Wednesday, 9 October 2024

Mining The Moon

It's a well known fact, that if you stand on the Great Wall of China, you can see the Moon and if you have an especially decent telescope you can see a small rover with Made In China stamped on the side carrying out exploration of the surface looking for natural resources such as titanium, and uranium, which the Earth is really short of.
The mass of the Moon is 81 quintillion tons, the Earth is 6.580 sextillion tons and they are involved in a celestial dance where the Moon is kept spinning around the Earth by a balance of acceleration and gravity equalling each other.
If we start tinkering with the mass of the Moon by transporting some of its mass back onto Earth, will this have an effect on us and it?
Taking millions upon millions of tons of the Moons mass would surely, over time, have to have an impact on the Moon's gravitational pull on Earth, creating a change in the seas tides and currents and weather patterns. Would a less dense Moon be slowly pulled towards the Earth or flung out of the gravitational grip we hold over it which would slow the Earths rotation considerably, not to mention the potentially devastating Earth's wobbling effect that the Moon controls.
In the pre-moon days, the Earth wobbled so we never had the tilt like we have today where in summer the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun and in winter the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun giving us shorter days and cooler weather.
Having a huge Moon beside us steadied the wobble and we now how the seasons we get but boy would we be in trouble if the Moon ever significantly moved away as we would experience much greater temperature swings than we are used to.
On early Earth, when the Moon was newly formed, days were five hours long, but with the Moon's braking effect operating on the Earth for the last 4.5bn years, days have slowed down to the 24 hours that we are familiar with now.
What all this means is that our early ancestors must have had a magnificent view of the moon but more importantly, has anyone checked if the Earth is wobbling anymore recently because i'm sure our seasons are completely out of whack, i was carrying my coat and shopping in a T-shirt today and it's October!

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