What would the world be like if there was no moon?

Answer 1

high water everywhere and less gravity it would also be windy

Answer 2

The world would be lessened if it lost the moon. The moon gives light during at least part of most nights, which can be helpful in finding your way home. The moon causes the tides, which are probably important for some reason or other (go ask a Navy guy). And there's a lot of tradition associated with the moon: fertility rites, warewolves, magic, astrology. And it gives young astronomers something to point their telescopes at and count the craters.

It's a potential source of aluminum (and other metals), silicon, and oxygen, and it's a good place to make a great big solar power plant, what with all that unfiltered sunshine. Note that if you have a little solar power plant on the moon at first, and a mine to get the metal oxide and silicon ores, you can bootstrap the energy generating facilities to ever-larger scales.

Sun + solar power plant level 1 + mines level 1 + time to amass resources...

Build solar power plant level 2
Build mines level 2

Time to amass more resources...

Build solar power plant level 3
Build mines level 3

Etcetera. I don't see why this would have to quit until the whole moon was covered with solar panels. The stuff that the moon is made of is (most of) the stuff you need to make solar panel. Solar energy, which the moon has lots of half the month, should make possible the bootstrapping up of the production scale.

Answer 3

Great question! I tuned in to see what sort of answers you are getting. Hopefully someone with really serious astronomy and geology knowledge will answer (like ozzie35 and others), but here are a few things that would be different:

1. Life might not have evolved on Earth at all. For lots of reasons, because the Moon has MANY effects on Earth, and it's possible that without them, the conditions for life to evolve might not have occurred.

2. Life might have been extinguished on Earth. The Moon has surely taken SOME asteroid and meteor impacts that would have otherwise struck the Earth. One or more of them might have wiped out all life on the planet.

3. Assuming everything else evolved in more or less the same way, there would still be SOME tides (the Sun influences tides too), but smaller ones, and there would still be weather, but it's likely it would be more uniform, such as we see on other planets with atmosphere and no moons: e.g. Venus.

4. If life did evolve, there would probably be some big differences in behaviours: sea life, a lot of which depends on tidal action in various ways, might be radically different; nocturnal animal habits would probably be different, animals that now breed according to lunar cycles would have different triggers, as would plants, like the rare amazon moonflower, which blooms in the light of the full moon; the differences would be amazing and interesting to see.

5. There'd be an awful lot of romantic literature that never got written!

These are just a few of the things that would be different. Hopefully you'll get some other answers that add more interesting things.

Thanks for your great question.

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oz: your answer wasn't yet visible when I was answering!

Answer 4

What would we be like?......Well the tides would be 1/3 what they are now, as the Sun would be the only object creating them. The days would be shorter because we would still have a majority of the angular momentum the Moon took from the Earth. The days would be 8-12 hours long, as they were early in Earth's history. Also the axial tilt of the Earth would be greater and more variable, because it's the Moon which stabilises the tilt and its variability. So, the climate here would swing rather wildly between freezing cold and very hot, depending on your location of the planet w.r.t. where the axis pointed and its inclination. Earth wouldn't be a very happy place, even though it'd still be habitable. As to whether we would've evolved....who knows. Probably not. But could an intelligent, sentient species develop on such a planet....yes. Could any sort of life spring up.......yes.

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Artful_Dodger, that someone already has....Myself:):)

Answer 5

Some scientists think that if we had no Moon, the Earth would be a lot like Venus: with a lot thicker atmosphere, and due to the greenhouse effect, a lot hotter. and uninhabitable.

The Moon might even be indirectly responsible for continental drift, by its gravitation kneading away at the molten core and causing currents and tides inside the planet. Because the molten core is much more viscous than water, the tides are not as periodic as the water tides. But we see sea-floor spreading, volcanoes, etc. That latter part is just my theory, and I don't insist upon it. I could be mistaken.

Answer 6

There would be no intelligent life on earth as the moon absorbed many impacts from objects in space that would have hit the earth had the moon not been in the way.

Answer 7

The earth would actualy be bigger in size since scientists think that an asteroid collided with the earth to produce the moon. we would also have a weaker gravitational pull on us which in turn would send us hurdling off into some other planet or worse, the sun.

Answer 8

there would be no tides at the beach. Also days would be shorter, the moon is slowly slowing down the earths rotation on it's axis

Answer 9

we would not exsist. we would float out of orbit the moon pretty much keeps us going.

Answer 10

it would be so dark outside no one could see anything the stars arent that much of a help

Answer 11

Less lunatics