I got up just before 3 a.m. and, brushing my teeth, I dipped back into my new audiobook, "Our Country Friends: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart.
He messed up the bed’s careful sheets as if two lovers had just enjoyed a tussle on it. He spotted two carved wooden statues of pineapples on the modernist desk... and knocked over one of them, adding some asymmetry to the deathly hospital order around him. What would his mother say from her immovable Gangnam cocoon, her throat tingling with hot barley tea? Advice she would never follow herself. Be strong for your friends.
A woman—Masha, it would have to be—was screaming...
Her what cocoon? Cheongsam? That's a tight-fitting dress, perhaps cocoon-like, but it's a Chinese dress, and the character was born in Korea.
Settling in at my desktop, I open up the Kindle version of the book and do a word search on "screaming" to find the page and see "Gangnam cocoon." It's a place name — the mother's not trapped within her clothing, but her district of Seoul. The word is familiar to me because of that song, "Gangnam Style."
Idly, I scan book titles in my Kindle app and notice "Pain: When Will It End?" What's that? Something I added to the Kindle at Meade's request? I open it up. Oh! It's a fantastic book of cartoons. I don't recognize the artist's name — Tim Kreider — but I must have put this in the Kindle. (Yeah, I see now, that I blogged about the purchase back in 2019.)
We're so self-absorbed. I get it. But I wondered, what would happen on earth if the moon were to disappear? I click out of Kindle and over to Safari and google:
5 suggested completions and 4 of them are about the loss of the moon?! How can that happen? I was in Kindle, and I hadn't typed "moon." I hadn't even encountered "moon" in searchable text, only seen it handwritten in a drawing.
But maybe the disappearance of the moon is the number one thing people are wondering about when they muse about what might happen on earth. Perhaps there's some movie or TV show where the moon is suddenly gone for some reason and all sorts of disasters ensued.
But what disasters? Something about the tides? The oceans go wild? Is there some weird psychic damage that would occur if we could no longer gaze upon that big white circle in the sky?
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Neal Stephenson's Seveneves explores the sudden, in geologic scales, disintegration of the moon and humankind's struggle to survive.
Maybe people were searching those terms because of the lunar eclipse that occurred yesterday morning around 3:00 a.m.
Perhaps Google was thinking about the lunar eclipse.
More likely but still remote ...
NASA will intentionally crash the DART spacecraft into an asteroid to see if that is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future
SpaceX and NASA
And like many interesting events in space, Elon Musk is involved.
I don’t fathom the moon, that rock off shore what appears when the tide is right…
…now that binary star system thing- that’d be cool.
Neal Stephenson's novel "Seveneves" is about the moon breaking up. It turns out it would be a really bad thing.
Great book, BTW.
Neal Stephenson just released a new book. He’s kinda a big deal. Of few books back, he released ‘Seven Eves’, a story about the destruction of the moon and an origin story for the human race after that. Sometimes other events trigger upsurge in back catalog related questions.
And there was a lunar eclipse yesterday morning.
The moon is always female. Women would stop having periods.
didn't you say the word moon out loud? The Walls have ears
Assuming our current understanding is correct, the moon started out as a ring like Saturn has, perhaps after a collision with a planet the size of Mars, a ring that coalesced into our current Moon, and the moon is moving away from us a tiny bit every day, relentlessly. Not sure if it will be long gone before our sun expands large enough that it's diameter includes our orbit, but one day it will be a tiny bright disc in the sky whose phases can only be seen with optics, like Venus. We would lose its bodyguard effect, where it takes some of the asteroid and comet hits for us.
Time travel to the future is theoretically possible, though you can't come back, a photon come to us from some distant galaxy hasn't aged a day, so maybe some human will live to see it. Not sure what the economics of an expedition to the future look like though.
I know you had written about Tim Kreider previously because it was your post that got me to purchase and read one of his books, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
The moon going missing would not be good for anyone. But I'm sure it could be blamed on climate change. And yeah...that would surely change things up.
Serious Question
Of All the so called "planets" that so called "astronomers" have "found"....
How many have moons large as ours? That is: large enough to permit life to form on the planet?
"Immovable" just doesn't work, which is why the metaphor bothered you; Inflexible, unyielding, uncompromising, are all words that might have worked better. When a word draws your attention, it spoils the effect. Obviously this metaphor broke the spell of the novel and was a mistake.
"didn't you say the word moon out loud?"
I had not said one word out loud for hours
Hmm. Maybe without the moon the lunacy will end and the Democrats will come back into their right minds.
Up a 3 am? Will you be able to stay awake for the whipping the Badgers will inflict on the Huskers today?
The first thing I thought about were the tides and the cleaning/flushing effect they have on the ecosystem on the ocean/land border.
I doubt there would be macro fauna on earth without that.
Glad the video covered that.
No moon means no tides; no tides means no evolution from sea creatures to land creatures, which means no us.
To quote Back to the Future, “Erased . . . from existence!”
Perhaps there's some movie or TV show where the moon is suddenly gone for some reason and all sorts of disasters ensued.
