How about Don’t be too hard on kanicbird, because he has it right, and it is the tidal effect on angular momentum that keeps the rotation stable, by acting as a corrective force to oppose other forces. (See Stranger on a train that angular momentum will only hold the rotation constant if there is NO other forces, I suggest you actually reading your cite for more info)
Cite or model, please.
Stranger
It makes me feel like rolling up a bunch of styrofoam packing pellets in my high school diploma and smoking it, is what it makes me feel like.
We wouldn’t have any more eclipses, that’s for sure.
Not only do you get the Desenex burger…
(If your comment wasn’t an FZ hommage, my apologies for being obscure.)
I didn’t feel like rubbing it in. You can, of course; you’re the one who was on the business end of a fairly snippy comment.
(Yes, I did notice; I just tend to be the type who likes to smooth things over if possible.)
IANA Science Guy, but it seems to me that if the moon was not there, the Earth might be hit by meteoroids and such more often. My understanding is that the moon takes quite a few hits that would otherwise hit Earth.
Colour me puzzled here, but why is this less drastic? A ring of debris around Earth is not going to have as much gravitional force as a whole moon, right?
I think what was meant was that a blown up moon would still have a center of gravity very near where the moon’s originally was, thereby minimizing a sudden change to the system. A ring would not have any net effect on tides, but it would take a very long time for the ring to form, so that the changes would be gradual and again not cause any sudden disruption. The slope of the loss would be slight and the system would have lots of time to adjust.
WEll, the tides might be affected, as the mass is now more evenly dispersed around the planet, but the mass itself is still there.
As I recall, the presence of the Moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt; without it asteroid impacts and internal mass shifts can alter a planets tilt, or cause it’s crust to slide into a new position over the liquid interior. Supposedly this has happend to Mars; the pattern of cratering shows it’s crust was once angled differently. I haven’t been able to find a cite yet and am going by memory on this, however. This of course would drastically change the climate.
Without the Moon tidal drag from the Sun might lock Earth’s rotation into some sort of resonance with the Sun like Venus’s; that’s a very long term concern however.
I’m pretty sure that absolutely none of this is true.
When did a correction to a factual misstatement become a “snippy comment”? Let’s review; kanicbird states as an unqualified fact that:
He offers no reference, cite, or support for this claim, which is, on its face, at odds with Euler’s expansion of Newton’s concept of inertia to rotational motion, which asserts that a body rotating about an axis of inertial symmetry will only change momentum in response to an external couple. The Moon, of course, provides a couple, lying in an orbit 5 degrees off of the ecliptic, while the Sun does the same. Both (as well as, to a much lesser extent, the other planets) contribute to the precessional and nutational motion of the Earth, which causes it to wobble.
Now, if the above statement were formulated as conjecture–something like “It’s possible that the Moon provides stability that keeps the Earth near its 23.5 degree angle to the ecliptic”–then take becomes a perfectly valid speculative claim. kanicbird could then cite, say, this paper (warning: PDF), in support of that claim. I’ll note that Laskar’s paper is long on speculation and short on actual data–if the paper I’m currently writing on the topic of slag accumulation in solid boosters were this thin I’d never get invited to speak at the AIAA conference next year–and that he cites himself (sometimes with collaborators) more than is strictly healthy (more than half of his total references are previous papers he’s written or cowritten) but at least its a staging point for discussion. Instead, kanicbird provides completely unsupported speculation as plenary fact, which will then no doubt be repeated by someone else, perpetuating the kind of unquestioning promulgation of supposition that so feeds ignorance.
If one is not prepared to be challenged, provide citation or qualification, and discuss, then one should stick with topics where everybody is right all the time–say, something like postmodern art criticism.
Stranger
There was a novel by Ramsey Campbell–I forget the name of it–where the good guys defeated the bad guys by destrying the moon. Campbell concluded that there would be no adverse effects beyond the loss of tides and moonlight, and I just sort of took his word for it.
As I write this, Three Moons over Milford is on.
I think that is the inspiration for the OP.
Hmmm, googling : link
Bolding mine; it’s the best cite I can find thus far.
Yes, the moon stabilizes the Earth’s tilt, but I was thinking of the rest of that sentence. The same authors you cite dispute it, not only in the very cite you give, but in other articles as well:
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-4/p71.html
Nothing about asteroid impacts, internal mass shifts, or crust sliding.
And then this sentence:
is given as a speculation with no backup in your cite. I don’t think many other scientists agree with it even as a speculation, however. Comins gives a very different scenario in his book, cited above.
What other forces?
Tell us again how Venus manages to stay right way up with no moons at all?
Mostly, it would remove the werewolf problem, once and for all.