UKC

Driving along the coast today and watching the waves and the tide going out. Just made mew think about the moon. What would life be like without the moon; if there was no moon at all? Obviously there would be no tides or beautiful moonlit nights.

Would there be any other ways that it would affect Earth and our lives on it?

In reply to FesteringSore:

What would The Moon (E3 5c) have been called?

In reply to FesteringSore:

This is an interesting read:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Moon-Didnt-Exist-Voyages-x/dp/1475930941/ref=s...

A surprising number of things we take for granted depend upon it.

In reply to FesteringSore: Would there be any other ways that it would affect Earth and our lives on it?

one less conspiracy theory and no clangers

In reply to FesteringSore:

werewolves would be extinct

In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

If the powers that be stopped faking the existence of a moon then there would be two fewer conspiracy theories.

Perhaps we wouldn't have any lunatics. What would we say instead of "...once in a blue moon..."?

Come to think of it, we wouldn't have months would we?

In reply to FesteringSore:

The froggies wouldn't have got upset by a scruffy brit climbing all their hard routes and then really taking the piss out of them with his route names...

Lots of pubs would have different names!

In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

one less conspiracy theory and no clangers

The Clangers don't live on/in The Moon!

In reply to FesteringSore:

Wallace and gromit would run out of cheese

In reply to FesteringSore:

You wouldn't know who Neil and Buzz are. Mike's fame would be pretty much the same.

No Moonshine

In reply to FesteringSore:

Sea cliff climbing would be a lot less interesting

In reply to FactorXXX:

The Clangers don't live on/in The Moon!

Better make that two less conspiracy theories

In reply to FesteringSore:

No moon would blow this theory out of the water of why the dinosaurs became extinct (number 15):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

In reply to FesteringSore:

Every Preston Guild?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

And what would the cow have jumped over?

Would Patrick Moore still have worn his monocle?

In reply to FesteringSore:

Bugger

This thread has just reminded me that I forgot to get at 4.30am on Tuesday to see the Mars, Jupiter, Venus planet alignment that isn't coming round again for ages.

bugger bugger bugger

In reply to FesteringSore:

Well some theories would have that without the tidal stirring, there wouldn't be any life at all.

In reply to FesteringSore:

The sun also makes a small contribution to the tides, so there would still be some tides, but smaller (not sure what size though).

In reply to FesteringSore:


Had you been on the wacky backy?

In reply to Mark Kemball:


I think it's quite small - an inconclusive Google suggests that it has about 3% of the Moon's effect. But there's another more important influence on the tides, that would still exist if the Moon weren't there, and that's the rotational force of the Earth.

I've always heard that one of the most useful things the Moon does is stabilise the 'wobble' of the Earth's axis - without it, there would almost certainly be extreme weather and climatic variations, and other cataclysmic effects.

In reply to Babika:

And shitpissf*ck! Me too!

In reply to FesteringSore:

No Moon - no Betty and Dennis. We'd have had to have used the Royal Oak instead I suppose...

In reply to FesteringSore:

The days would be much shorter and we'd have more of them in a year.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I don't think so. The rotating earth would certainly cause the oceans to 'bulge' towards the equator, but everything - land and seas - would be rotating at the same rate, so there'd be no tidal effects.

In reply to FesteringSore:

Plate tectonics would have been very different, perhaps enough to prevent mountain - indeed land - raising. Splish splash splosh.

Ignoring that, perhaps we'd have raced to Mars 50 years ago, not the moon, and wouldn't have to listen to all the "experts" saying how it's a bad idea because people might die. It was almost within the reams of the possible at moon race spending levels... Perhaps if the space race had continued into the 80s...

In reply to FesteringSore:

We'd have never seen an eclipse

In reply to FesteringSore:

And our vision would have developed differently

In reply to FesteringSore:

The act Bending over ,and bearing ones big white arse would have to be given a new name.

NASA would need to find another flung planet .and pretend they landed on it.

The Sun .perhaps

In reply to FesteringSore:



There would be tides.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:
"If we did not have a Moon there would be no lunar tides. (We would still have tides caused by the sun, but these would only be about 1/3 as great as the current tides.) "

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/37-our-solar-system/the-m...

Looks legit? and says 1/3rd the size.

We'd have no neaps and springs though.


But without any Moon at all, our tide patterns would be much simpler, and only the Sun would contribute anything substantial. So our tides would only be about 40% as large as a typical tide is today.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/08/08/the-top-5-things-wed-mis...

So 30-40% seems likely from those 2 sources, still considerable for much of the world, especially the UK.

In reply to Babika:



It was still pretty cool last night and will be for a few more days.

It says that the Sun has mass 27 million times that of the moon but is 400 times further away. By my calculation this means the sun's gravity on earth is getting on for being about 200 times stronger than the moon's. So why is the sun's tidal effect so much weaker? I do know the answer by the way! The (400) cubed bit in the article is connected nicely with it.

