No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull Are you tired and grumpy after such a long day? Well, now you know what to blame: the Moon. Scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Columbia University, in the US, found that days on Earth grew longer as the Moon inched further away. Some 1.4 billion years ago, a day lasted just over 18 hours, the eggheads …
and 60×45 seconds in an hour.
See how easy that was, by shrinking the minute to 45 seconds your objection is fully resolved, why complicate things, there's no need for that.
As you can attest LDS' remark above stands correct.
You need to learn to write better contracts, son. Even in my 9-5 days the company started paying me when I set foot out my front door, and continued paying me until I returned home. Granted, some of it was comp time or flex time, but I was compensated nonetheless.
Justification? I wouldn't be traveling if they didn't ask me to, so they could damn well pay me for it! Yes, a few companies balked ... but there is plenty of work out there. Their loss, not mine.
...not only will the days get longer but the moon will fly higher still until eventually it departs orbit! (Yes this will happen; look in Wikipedia). Just think of the fix we will be in then with no tides and very long and cold nights and long red hot days. How's your beach holiday now?
And another thing; some lunatics want to build tidal power plant. Mad! It will slow the earth's rotation even sooner.
@DougS; This video is an artist's impression of what it would look like even closer than *that*- specifically, if the surface of the moon was at the distance from earth of the International Space Station (circa 400km, which would require the moon's centre to be at a distance of 2158km).
Except that- as you already realised- in reality, it wouldn't because- leaving aside the fact the video is slightly speeded up (the moon would take more like five minutes to cross the sky)- the tsunamis generated by the tidal forces at *that* distance would have waves literally kilometres high and running for your life probably wouldn't do much good.
Not to mention that- as also spotted by Brewster's Angle Grinder- the earth would be stretched, leading to huge earthquakes and increased heating resulting in volcanism that would probably boil the oceans away anyway, so you'd probably die due to lava rather than flood.
Which is nice.
Are we sure it would stay in one piece and not be tidally broken if orbiting at 400km? That seems too close some how. Especially to then recede, and not have atmospheric drag and crash (though the size of the thing, the energy it would contain in orbital velocity probably could never be slowed by just atmosphere...).
[edit]
Oops! You said *if* it was, not *it* was... my mistake.
@TechnicalBen; I rephrased my comment slightly after posting, so I apologise if (as I assume) you were replying to what I'd originally said.
And yes, you're correct- the Slate article (the second link) makes clear that indeed the moon *would* be tidally broken (which I should have added myself), "So we wouldn’t even have a Moon; we’d have a thick debris ring composed of ex-Moon. That would be cool to see, too, except for the whole everyone being dead thing."
Which is also nice.
And for an impression of what the incoming high tide might look like, just watch 'Interstellar' again.
The scene on the water world where their spacecraft lands in a vast area of shallow water and only just gets away before the tidal wave swamps it may be pretty close to what you'd see on Earth when the moon was still in a close orbit. Except, that is, that both Earth and Moon were rather hot at the time: think glowing lava rather than blue water.
"How large would it have looked in the sky?"
About 9 times large than today. But it would be 80 times fainter - because the light it reflects, which hasn't changed, is now spread out out over a much larger "area". My fag packet suggests the full moon would only be about as bright as Sirius. So it wouldn't be visible in the day. Eclipses would be far more common, though.
I used to know the numbers about tidal heights. But I can't fault the answer above (except for using miles). Remember tides are very complicated, shaped by local geography, and the sun is responsible for about a third of the height. However the most important thing to worry about is not the ocean tide but the tidal movement of the Earth's crust. Imagine the fucking earth's surface raising and shrinking by 100s of metres twice a fucking day.
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About 9 times large than today. But it would be 80 times fainter - because the light it reflects, which hasn't changed, is now spread out out over a much larger "area". My fag packet suggests the full moon would only be about as bright as Sirius. So it wouldn't be visible in the day. Eclipses would be far more common, though.
You need a new fag packet. At night, the moon reflects(1) light from the *Sun*, and that light, per square metre of lunar surface is just as bright with a close-in moon as with a far-out moon.
(1) No, it *scatters* it. The difference is important, because although the scattering isn't uniform, it is roughly inverse-square in perceived intensity.
So there are several effects going on...
* The light hitting the moon is neither brighter nor dimmer.
* The light that we would see in a particular circular milliarc-second is increased by the decreased distance, on an inverse-square basis.
* The light that we would see in a particular circular milliarc-second is decreased by the decreased number of square metres in the circular milliarc-second, on a positive-square basis.
* The above two effects cancel out, so the circular milliarc-second would look neither brighter nor dimmer than today.
* The moon would occupy many, many more circular milliarc-seconds of sky, so it would overall be much brighter.
It would have been impressive to sit on the beach and see that huge moon hovering over the ocean, until you saw that huge wave coming at you like a tsunami and you had to run for your life!
Cowabunga!!!! Surf's up!!!! But the downside is all the volcanic activity from the Earth's crust being pulled.
I've often thought our 7-day week and uneven number of days a month were overly clunky to work with even though I understand their link to the Earth's motion. But good to know we can change them.
I propose a 5-day week. We'll eliminate Tuesday and Wednesday*, which leaves a more satisfying proportion of the week as weekend. 6 weeks a month gives us 30-day months, but we'll eliminate July and August (screw you, Caesers!), and finally Sept / Oct / Nov / Dec can really be the 7/8/9/10th months. 300-day years would give us days of a bit over 29 hours, so we gain 5 hours a day to sleep and/or do all those things that a day never seems long enough for.
Now, all we need to do is calculate how far away the moon needs to be, and start pushing!
*I would have eliminated Monday but since it's the day dedicated to the moon, kind of appropriate to keep it
Ladies of the earth would unite and stop your plan.
Can you imagine getting them all to sign off on agreeing to a be a bit older? And to "age faster" going forwards?
You try telling my mum she's has to agree to be a couple of years older, because we're moving the moon.
"the amount of solar radiation received on Earth also changes affecting the climate."
But this is due to all those filthy hydrocarbon-powered cars yanking the sun closer to us, right? Or, heaven forbid, incandescent lightbulbs...
Because, you know, those are the things that lead to climate change; anything out of our control wouldn't be taxable you see, so it can't be allowed.
Actually global temperature stopped increasing in 1998 and has been dropping since 2000. That's why the old raw(ish) temp.datasets got pulled around 2005 and why they have been replaced with models. I'm not joking: HADCRUT4 etc are models, not data.
Oh, and "extreme weather events" are running at half the long term average. Ask the insurance companies' catastrophe modellers, who don't have the luxury of ignoring data in favour of meme.
"That's why the old raw(ish) temp.datasets got pulled around 2005 and why they have been replaced with models"
Which only begs the question what data you are using to declare global temperature stopped increasing in 1998 and has been dropping since 2000! Because by your loose definition all temperature datasets will be "models" - hence your admission in brackets.
The oceans absorb solar radiation, and the sun plus ocean cycles, created by decades of absorbing solar energy, determine the air temps. It is obvious looking at the heat content and volume of the oceans compared to the heat content and volume of the atmosphere, that the oceans drive the temps.
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