What If the Moon Started Falling Toward You?

At 3 a.m. the Moon stops moving sideways. Nothing hits it. It just stops. And with nothing left to make it miss us, it starts to fall. You watch the whole thing from one small seaside town. For three days it looks exactly the same. Then your tide app is wrong, the sea is in your car, the ground starts to crack, and on the last night your neighbour Rosa's dad can't walk fast enough to get uphill. You have 4 days and 19 hours. Where would you watch it from? Tell us in the comments. 0:00 Twenty minutes before impact 0:18 Night 1: it stops 1:45 Day 2 2:12 Night 3: the sea notices 3:10 Night 4: everyone can tell 4:34 The sum 5:43 The last moonrise 7:31 Impact, and the truth What's real: every number on screen is real physics. A Moon that stopped dead in its orbit would fall straight in, in 4 days 19 hours 36 minutes, arriving at about 9.9 km/s. Its pull on the oceans grows with the cube of how close it gets: half the distance, 8 times the tides. The solid ground has tides too (about 30 cm a day today). Earth's pull would start tearing it apart at about 18,000 km (the Roche limit). And the real Moon is actually drifting AWAY from us, about 3.8 cm a year, roughly as fast as your fingernails grow. What's invented: the Moon stopping (nothing could do it), the town, and Rosa. Music: original score. Sound: Freesound (CC0). #whatif #moon #space