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What would happen if we had no moon?


Fatal

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Or our moon was suddenly destroyed? How would it effect us?

We would lose our tides hence the oceans would probably lose a significant amount of life. Most of this life would be plant life and therefor less oxygen. Migration patterns could be upset, nocturnal animals would slowly die and become fewer. The food chain would experience a major change. Plus most of it would rain down on our heads. We need the moon and with out it life on earth may have never started.

I love the moon.

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If i'm not mistaken, assuming the mass of the moon was removed from orbit and it was not simply broken up or something, it would affect the precession rate of the Earth. I find conflicting information on if this would make the AMOUNT of axial tilt change or just the speed at which the tilt precesses.

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If i'm not mistaken, assuming the mass of the moon was removed from orbit and it was not simply broken up or something, it would affect the precession rate of the Earth. I find conflicting information on if this would make the AMOUNT of axial tilt change or just the speed at which the tilt precesses.

tilt I believe would be up to 50 degrees and the speed of change would greatly increase.

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We would lose our tides hence the oceans would probably lose a significant amount of life. Most of this life would be plant life and therefor less oxygen. Migration patterns could be upset, nocturnal animals would slowly die and become fewer. The food chain would experience a major change. Plus most of it would rain down on our heads. We need the moon and with out it life on earth may have never started.

I love the moon.

our tides are also caused by the sun. We wouldn't lose them. since plants create 02 I don't see how we would have less of it.

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Wouldn't the Earth lose all rhythm? I mean this a very broad sense that includes predictable seasons, predictable rotation, rhythmic cycles and so on.

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I heard that the moon is going away from earth about 5 cm each year.

But sometimes the Moon is small and sometimes large.

It would be bad if we didn't have the moon :(

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I heard that the moon is going away from earth about 5 cm each year.

true. but that doesn't mean **** because by the time it moves far enough away to have an effect i doubt humans will be even living on this planet still, i'm assuming we would of used up all our resources by then and moved on to another planet

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It would be bad if we didn't have the moon :(

I think that statement is fair enough.

It would take some pretty sophisticated mathematics to figure the potential effects out, but, I will say this:

The premise here is the Moon being "suddenly destroyed".

That would not be a good day for most people on this planet in and of itself.

The Moon's fracture into countless large and small bodies would be cataclysmic in nature to life on this planet. We might find ourselves being orbited in wildly eccentric ellipses by very small and perhaps even humongous pieces of Moon the size of other moons in our solar system. The possible effects on precession, and the Earth's orbit around the sun are impossible to calculate simply given the possible variables that would exist in such a scenario.

Then, we may well see significant, and not so significant pieces of Moon going into orbits which would impact the planet. Odds of a life ending collision would not be low, I think.

If the Moon's mass were to somehow be wiped away, with no physical interference to the Earth being a factor, we'd still be in for a bad day.

Sure, the vast majority of tides would be eliminated, and the effects of that are well...actually irrelevant when one considers other effects that would follow.

The Earth -Moon system is a stable, co-orbiting one where in both bodies actually orbit around a barycenter which is actually located beneath the surface of the Earth. If this rotating stable system is suddenly stripped of its balance, the Earth will most definitely be affected. Not only will its precession be changed (since precession is influenced by gravitational attraction of the Sun and the Moon on the equatorial bulge of the Earth), but its rotational rate would likely change, and its orbit around the Sun would be affected, perhaps becoming a much more eccentric ellipse.

Someone has probably computed or modeled the potential effects of these things someplace....but I envision a potentially radical change in seasons, perhaps even becoming so great that orbital eccentricity might place the Earth in a situation so it became too cold for survival at one end of the orbit, and too hot at the other.

I don't know for sure.

However, I postulate that the potentials for the loss of the Moon could well be the end of life on this planet.

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No more werewovles? :whistle:

Nope... :(

None, nada, ziltch on the werewolves...in London, or anywhere else!

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No more werewovles? :whistle:

Nope, but there will still be vampires. I think... I don't think so..

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But sometimes the Moon is small and sometimes large.

Huh? :huh:

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I dunno ask MID...

Oh nevermind :D

;) ...

Don't mind me.

I actually hate overwhelming people with thoughts of doom....

But fear not, the beautiful, albeit lifeless and barren Moon shall be here for all the days of all the lives of everyone present on this board, and everyone else on the lovely planet Earth....for as far into the future as we can all imagine...

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Huh? :huh:

Ya got a point there...the Moon is always the same size in reality...always has been as far as I know....

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Ya got a point there...the Moon is always the same size in reality...always has been as far as I know....

I think they might have been refering to when the moon is low on the horizon it "appears" to be larger. I know there is a term for this but I can't recall what it is darn it.

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Ya got a point there...the Moon is always the same size in reality...always has been as far as I know....

I think he is talking about when we see the moon on it's outer elipse orbit and when it is on close in elipse orbit.

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I always wondered what the tidal effects would be like on an Earth-like planet with more than one moon.

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our tides are also caused by the sun. We wouldn't lose them. since plants create 02 I don't see how we would have less of it.

I would like to see just how much the sun effects our tides, to me it seems like it would be very minimal. With out tides a lot of the ocean plant life and microscopic life would decrease exponentially. Since the planet gets most of it oxygen from the ocean I would see this as a very big problem as CO2 would increase at an alarming rate.

