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In the 2003 Jim Carrey movie "Bruce Almighty," Carrey's character suddenly acquires God-like powers, and uses those powers to lasso the full moon and pull it closer to Earth to woo his beloved. Later in the movie, background shots show TV news reports about massive, unprecedented flooding around the world.
While the film is obviously fantastical, it does raise a question: What would happen if the moon were twice as close to Earth than it is today?
Article continues here: What would happen if the moon were twice as close to Earth?
Does anyone believe it to be true?
originally posted by: ElGoobero
Doctor Fu Manchu
was from West China
had all sorts of exotic / hidden knowledge and substances
relic from Tartaria?
I live in western Australia and grew up in the city of Perth in the sixties.
I think there was a mad nutter on "Reddit" a few years back that disputed the existence of Australia, says you are all actors.
Of course Australia exists. The proof of that is outside my front door. If you're visiting, be sure to turn left at Madagascar and left again at Tazmania.
Fair warning though, the eastern states are all convict colonies, the west is the where the gentlemen stettled.
Pay no attention to that newspaper, they're just cranky because it was popular as toilet paper during the covid crisis.
But there's an obvious answer: we're alone. It's just us. There could be a trillion planets in the galaxy. Is it plausible we're the only creatures capable of contemplating this question? Well, yes, because in this context, we don't know whether a trillion is a big number. In 2000, Peter Ward and Don Brownlee proposed the Rare Earth idea. Remember those four barriers that people use to estimate the number of civilizations? Ward and Brownlee said there might be more.
Let's look at one possible barrier. It's a recent suggestion by David Waltham, a geophysicist. This is my very simplified version of Dave's much more sophisticated argument.
We are able to be here now because Earth's previous inhabitants enjoyed four billion years of good weather -- ups and downs but more or less clement. But long-term climate stability is strange, if only because astronomical influences can push a planet towards freezing or frying.
There's a hint our moon has helped, and that's interesting because the prevailing theory is that the moon came into being when Theia, a body the size of Mars, crashed into a newly formed Earth.
The outcome of that crash could have been a quite different Earth-Moon system. We ended up with a large moon and that permitted Earth to have both a stable axial tilt and a slow rotation rate. Both factors influence climate and the suggestion is that they've helped moderate climate change.
Great for us, right? But Waltham showed that if the moon were just a few miles bigger, things would be different. Earth's spin axis would now wander chaotically. There'd be episodes of rapid climate change -- not good for complex life. The moon is just the right size: big but not too big. A "Goldilocks" moon around a "Goldilocks" planet -- a barrier perhaps.
Source: Talk transcript