Recently I’ve streamed The Universe by the History Channel on my Wii (thank you Netflix). One of the episodes I just finished watching was about our moon. As someone who literally has built new worlds as backgrounds for some of my SciFi novels, I knew the moon was important but didn’t realize how important it was until this program.

If we never had our moon:

Earth’s molten iron core would be much smaller and would probably already have solidified like Mars’s has. What does this mean? Life would probably exist only deep within the oceas since no magnetic field would be around to protect us from radiation. Also, our continents would be fairly flat given that there’d be no plate tectonics giving us mountains.

Our day would be much shorter. By orbiting us, the moon actually slows the Earth’s rotation, lengthening our days.

Earth would still have tides twice a day but they would be the same height each time. In other words, no tide pools were life diversified (in theory) and crept on the land (if it weren’t irradiated as soon as it stepped out of the water).

Our planet would wobble significantly more than it does now. We’re talking 15 to 75 degrees over a course of a million years. Tropics in Year One would be the frozen poles in Year One Million and vice versa.

Then there’re the dark nights, without the moon to reflect light back at us and the superfast winds (not to mention wild hurricanes and tornados that lasted for  months).

Not really focused on in the show was the number of hits from meteors, asteroids etc that the moon has prevented from reaching Earth or deflected away because of its gravitational pull.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few important contributions our lunar lovely has given us. But that just gives you motivation to check it out yourself:-)