Did you ever stop and wonder what the world would be like if there was no moon? First of all, you might as well stop wondering because if there was no moon, you wouldn't be around to ponder its absence.

First of all the moon is what keeps our planet's tilt and rotation in it's slightly over 23 degree tilt and 24 hour day. Without the moon we are talking about wild 90 degree varying tilts and days that could be be just 4 hours long! This means that seasons would be way out of control and with polar ice caps melting and re-freezing, you might as well forget living on any kind of land even remotely near an ocean. Speaking of the ocean, you know those tides that control so much of this planet's ecosystem? Yeah you can kiss those goodbye too. And lets not forget that any extraterrestrial object soaring towards our planet now has absolutely no chance of being pulled off course by the moon's gravity.

So basically in a nut shell, without the moon I wouldn't be writing this Blog and you wouldn't be reading it. Also you wouldn't have such a beautiful site in the night sky. The moon however is retreating from our happy home at a little more than an inch per year, but I figure by the time it is far enough away to create such a chaotic world, there won't be anyone left here anyway, or we would have at least figured out a way to keep the moon nearby with some really really big jets!

So actually it's no surprise that we see the moon in our sky these days, because frankly, our very existence relies on its presence and orbit. The biggest coincidence however, with our moon is the fact that the distance is just so perfect that we have total eclipses. At one time, the moon would have entirely blocked the sun out, and in the future, there will no longer be a total eclipse as the diameter of the moon in the sky will no longer cover that of the sun's. But for now, the moon rests ever so perfectly within the sun from our perspective once every 8 years. How truly amazing that is...