The earth's rotation does not effect the actual tidal forces, but it does introduce a lot of lag into the system, so that it is much more complicated than simply having high tides facing and opposite the moon.

In reply to Robert Durran:

The inverse-square law.

In reply to Shani:
He's accounted for that: 27 million ish divided by 400 squared = getting on for about 200.

In reply to FesteringSore:

There's be one less character on the Mighty Boosh

In reply to Shani:
Here's a clue, btw: it isn't about the strength of the gravitational field so much as it is about it's gradient - ie not so much about how strong the Sun or Moon's 'pull' on the Earth is as how much it varies from one part of the Earth to another.

In answer to the OP:


Our lives on Earth are the culmination of such a long and staggeringly unlikely series of events that you can imagine all sorts of ways the Earth could have been different, but you can't really imagine such a significant change so far back in the Earth's history resulting in a world with us living on it. (Or any creature capable of wondering about such things. Or, perhaps, any creature at all.)

In reply to Robert Durran:

Only had the three coffees so far so might not remember correctly

The Force is GmM / r^2 (thus proving that the Force is more complicated than the Meaning Of Life)

So while the sun has greater mass the distance plays a big part.
If I still smoked I'd scribble something on the back of a fag packet.

In reply to Roadrunner5:

Would we be able to see the sea in Southport?

In reply to Stu Tyrrell:


Not from here

In reply to deepsoup:


Such a weird statement this, but we hear similar the whole time. Sheer milk of the modern gospel of the 'meaningless universe'. So God-like in its 'religious' certainty! Where does this 'unlikely' thing come from in your mind, if not from some kind of (religious) belief? It's certainly not scientific. For if we say (v roughly, for sake of argument) there are c 500 billion stars in our galaxy and then that there are c. 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, then, even if the chances of another Earth-like planet were only one in 500 billion, there would be 500 billion Earth-like planets in the universe. If the chances were a bit better than that, there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. I don't know how many times I've repeated this exact same argument on here over the last two decades, but it seems to me to be worth repeating.

I just do wish people would stop trotting out this conviction, from an utterly groundless, 'pseudo-Godly' perspective, of how 'unlikely' this all is.

In reply to FesteringSore:


Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit might be called Mars Unit or Sun Unit [or maybe Jennifer].

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

What the hell are you on about Gordon?

Not for the first time, it looks like you haven't understood the post you're replying to.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

We don't yet know whether life is likely or unlikely. If all it requires is a planet at about the right temperature, with a few of the right flavour atoms around, then it might be quite likely, as you say. But at the moment, we don't know how atoms arranged themselves into the first information-carrying, self-replicating units. Until we know a bit more about that, we're not qualified to see the advent of life as either totally extraordinary, nor as run-of-the-mill.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

All but one of those are irrelevant, the subject of this thread is just the one specific Earth-like planet.

And what I'm describing as staggeringly unlikely is first that there was the advent of life (which as Jon points out may be totally extraordinary or very run of the mill, we have no idea) but also that some billions of years after that event, after an immensely long and complex process of evolution and extinction there arose large numbers of a very particular kind of argumentative ape, recognisably "us".

Go back in time and make a much, much smaller change than the absence of the Moon. Let's say a mere 66 million years ago that the Chicxulub Asteroid missed. Would we be here now? Not bloody likely. Call me "religious" if you like.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Yes, your stance here is probably the safest of all. Where we are agreed is that we just don't know (i.e we haven't the means of knowing); what we can't say at all safely is that it is 'very unlikely' or even, 'unlikely'.

In reply to deepsoup:


It's only unlikely if we insist that the purely 'dice-throwing' picture is the correct one. We don't know this at all. And there seems to be quite a logical tension between the idea that it could be both 'very run of the mill' and 'staggeringly unlikely' at the same time.


[[I still love Professor Wheeler's famous, esoteric comment that 'a human being is an atom's way of looking at itself.']]


But wouldn't those collisions or near misses be quite likely either way, given the statistics I mentioned earlier? With, presumably, near misses millions of times more likely than collisions?

And, don't we have to be a bit careful in thinking that the old, essentially sterile, dice-throwing picture is correct? An idea that's already been undermined in quite a few ways by quantum physics. [Late at night - sterile isn't quite the word I'm looking for ] There could be 'other things' going on that we don't understand yet, and we can't even rule out the idea that the universe may be 'purposive' in a Kantian sense.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


It seems all one can call it is very fortunate, or remarkable, that we exist and have consciousness too, enough to comprehend it to the level where we can think about how we have come to be here.

In reply to deepsoup:

Signing off now, but one final comment: wouldn't it be the most wonderful joke of all time if eventually science were to discover that the universe does have a discernible 'meaning' after all? How incredibly embarrassing that would be for all the dogmatists who have simply ruled out the possibility.

In reply to Timmd:

Yes, absolutely wonderful and remarkable. It makes us a very privileged animal. Something Einstein was fascinated by: that we can indeed look at ourselves, and our 'world' (in a philosophical sense) in this way. I'm sure it was he who made the point that what is so fascinating is not how little we can know but how much we can know, or words to that effect.