Edit: use spell check lol

Edited by The Silver Thong
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I think they might have been refering to when the moon is low on the horizon it "appears" to be larger. I know there is a term for this but I can't recall what it is darn it.

Harvest moon?

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Ummmm If the earth didnt have a moon, the coral on the east coast of Australia (Great Barrier Reef) wouldnt polonate at that one particular time of the year and reproduce as It has evolved to, the race of coral would probably become exstince. Yeah! :innocent: Edited by xCrimsonx
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If i'm not mistaken, assuming the mass of the moon was removed from orbit and it was not simply broken up or something, it would affect the precession rate of the Earth. I find conflicting information on if this would make the AMOUNT of axial tilt change or just the speed at which the tilt precesses.

Yes indeed Torgo.

it is argued that the presence of the orbiting Moon has, through a large part of geological time, stabilised this axial tilt or obliquity of the Earth. This has had important ramifications for life on the Earth as major and frequent shifts in this obliquity would have led to significant and rapid changes in the Earth's climate due to changes in insolation values at the poles and equator. A similar mechanism has been suggested to explain the apparent contradictions in the climate record of Mars.

The current relatively moderate axial tilt of the Earth ensures that the difference in heating between the poles and equator is sufficient to promote a healthy and diverse range of climatic zones without veering from one extreme to another (e.g. Snowball Earth hypothesis). In particular the stability of the Earth's axial tilt produced by the Moon, coupled with the break up of the Pangean supercontinent in the late Mesozoic produced a diverse set of climate zones (with their associated ecological niches) compared with what had gone before during the time of the dinosaurs. This helped set the stage for the rise of the mammals, including Man.

I think they might have been refering to when the moon is low on the horizon it "appears" to be larger. I know there is a term for this but I can't recall what it is darn it.

Believe it or not, we've been arguing about this for two thousand years. irst of all, let me make it clear that the effect is an optical illusion. If you measure the moon with a ruler held at arm's length (a paper clip bent into the shape of a calipers will also work), you'll find it's always the same size no matter where it happens to be in the sky. If anything, the moon is slightly smaller at the horizon than it is at the zenith, mainly because it's 4,000 miles (the radius of the earth) farther away. (If you don't understand why this is so, draw yourself a picture.) Nonetheless, most people are convinced that, area-wise, the moon's at least twice as big when it's near the horizon as when it's overhead.

Numerous theories have been advanced to explain the ""moon illusion.'' At one point people thought it had something to do with the angle at which you hold your head and/or eyes while viewing, while others said it was caused by differences in the moon's brightness when seen at various locations in the sky.

Both ideas have long since been discredited. The fact is that the illusion is dependent entirely on the visual cues provided by the terrain when the moon is near the horizon, and the lack of such cues when it's at the zenith. To prove this, try viewing the moon through a cardboard tube or a hole punched in a sheet of paper to mask out the landscape--the illusion disappears.

What's now called the "apparent distance" theory was first advanced by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy in the second century AD (I told you this goes back a ways). His explanation is a little confusing, but here goes: most people subconsciously perceive the sky to be a flattened bowl--i.e., objects near the horizon seem farther away than objects overhead, due to the abundance of intervening visual cues on the ground. Now, when we see an image of a certain size at what we believe is a great distance, we deduce that it's bigger than an image of the same size seen at what seems to be a lesser distance. So when we see the moon at the "distant" horizon, we subconsciously conclude that that it's "bigger" than when we see it a few hours later overhead, when it's "close." To put it another way, perspective--i.e., the march of visual cues to the horizon--makes the the moon look bigger than it does when it's just hanging in space.

This explanation is OK as far as it goes, but it's even better if we combine it with one propounded by psychologist Frank Restle. Frank reasons thusly: you judge the size of something by comparing it to the size of things around it. If it's surrounded by big things, it seems little. If it's surrounded by little things, it seems big. When the moon is overhead you judge its size against the vast expanse of the night sky (the stars are too small and faint to make any difference). When the moon is close to the horizon, on the other hand, it's usually bigger than many nearby objects (trees, houses, waves on the ocean). In addition, just after moonrise (when the illusion is most compelling), the moon's apparent diameter exceeds the distance from the moon to the horizon. Add in the effect of prespective, and the moon looks huge. That's all there is to it.

Other people blame the atmosphere, due to a "magnifying" effect. This is NOT the case, and is only believed by misinformed people. The "magnifying" effect you refer to is called refraction. It accounts for the fact that the sun, and less often the moon, appears distorted (i.e., vertically elongated, or pear shaped) just at the point of rising or setting. The elongation lasts only a few minutes, and is not what people are talking about when they say the moon looks bigger when it's low in the sky. The so-called moon illusion persists even when the moon is a couple of degrees of arc above the horizon.

The illusion is entirely psychological in origin. The actual size of the moon's image doesn't decrease as it rises in the sky; you only think it does. To prove this, get at several points during the night and try the paper-clip caliper test described earlier to measure the size of the moon's image as it sinks towards the horizon. The illusion disappears as soon as you hold up the paper clip.

Cheers. :tu:

Edited by Alex01
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