January 2011
28 posts
Hello! Sorry if you've answered this question before, but I heard that the moon's orbit is getting farther away from the Earth. If that's true and everything, how serious would those implications be to Earth?
This link is helpful.
“The effect of the Moon inching away from Earth is barely noticeable on human timescales. But millions of years from now, the effects will be more tangible. The tides will be weaker because of the Moon’s weaker gravitational pull. The release of tidal energy in Earth’s oceans and crust will continue to slow our own planet’s spin and thus increase the length of our day (it is increasing at a rate of one second every 50,000 years). Our distant descendants will not be able to view a total solar eclipse, because the Moon’s apparent diameter will always be smaller than the Sun’s, making only annular eclipses possible.”
Hope that helped!
Wolfram Alpha's take on the Drake Equation →
wolframalpha.com
Debatable. Interesting commentary by users on Reddit. Check it out.
Hello! Sorry if you've answered this question before, but I heard that the moon's orbit is getting farther away from the Earth. If that's true and everything, how serious would those implications be to Earth?
This link is helpful.
“The effect of the Moon inching away from Earth is barely noticeable on human timescales. But millions of years from now, the effects will be more tangible. The tides will be weaker because of the Moon’s weaker gravitational pull. The release of tidal energy in Earth’s oceans and crust will continue to slow our own planet’s spin and thus increase the length of our day (it is increasing at a rate of one second every 50,000 years). Our distant descendants will not be able to view a total solar eclipse, because the Moon’s apparent diameter will always be smaller than the Sun’s, making only annular eclipses possible.”
Hope that helped!
You can now submit pictures again.
Read the rules.
December 2010
73 posts
Sentry Risk Table →
neo.jpl.nasa.gov
The following table lists potential future Earth impact events that the JPL Sentry System has detected based on currently available observations. Sentry is a highly automated collision monitoring system that continually scans the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years.
How many of you saw the lunar elipse?
It was cloudy for me :’(
Apparently the next visible one from N. America is on April 15, 2014. Greattt.
