What If the Moon Disappeared Tonight?

What if the Moon just… vanished tonight? No explosion, no crash — it's simply gone. Nobody gets hurt. But the Moon has been quietly running a surprising number of things on Earth, and some of them would break immediately. In this video: darker nights and hungrier lions, beetles that navigate by moonlight, tides that shrink and go flat, corals that lose their clock, the end of eclipses forever — and the slow, scary one: Earth's wobbling tilt. 0:00 Poof 0:46 The darkest night 2:02 Tides 3:04 Things that secretly ran on the Moon 4:04 What stays the same 4:41 The brakes 5:38 The wobble 7:15 What's left Sources: Lion attacks & moon phase — Packer et al., PLoS ONE (2011) Dung beetles & polarized moonlight — Dacke et al., Nature (2003) Coral spawning & moonlight — Kaniewska et al., eLife (2015) Stabilization of Earth's obliquity by the Moon — Laskar et al., Nature (1993) Obliquity of a moonless Earth — Lissauer, Barnes & Chambers, Icarus (2012) Lunar Laser Ranging — NASA What if? Let's find out. Subscribe for more oddly possible questions. #WhatIf #Moon #Space