reproductive goodies. And so you have like these giant pink clouds that you can see from space. So you just start going like, okay, so if there's no moon, what happens with all of that? The eels would maybe be chasing their tails. The jellyfish bobbing toward the bottom. Coral reefs dead and vacant. Not good.

Yeah, but it sounds like all of this is watery stuff. I mean, don't discount the watery stuff. That's most of the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watery stuff is most of the planet. Fair, fair, fair. Good point. And as Mika points out, the water is going to affect the land. Again, because the tides aren't moving water, the warm water is going to be pooling out in the ocean. Concentrating and piling up all in one place. And because warmer water means harsher hurricanes. See, brooks collapse.

The hurricane season is going to start even earlier and last even longer. I mean, entire states might have to be evacuated. And as we move inland, we're going to be running into ecosystems in total flux. So let's look at the Serengeti and the wildebeest. Okay, great. Typically, on new moons when it's the darkest is when wildebeests are most vulnerable to their number one predator, lions. You know, the lions can sneak up on them more easily in the dark.

So, to protect themselves, the wildebeest stay packed together and don't eat or move much, holding tight, waiting for a brightly lit, moon-filled night. But if it's perpetual new moon... Perpetually moonless nights...

Well, eventually the wildebeest are going to have to come up with a new plan and they're herding animals. So they're all going to have to agree on a plan together to do something. They could travel, expose themselves and probably get eaten.

or stay hunkered down and quickly eat up everything around them. And weirdly, if they go that route, they're going to make themselves even more vulnerable because there'll be no foliage left for them or anyone else to hide behind. So the lions will be swarming them and they're going to be fighting back. Chaos on the Serengeti. Chaos on the Serengeti. Exactly. But...

This chaos on land, it might not be bad news for everybody. Take, for example, the badger. Badgers pee more. Wait, say that again? Badgers? Badgers urinate more. So badgers will pee better and more on new moons when it's darker and less on full moons when it's brighter. Are they a little shy?

So that's the joke, except for what it is, is they're peeing in order to mark territory, saying, hey, I'm ready to mate. And it takes badger parents a while to make a baby. So they want to be in darkness where they're less likely to be spotted and eaten. So they might actually do quite nicely without a moon. Yeah, yeah. Badgers. The badger population would explode. It just skyrockets. Okay, so maybe an earth with no moon means...

more badgers. And we will hear a few last surprising consequences of making the moon go bloop after this short break.

Radiolab for Kids is back. We are celebrating April Fool's Day by imagining a loony lunar prank of making the moon disappear. What would happen here on Earth if it did? We have learned that it would be real bad for a lot of creatures, sea creatures, land creatures, a lot of human creatures because there'd be more hurricanes and certain cities might need to get evacuated. And we have learned that it would be real bad for a lot of human creatures because there'd be more hurricanes and certain cities might need to get evacuated.

But returning to scientist Mika McKinnon. When you're asking about like who are the winners, who are the losers, one of the winners would be geophysicists. Why? Because we would finally be able to tell the difference between several theories that we've had that we're like, I can't really tell. Like what? Can you give us one? Yeah. So a perpetual question is whether or not the moon is responsible for the Earth's magnetic field. What? Okay.

So here on Earth, we've got the outer crust where we're all hanging out. Under that. We've got the mantle. Under that. We have the liquid outer core. And then there's the solid inner core. And this liquid core moving around this solid core, that's what generates our magnetic field. And the Earth's magnetic field, it's like our shield.

It's what protects us from all the nasty, nasty radiation of space. I mean, it literally deflects harmful particles that are bombarding us. And yeah, it's all thanks to that metal moving inside the Earth's core. So why is the metal moving inside the Earth? Why is the outer core moving?

Do they? Yeah, why? We don't know? Is it the moon? That's one of the ideas. Thinking goes that in the same way the moon's gravity pulls the water of the oceans. The gravitational massage is having that same impact to a smaller amplitude on the inside. Causing some of that metallic movement. And I mean, if this theory is right, well, then the Earth without a moon is really no Earth at all.

