What Would Earth Be Like With No Moon?

You know how it all started 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang?

Bam!

No, no, wait, I can do better.

Now, let's never mind.

And the universe has been expanding ever since.

At its young age, it was all made of gas, huh?

Mostly helium and hydrogen.

For billions of years, the gas has expanded and cooled down.

Meanwhile, Galaxy stars another mysterious thing in space

we try to explore today, formed because of gravitational forces.

And in that chaos, thus like in middle school, about 4.6 billion years ago,

our magnificent planet was born too.

It all started as a disc of gas and dust that orbited the young sun,

just the same way it was with the rest of the planets in our solar system.

This disc consisted of dust particles of different sizes and gas.

They were circling the sun at different speeds and in orbits that weren't stable and predictable.

They were bumping into each other all the time.

These particles grew from very small grains of dust into boulders,

then later into bigger objects called planetesimals,

that had a range from miles to hundreds of miles in diameter.

And these planetesimals that were orbiting the sun within the disc

had gravitational force strong enough to pull other objects from the neighborhood

out of their orbits and collide with them.

As they were constantly hitting each other, they got bigger and bigger

until some got to the size of thousands of miles in diameter.

That's nearly the size of Mars and the Moon.

We know these things because of meteorites.

They come from different places all over our solar system

and bring all kinds of materials to our planet,

giving us something cool to study and learn about our solar system and how it formed.

These materials include very small pieces of dust and rock

that have gone through the chaos and survived those rough times,

even before the planets were created.

Meteorites also brought pieces of asteroids and planetesimals left behind

after the planet forming process ended.

As these objects were forming,

some radioactive elements were left trapped inside the minerals that, again,

were part of them.

That's how scientists could tell how old they were.

But the final stage of Earth's formation and generally this whole chaos

that was happening in our solar system may have taken a little bit longer,

possibly even up to 100 million years more.

That's when the last enormous impact was and the Earth finally reached its full size.

What actually happened is that it hit another object

which was nearly as large as Mars.

This collision was so strong that the impact produced enough energy

to vaporize some of the metal and rock both from the Earth and the Mars-sized object.

And this vapor created a disk that was surrounding our planet.

That disk cooled and clumped together at some point,

which is when we got our moon.

Our moon was the result of impact debris,

which was a combination of hot gas and molten rock.

There are some theories of how the moon formed though.

One claims it broke off from the Earth.

Another one says the moon formed somewhere else in our solar system.

And at some point, as it was wandering around,

it got so close to Earth that it ended up captured by its gravity.

And fans of the third theory believed the moon and the Earth formed at the same time

from the same proto-planetary disk.

Before the moon formed, the Earth was a much different place.

If you could have just one day on Earth without the moon,

you'd be first surprised by the days and nights.

They wouldn't be as stable as they are today

because the moon helps to keep the Earth's axis stable.

Days were shorter back then.

The Earth had been rotating much faster before the moon formed.

Its gravitational pulse slowed the rotation of our planet,

which means days got longer.

The Earth's rotation is getting slower through time,

but at a really small rate.

Some predictions say that in a billion years,

a typical day will be between 25.5 and 31.7 hours long.

If 24 hours is not enough time for you,

it'd just wait a billion years.

But yeah, if you're the type of person that likes to take things slow,

you'd definitely have to hurry back then.

Although there weren't many things you could do back then,

then to fill your time,

besides, you know, sailing across the hot lava, collecting rocks,

or hoping not to get hit in the head by some fierce meteorite falling onto our planet.

But if you were patient enough,

maybe you'd see something really cool.

Water coming onto our planet for the first time.

There was a rain of fiery meteors coming from the sky

and they kept slamming into our young Earth.

It looked devastating at first,

but some of this falling debris probably held water.

Many believed the asteroids and comets that bumped into our home planet

carried tiny amounts of water.

But considering this meteorite shower lasted more than 20 million years,

maybe even up to 200 million years,

it's not that unusual that after a while,

puddles of water started to collect across the surface.

And as the water evaporated within the atmosphere,

it would fall back down, forming lakes, rivers, seas,

and eventually oceans.

Only at that point, there was a chance for some primitive life to evolve

sometime in the future.

Earth started its transition from a hot ball of magma to the world we know today.

Before that, it would be too hard for life to exist there.

Even if it had happened somehow,

all those meteor and asteroid collisions would have probably destroyed it.

Also, you wouldn't be able to survive without an oxygen tank.

The Earth did have an atmosphere,

but it wasn't like the one we have today.

Scientists believe it was composed of water vapor, methane, ammonia,

and some other gases released from volcanic activity.

Basically, it was too toxic since there were volcanic eruptions all the time.

And the temperatures were way higher,

so just standing at these early stages of Earth

wouldn't be such a pleasant experience.

Also, there could even be some form of life at that time.

In its early stages, when everything was so chaotic,

it wasn't covered in oceans, trees,

or stunning landscapes like today, but in molten magma.

I mean, the earliest form of life we know about

are fossils of microorganisms found in hydrothermal vents,

and they're thought to be 1.4 billion years old.

And scientists assume the earliest time for life to show on Earth

could be 4.2 billion years ago, give or take.

So, with the right equipment, you could even see some single-celled organisms

like bacteria somewhere across our chaotic planet,

even before the Moon was there.

The Moon's gravitational pull on the Earth creates tides in the ocean,

which means it probably helped mix and circulate ocean water,

maybe even shape them.

The tides without the Moon would be much smaller,

because the gravitational pull is what causes the tides

to rise and fall.

The Moon also affects life in the ocean.

Over time, animals in the ocean have changed and adapted

to the changing water levels caused by the Moon's gravity.

Even just the Moon light has a big effect on sea creatures.

For example, corals use the Moon's cycle to release their eggs

at the same time and with stronger tides to help carry the eggs.

Baby sea turtles use the Moon's light shining on the water

to guide them from their nest to the ocean.

Who knows which directions life on the Earth would have taken if,

at some point, billions of years ago,

we didn't get our lunar buddy to follow us along the way.