ThatDamnedPanda
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
Hmmm, the lack of potable water has been noticed in areas of famine in the world. I have an idea, let's send it to the moon !
And how's come none of these asteroids have ever brought up any water ? Oh wait, maybe they did but it all evaporated because there is no atmosphere. In a vacuum our beloved H2O is almost always either water vapor or ice. This is why freeze drying works.
So they are looking for what now ?
Actually, that's exactly what would have happened. They're not looking for liquid water, because they already know there isn't any substantial reservoir of liquid water on the moon. They're looking for evidence that there may be usable quantities of frozen water buried deeply enough beneath the surface that it wouldn't have been boiled off by the sun.
As for your earlier post, I'm really not sure exactly what you said there. I don't think I quite got what you said about the effects on the earth's orbit. But I think I disagree with some of it; the part of it I understood, anyway. Actually, if we were to lose the moon, the immediate effects would be significant and possibly catastrophic, and the longterm effects would be worse.
Initially, many nocturnal land animals would become extinct, because their vision is not acute enough to hunt by starlight. At the same time, though, other nocturnal animals would thrive because there wouldn't be anyone hunting them anymore. Other predators - those with more acute night vision - would do quite well, but they would probably have different prey species than the ones with the poorer vision, so it's hard to say which species would be diminished and which species would blossom. But this, in turn, would have an effect on plant species that are either eaten or fertilized by the prey species, which in turn would have an effect on other species dependent upon those particular plants. At best, there would be significant planetwide disruptions in the ecosystem.
The effects would probably be worse for marine life. You're right in that the tides would be disrupted, but it wouldn't be a minor matter at all. Many ocean-dwelling species key their mating cycles to the tides and the phases of the moon. Without the moon to trigger their cycles, they literally wouldn't know when to mate or lay eggs, and many species would be impacted severely enough that they might go extinct. At best, there would be global diebacks of many key marine species. Fisheries around the world would be drastically affected, and many cultures dependent upon those resources would suffer severe famine if they weren't able to find some other food source.
Meteorologically speaking, the impact on the world's climate would perhaps be the most immediate and the most disastrous. The lunar tides act as a powerful engine to mix the world's oceans, bringing colder water from the depths up to blend with the warmer surface waters. Without the moon to drive that engine, surface temperatures of the world's oceans would change significantly, which would cause extreme and almost immediate changes to ocean currents and (as a result) worldwide weather patterns.
Longer term (over a period of several hundred thousand years), the Earth would become a much more inhospitable place to live. The gravitational tug of the moon presently acts as a stabilizer to the Earth's orbit, keeping the axis tilted at a constant 23.5 degrees or thereabouts. This constant axis is what allows the Earth to experience long, stable seasons. Remove that stabilizer, and the planet will begin to wobble more and more. As it wobbles more on its axis, there will be periods of time when each pole is pointing almost directly at the sun for part of each year, much like Mars - again, causing severe climatic variations worldwide.
So yeah, it would suck. This post is already way too long, so i won't even waste any more space going into how much different the planet would be if there had never been a moon at all (short version, we probably wouldn't even be here). But if we were to lose the moon now, it would be a royal pain in the ass for just about everyone.
< Message edited by ThatDamnedPanda -- 10/9/2009 12:26:42 PM >
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Panda, panda, burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Made you all black and white and roly-poly like that?
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RE: We pay NASA to do this? - 
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