It is interesting thread. When i read it i start thinking. The moon has slowed the earth’s rotation. As it slows gravity wants to pull the earth back to a sphere, which it is not now because the rotation makes the planet wider at the equator than at the poles. The is the origin of tectonic plates, of the rise of the dry land. With no moon, there would be no earthquakes, probably no volcanoes, no dry land. Also there would be no magnetosphere and so any atmosphere would have been blown away by the solar wind.

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In reply to Robert Durran:

The tides due to the sun or moon arise from the gradient of their respective gravitational fields rather than from their absolute values. Think of three points on the earth in a line pointing to the moon: the oceans on the near side to the moon, the centre of the earth and the oceans on the far side from the moon. All are accelerating towards the moon with an acceleration proportional to the local gravitational field strength due to the moon. Since this is strongest for the oceans facing the moon, they pull away from the solid earth (which also distorts, but not so much) which in turn pulls away from the oceans on the far side. This gives two bulges of water. Meanwhile, the earth is spinning on its axis and we get the two tides a day thing.

The same effect is happening due to the gradient in the gravitational field due to the sun, sometimes pulling the same way (spring tides) sometimes not..

The actual field strengths at the earth are proportional to (m/r^2, where m is the mass of the sun or moon, and r is the earth-moon or earth-sun distance. Hence the gradient of the respective fields is proportional to m/r^3. Using the ratios you give for the mass of the sun to that of the moon, and the earth-sun distance to the earth-moon distance, we get that the gradient of the suns gravitational field, at the earth, is 27,000,000/(400^3) = 0.4 times that of the moon's field. Hence we would expect the tides due to the sun to be comparable to, but weaker than those due to moon.

They must be comparable in size or there would be no significant difference between neap and spring tides.

Real tides are more complex because of all sorts of other factors, but that's the gist of the sun-moon thing, I think.

In reply to FesteringSore:

The Who would sound awful

In reply to mbh:

Yes, it's a pretty cool mechanism. I hadn't thought of differentiating the inverse square until I wondered where the reference to (400)^3 came from in the article referenced earlier in the thread.

Some people find this explanation hard to stomach because the earth is not actually falling towards the moon even though it is accelerating towards it, which is quite subtle! Another way to look at it is to use the fact that a higher speed is needed to maintain an orbit of smaller radius, So the oceans on the moonward side of the earth are not going quite fast enough to to maintain their orbit and so tend to fall towards the moon. The opposite for the oceans opposite the moon which are being dragged round too fast and so tend to fly off into space. I find this explanation more intuitive!

This has just got me wondering: if the earth's rotation was locked so that the same side always faced the moon (like the moon is), how big would the permanent high tides be?

Tidal forces are gravitational in origin, so are proportional to mass, so all objects should have equal tidal acceleration. Therefore, if water is significantly affected, so should all objects and everything should tend to float off into the air at high tide. The same side of the moon faces earth all the time, so will have a permanent high tide, so the moondust should just float off into space! Clearly there is a flaw in my reasoning here! Lay awake for quite some time last night (under the stars and moon at Joshua Tree ) until I had resolved this and worked out what is really going on - why the oceans have tides but dust doesn't.

Another thought. There are presumably atmospheric tides. Are these significant enough to make it worthwhile timing your high altitude summit bid with a big one to get a thicker atmosphere?

In reply to Robert Durran:


What is really going on? Water tension?

In reply to Removed UserBwox:

We define tides as the motion of water relative to the earth. In fact, the earth as a whole does have tides, but we don't notice them. If you asked a duck floating in mid ocean whether the sea had tides it would probably say no.

A longer answer would be that tides are actually forced waves. The amplitude of oceanic tides depends largely on the fact that we have the southern ocean which allows an uninterrupted wave with a period close to the forcing frequency to move freely around the earth. This in turn propagates into the oceanic basins (the reason why our spring tides, in the UK, occur two days after full moon). The natural period of the earth as a whole is quite different to the frequency of forcing which is why earth tides have a lower amplitude than oceanic tides.

In reply to MarkJH:

It would probably say "quack"

In reply to GrahamD:


Hmm perhaps. Worth conducting the experiment anyway; does anyone have a boat?

In reply to Babika:

I was quite annoyed at the dog barking and waking me up that morning, but less so when I realised.

In reply to Removed UserBwox:


The extra gravitational field from the moon can effectively be added to the earth's field so that on the side of the earth facing the moon 'vertically downward' is effectively slightly more towards the moon. The water simply flows 'downhill' under its own weight and pressure. So fluids have tides but dust doesn't (it would need a far, far bigger tidal effect to make a pile of dust slide 'downhill').

In reply to marsbar:

Venus still very close to Mars and Jupiter not far above. Moon rising about same time as Jupiter Friday and Venus Saturday. Could be good.