The moon, you and a little red button

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Originally posted by: Qriz
Haha a "yottaton" is simply 10^24 of SOMETHING. What do you mean by this? 39 yottatons of...what? Granite? TNT? Chamomile tea? Did you just learn the word or something?

For example, 1000 yottatons of marshmallow probably wouldn't put the moon out of orbit. But that would be pretty funny. It depends on density, velocity, etc etc etc.

EDIT: 1000 yottatons of marshmallow could put it out of orbit, but probably not (hence my addition of the word "probably."

yotta means 10^24 of something.
the something is tons

Sorta like a yottameter would be 10^24 meters
A yottagram would be 10^24 grams

And, a yottaton would be 10^24 tons. Although, I don't know what kind of tons
Also, once you're at that scale, units of weight don't make much sense. (i.e. "what's the weight of the Earth?" really doesn't make sense)

I really hope you guys realize that the *tons thing is about explosive yeild, meaning a kiloton bomb blows up with as much force as a thousand tons of TNT would. This method of measurement goes back to the first nukes, simply because they blew up bigger than anything we'd seen before so we needed some way to measure the force.

 

[Ruptga]

It's far more likely that we'd propel the moon with a bunch of relatively small explosions instead of one ridiculously large boom, just because it's more efficient that way.
It's meant for ships, not planets, but something like an Orion engine should do the trick, look up Project Orion (Nuclear Propulsion) on Wikipedia. On the large scale, we could literally move city-ships with one of those, it'd have to work for a moon too, even if it would take forever.