Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The Day the Moon Was Gone

Paul and I do pretty good on agreeing about what to watch on television. Usually, we settle on something about home improvement or cooking, but tonight, he had the remote and landed on a show called "The Universe" on the History channel. Would have been more appropriate on the Science channel, because this is history that goes WAY back. The official topic of this particular episode was "The Day the Moon Was Gone," but it didn't really talk about that a whole lot. Essentially, in this one hour, they covered everything about how the Earth formed and life evolved. Every once in a while, they would throw in some facts about how something might have formed differently if there was no moon. I mean, basically, everything would have been completely different. No mountains (somehow the earth's core would have been cooler, so no plate tectonics). More water. Shorter days. Constant winds. No advanced life forms.

It's those last two that really got me thinking, because at one point, when it was talking about the imaginary animals that could have evolved if there were no moon, it said that they could have evolved to have more arms to shield themselves from the wind. Hum.

Well, naturally, I was thinking that, personally, I could really use another hand. And everyone else probably could too. So, why don't we have one? I mean, if I had an extra hand, I really think that would give me an evolutionary advantage. Ahem.

And while I'm at it, I don't understand why we don't have tails. It seems like I learned in biology or somewhere that the animals that we humans evolved from had tails and then we lost them during the evolutionary process. Well, who were these lazy pre-humans that didn't use their tails? I would love to have a tail, especially a prehensile tail. It would really be a help when I'm trying to navigate the treetops. It would help me balance during a field sobriety test. I could wag it when I was happy...

The ending of this particular episode was almost like a punchline. They kept building up to and teasing with promises of talking about what life would be like if the moon suddenly disappeared. But, then, in the last two minutes, they covered this by simply saying that although in billions of years the distance between the earth and the moon would be so great that they would lose their gravitational attraction and the moon would go spinning off into space, BUT that will never actually happen, because long before then, the sun will explode and the earth and the moon will both burn up and cease to exist.

Cue Credits.

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