If we lost our magnetic field, I mean, it wouldn't happen right away. But if it started slowing down, if it started getting weaker, goodbye remaining life. Man, that is all of this is such a bigger effect than I would have ever fathomed. I'm kind of in awe.

I feel like the big takeaway from this is we don't want this scenario. This is not like a world that we want to live in. No, we don't want this. Without the moon up there, really just everything, there's going to be death. There's definitely going to be slow and confusing death. So I would like to keep the moon, please. Thank you, moon. Thank you, rock, for all that you do for us.

And thank you, Alan, for bringing us that gem. Yeah. Now, you didn't write a song for this story. No, no, no. But what people might not know is that when you're not making songs for terrestrials, you do make songs elsewhere. Yeah, that's right. One of those places is that you have a band called Little Skunks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kids music. I started making kids music because I really wanted to

be part of the lives of my nieces and my nephew that live far away from me. Oh, that's so cool. And Little Skunks, is it you solo or it's you and a friend?

It's primarily me and a few friends. My fantastic spouse, Alita, my good friend, Jordan, and my buddy, Travis, playing saxophone here and there. Oh, some sax. And just to give people a little sample of Little Skunks, I'm going to play my favorite song, a song that has been stuck in my head for, I don't know, three years straight. We'll hear a little bit of that one. That's totally cool. All right, good. Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, totally cool.

Totally cool, totally, totally cool Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome Totally cool, totally, totally cool Really, really, super duper Really, really, totally awesome Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome Totally cool, totally cool

So that's an awesome, awesome, awesome one. It's totally cool. Do you have a fave or one that would be fun to play from this album? Well, one that I really like is, it's called Pancakes. Pancakes. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Because I love to imagine it being stuck in your head while you're trying to make pancakes with the family. Okay, here we go. I'm going to play that one. Can I get some pancakes? They're moving. They're moving.

Can I get some pancakes?

You can almost hear the batter and the boom, boom, boom, boom. I love that. I love that so much. So yeah, Little Skunks, Alan, there's like 20 songs waiting there and people can find that on Spotify, Bandcamp, places like that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And yeah, it's just such a joy to hear you make things. I think you make many people smile and dance. Thanks, Lily. Just wanted people to know there's more out there. Yeah.

So, okay. Everyone, happy April Fool's Day. Pull a prank. Be pranked. Have fun. Be safe. Blow kisses to the moon. Happy April 1st. Happy April 1st. More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours and its moon in two weeks. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Mixing help?

from Ariane Wack. Special thanks to Rebecca Boyle, whose new book is Our Moon, How the Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. Also to Renee Weber, Paul M. Sutter, Matt Sigler, Sarah Noble, Chucky P., Sarah Stewart, and Patrick Leverone and Daryl Pitts at the Maine Gem and Mineral Museum in Bethel, Maine. Radiolab is supported by the Simons Foundation. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

Hey, I'm Liz Landau, and I'm from Washington, D.C. Here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes...

Thank you.

Sarah Sandbach, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hey, Alan. Hi.

teeth do coyotes have? Uh, I don't know. Well, do you know how high a coquifrog can jump? I don't even know what those are. Dang. What about, okay, camels? Do you know anything about camels? Not really, but that's what badger questions are for. Right.

One of our favorite segments of Terrestrials is where we all stop talking and the badgers, a.k.a. the kids with badgering questions, get to ask our experts everything they're dying to know. And we need some of those for our upcoming episodes. We're looking for questions about coyotes, rats, coquifrogs, camels, and farts. Farts.

Email us a voice recording of your question along with your name, age, location, and you just might hear your badgering voice on an upcoming episode of Terrestrials. And where can they send those, Alan? Terrestrials at WNYC.org. That's T-E-R-R-E-S-T-R-I-A-L-S at WNYC.org.