Well, there's Space 1999, but that's told from the moon's point-of-view.
"Is there some weird psychic damage that would occur if we could no longer gaze upon that big white circle in the sky?"
I'd be in heaven; I could observe all month long!
Apparently this post is mostly about the moon, but I can't get past the horrible writing in on display in the preface.
"Not sure if it will be long gone before our sun expands large enough that it's diameter includes our orbit"
It takes 63,000 years for the average distance to move 1 mile further away at an inch/year (don't know if that is the right rate of increase), and there are 63,000 63,000s in 4 billion years. I have seen calculations that indicate that we will still get total solar eclipses for about another 1.2 billion years, so the moon's apparent size isn't going to be noticeable for a very, very long time.
Mr. Show was ahead of its time: America must blow up the moon.
https://tinyurl.com/94d5y645
Let's see. A mile has 5,280 feet and thus 63,360 inches (5280*12). Assuming the moon recedes (or secedes if you will) at a steady rate, it takes 42,240 years (63,360 / 1.5 inch per year) for the moon to drift a mile further away.
And thus, 4,224,000,000 years for the moon to drift 100,000 miles away.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2021/01/22/in-photos-this-is-what-we-will-look-like-in-55-billion-years-when-the-sun-is-dying/?sh=79655b4c63c3
"You exist on a rocky planet orbiting a yellow dwarf star of little importance that will get brighter, then expand, burning Earth to a crisp (in about 1-3 billion years), before exploding and spreading atoms—including yours—across the Milky Way."
1-3 billion years. Certainly narrows it down.
I'm sad I won't live to see the moon disappear because the expanding sun will make me disappear first.
OK, there is some (now thrown-out) science suggesting that the moon is essential to Earth's viability. Larry Niven provided it to me. The idea was that only with the moon there to siphon off excess Earth atmosphere did the Earth escape the fate of Venus -- not all that far from our own orbit, very thick atmosphere, something like 800F on the surface and intolerable pressure to boot.
Niven has a short story somewhere that involves time travel. A man is trapped on the moon. He finds what turns out to be an alien time-travel device. Pulls a lever, and finds himself some impossible time back in the past, billions of years perhaps. And he's wandering around the alien space station, as it were, and he has a digging tool of some sort, one that removes atoms in the way of its beam. He tries it idly on a surface, and oops, it slips into the hole it just dug. Oh, well. Guy goes back to the time-travel device, and manages to get back to the "present." Only he looks at the Earth from the moon, and it's completely covered in thick cloud. At the same time, the moon is just a very thin husk, like a deflated balloon. And then he gets it: He's wiped out all humanity, because his digging tool has removed the entire mass of the moon, and there's nothing to remove the excess atmosphere.
Bummer.
This was bog-standard planetology in the 70s. Not so much now.
At least we'd have fewer fucking terrible rhyming lyrics:
June moon swoon spoon...
Btw, the cartoon is very funny.
Would the Australians finally fall off the earth like they're supposed to?
Do they all wear special gravity boots?
I am kind of sad now. I liked the image of the moon moving far enough away from us that it would appear like Venus. Probably why I didn't check. Oh well. It's pretty clear that the Milankovitch cycles will have a lot more effect on us than the flight of the moon.
I once read a book called The Rain of Iron and Ice, and he recounts the story of a monk in the Middle Ages who claimed that he witnessed the moon to have been struck by an asteroid, I guess, had it been a comet, there would have been many more accounts of it, and that it appeared to vibrate as if struck like a bell.
"Do you not know, the moon is nothing more than a circumambulating aphrodisiac divinely subsidized to provoke the world into a rising birth rate? " from Christopher Fry's play, The Lady's Not for Burning.
I learned something in school about the moon making life possible on earth.
But I can't say why or how and I'm not looking it up because I wouldn't understand it anyway.
I think both the moon and Planet X are pieces of the proto-Earth during our solar system formative years. Sorting it out and settling into the current stable, although Planet X is literally eccentric, orbits wasn’t easy you know. It was rough out there for a new universe!
"Well, there's Space 1999, but that's told from the moon's point-of-view."
Space 1999 is one of my favorite Sci Fi TV shows. (But only season 1) In the first episode, Earth is storing all it's nuclear waste on the moon and the nuclear waste dumps explode. This causes the moon to break out of the Earth's orbit and head out into deep space. At the end of the first episode, the survivors on Moonbase Alpha are watching a news transmission from the Earth that talks about violent storms and earthquakes. The TV signal slowly fades away as the episode ends.
Someone did a cheesy fan film, with a terrible computer voice narration, about what happened to the Earth after the moon left orbit. The fan film starts with the TV news broadcast from the end of the first episode of Space 1999.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vj021URXlY
I just found a better version of that Space 1999 fan video.
This one is actually narrated by one of the main actors of Space 1999. (Nick Tate) I wonder if Nick saw the first video and hated the computer generated voice so much that he offered to re-narrate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnalZK43iVI
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