What If The Moon Came Closer and Couldn't Stop?

A warm evening on the beach of a little seaside town, and the Moon is coming up over the sea. Then it starts coming closer. It can't stop. The sea pulls away from the beach and the boats sit down on the sand. You walk out across the seabed after it, until the sea comes back. Up in the town the street lamps flicker out and the ground shakes. From the lighthouse on the headland the Moon fills the sky, and then it reaches the point where the Earth pulls it apart. What is real: the Moon is 384,400 km away and 3,475 km across, and every distance, every size at arm's length and every "N times harder" on screen is worked out for that second of the film. The pull on the sea is the tide-raising pull where you stand, against tonight's: at half the distance it is about 8 times stronger, and it grows faster and faster after that. TV satellites sit 35,786 km up, GPS satellites about 20,200 km, the space station about 420 km. The breaking point is the Roche limit: for a Moon held together by its own gravity, about 18,400 km from the Earth's centre, where the Earth pulls harder on its near side than on its far side by more than the Moon can hold itself together. Saturn may have got its rings exactly like this: a lost moon torn apart about 160 million years ago (Wisdom et al., Science, 2022). Shooting stars hit the air at 11 to 72 km a second, many times faster than any bullet. What is not real, or simplified: nothing can push the Moon toward us, and it would take days, not one evening. Real tides are far more complicated: they lag behind the Moon, slosh and depend on the shape of the coast. The Moon is lit a day or two from full so its craters show. How it breaks, how fast the ring spreads and how soon the pieces come down are shortened a great deal (really it would take days to years), and the very end is made up. You watched for nine minutes. In that time the Moon came more than twenty times closer, and broke. CHAPTERS 0:00 Six minutes from now 0:06 The beach 0:38 The sea leaves 1:14 The seabed 2:01 The face of the Moon 2:46 The sea comes back 3:34 The town 4:27 The satellites 5:10 The lighthouse 5:57 The breaking point 6:39 It breaks 7:29 The ring 8:20 ??? HASHTAGS #whatif #science #moon #space #tides