Lifeless Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about learn how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare. Hear on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast page.

One moon merely isn’t sufficient. Earth solely has one, whereas another planets have many – Jupiter has 95 moons, placing our single shining cosmic accomplice to disgrace. On this episode of Lifeless Planets Society, it’s time to mild up the night time sky with as many moons as doable.

But it surely isn’t as straightforward as simply chucking a bunch of rocks into orbit, so our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte are joined this episode by Sean Raymond on the College of Bordeaux in France for assist with the particulars. He suggests we might assemble a hoop of 10 moons orbiting Earth, every in a distinct section, inflicting unusual little eclipses as they march across the planet.

And it isn’t simply moons: in 2018, Raymond and Juna Kollmeier at Carnegie Observatories in California discovered it’s theoretically doable for Earth’s moon to have its personal orbiting satellite tv for pc, dubbed a moonmoon. Such a factor may not be secure due to gravitational anomalies current in our moon, so our hosts are including a gargantuan immersion blender to their cosmic toolbelt to clean issues out. As soon as issues are sorted, there might be moonmoons and even moonmoonmoons lighting up the night time sky.

The moon is vibrant as a result of it displays daylight, and these new moons might be the proper locations to place a collection of giant photo voltaic panels – unobstructed by the environment and clouds that plague Earth’s floor. They’d even be so vibrant it could most likely be unattainable to ever see the celebrities from Earth’s floor, however that’s a comparatively small element.

The larger drawback: the extra advanced and crowded the orbits get, the larger the danger of those moons and moonmoons smashing collectively. This might give our planet stunning rings like Saturn’s, nevertheless it might additionally destroy life on Earth.