Yeah I think the impact that created the moon is the main reason why there’s life on this planet. That impact also mixed up the heavier metals and liberated enough phosphorus making the composition of earth’s crust unique. Also the two metal cores fused and made it oversized, prompting the difference between the rotation of the Earth and the core, making the magnetic field that protects our atmosphere possible…
So yeah, I’m definitely not optimistic about life on different planets…
But hey, if it happened once, maybe we’ll get to find some remains of another system to which this happened as well. Or maybe, someday, someone else will find ours. Or perhaps gravity is the only force keeping us from drifting off the surface of our rock, preventing us from falling into the darkest void for eternity, with the vain hope that your frozen corpse will someday land in someone else’s yard, like a cosmic frisbee.
The universe is large enough that similar combinations of events could have happened elsewhere too. But it’s also large enough that those places are most likely further from us than our species will ever travel.
Perhaps too far to ever travel, but if we can detect it to at least be aware of their existence, then that might be enough for us. Just an answer.
Honestly, if we ever got a really credible answer, I’m sure we’d dramatically increase the pace of space travel research, to the point where we might innovate a way to get there. Maybe we do one of the space/time bending options, or maybe we find a way to punch a hole through spacetime or something like that. If there’s a will, we’ll put a ton of resources into exhausting every potential way to do it before giving up. It might even create multi-national unity in a way that we’ve never thought possible.
So please, if you’re an alien that’s been quietly listening to our broadcasts, please send an answer somehow.
I feel like the most disappointing answer but likely answer is that life is out there (and even if we do get some whisper of communication with them), but a method of travel capable of crossing the distance between us is downright impossible to make. Like “break the laws of physics” impossible.
And I’m sure the strong tidal pull likely had an accelerating effect on the early stages of the emergence of life, since the first steps would have basically had to crash into each other in water without having any other way to move. There are many other ways for that to happen on the “millions of years” time scale, but the amount the moon moves our water has got to have had a notable effect.
Earth is and always has been the giant beaker of chemicals that has one of those magnetic stirrers in it, thanks to the moon.
In the fifth or sixth book of the Foundation series they follow a map to Earth that mentions a planet with huge rings and a planet circled by a giant moon. Throughout the universe, this combination was so unique you could identify the home of humanity among trillions of planets.
It’s a weird book but I’m glad I read it.
Well, Foundation and Earth is the fifth book of the Foundation trilogy… of course it’s weird.
Similar to the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy.
Yeah, but the Foundation trilogy has seven books.
The last two being prequels.(Also it’s connected to the Galactic Empire trilogy, which does have three books, but was published in reverse order, and the Robot series, a four book duology not to be confused with Asimov’s other robot books, though it’s set in the same universe, and also to The End of Eternity, which is set in a different timeline altogether but is sort of a prequel to the whole shebang.)
Adams had one more short story in the Hitchhiker’s universe, but debatable whether it’s technically part of the trilogy.
Wasn’t there one more book written in the world by a separate author? Or is that this one?
Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing
And the idea of such a big moon was part of why it was largely thought of as an unfounded myth.
And it shows how Asimov had zero conception of how ridiculously huge the galaxy is, though that’s just the storylines being a product of their time, probably.
Or he was writing a fiction and knew he could play fast and loose with scientific laws.
Asimov wrote non-fiction books about astronomy; I’m sure he knew as much about it as you do.
But the moon size thing isn’t a coincidence, thats part of what makes solar eclipses so rare, the moon needs to be at the correct distance when it passes in front of the sun or it isn’t as impressive, and it does do that some times.
There are some schools of thought that say that a large moon like ours should be a part of the Drake Equation, because without which life would have a very hard time even on supposed “garden planets”.
Another factor that is likely to affect civilizations is an easy source of energy, like oil. We got lucky, in that the evolutionary development in Lignin in plants - and the several million years needed for bacteria to catch up and be able to break it down - are what created those massive deposits of organic matter that became trapped deep in the Earth and modified into oil. Without that oil we are unlikely to have reached several milestones, including transportation, population levels, trade, high technology, and even access to space. And this would start affecting us several hundred years back, with steam engines.
So evangelion was right?
Jokes aside, the probability of moonlike-moons forming in earthlike-planets should be added to drake’s equation and see what that begets.
Might explain a lot of the silence, at least for life as we know it
The drake equation is a bogus probability that really means ultimately nothing. I wouldn’t put stock in anything it says.
Why is that?
The Drake Equation was not really meant to be used. The original purpose of the Drake Equation was to drum up conversations surrounding the first SETI. All it really did was condense everything someone should look for in a possibly human habitable world where aliens may exist. We have much better ways to calculate and search now.
Well technically Charon is bigger relative to its parent body but, y’know, Pluto isn’t a planet…
Twin planets. Caron and Plato. Downgraded to dwarves because NDG sucks milky ways.
He might suck, but you know it wasn’t his decision right?
Yeah, but it’s fun to blame him. He was vocally parading the news and using it, as usual, for self promotion. So I let him have it.
