Deleting Originals to Clear Space on Hard Drive

Hello!
I am undertaking the endeavor of going through the 20,000 pictures I have stored on my MacBook/first external hard drive. I am deleting the unnecessary images and am planning on exporting the ones I want to keep to another external hard drive. My question is: once I've exported the images I want to keep, can I then delete the original images taking up space on my hard drive? If I have the export (JPG) but not the original file (RAW), will it show up as "image is missing" or cause some type of pathway problem? I'm hoping to keep this as streamlined as possible but also want to preserve the integrity of my images.
Thanks so much for any help you can offer!
Beka

Thank you all for your advice! You are probably confused because I'M confused - so thanks for bearing with me!
So, it sounds like deleting anything would be a bad solution. Jimtron, I think your second point ("If you want to keep images, but move them to a different drive, you can move them in Lightroom (which can be a little awkward, but that way you don't have to reset any paths). Or, if there are entire folders that you want to move to a separate drive, it shouldn't be a problem to move the folder to another drive, and then tell Lightroom where that folder now resides.") will be my best bet. My new questions are as follows:
I'll need to move entire folders to a separate drive. How do I tell Lightroom where that folder now resides?
I'm considering moving older editions of Lightroom (2 & 3) to a separate drive as well, and only keeping the current edition on my laptop hard drive. How do I navigate that without going crazy and making a mess of everything? Is there a good tutorial for how to do this so that I don't end up with all of my photos "missing"?
Once everything is moved and in order (and I regain my sanity), can I then do what Silkrooster advised and compress the original files so that they don't take up quite as much space?
Thank you in advance!
Beka (OP)

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Deleting Originals to Clear Space on Hard Drive

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