this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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I gotta admit though that it's a pretty awesome coincidence that the moon is the size and at a distance that makes it look approximately the same size as the sun and allows us to have amazing looking eclipses.
But the moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth so it will not be true in the relatively near future.
In 500-650 million years
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/11/as-the-moon-drifts-slowly-away-from-earth-will-there-eventually-be-a-last-total-solar-eclipse/?sh=7ed11ca8316a
Okay, not as near as I thought, although I did mean "relatively" compared to the age of the Earth.
Good save there
Or, you know, me admitting I was wrong but still clarifying.
I mean, and I'm saying this just to mess with you a little more, you could have said that you meant "relatively" compared to anything as a follow up depending on how your replies went XD
They said "relatively". So it's okay.
I don't know if this is sarcastic, but pedantic and edifying are a venn diagram
Yeah it was a sarcastic joke. LoL
Earth will be a desert planet by then (not because of humans).
And the sun is expanding, too.
May take a while but if you look closely you will notice. Just wait.
I was concerned about my eyes so I asked google before.
Gemini said it is ok to stare at it
I followed it's instructions and glued my eyes open!
What if the earth and moon hung out a bit more and developed some better shared hobbies or something? Can we heal this relationship and stop this drifting-apart problem?
How many centuries of science progress do you think we lost with this “awesome coincidence”?
A bigger or smaller moon in the sky would have probably made the mechanism of the solar system a little more obvious for sure.
I'm guessing basically 0 years, honestly. Both are visible in the sky at the same time, so I'm not really sure what being different sizes would clarify.
I think too much order lead to a loss of information.
Of course they are visible at the time so we know they are not the same. But the way we Humans generalize concepts around ridiculously little set of data makes me think that most of people must have looked at the sky, decided they were the same type of things that have definitely always been there, and just forget about it. “Nah we good, those are Gods. Don’t think about it and don’t make them angry”.
This is the type of coincidence that is blinding in a way. People naturally give way too much attention to random things. There are literally tons of textbooks examples of events that look totally improbable, but will in fact appear constantly (meeting someone who knows someone you know in an airplane, meeting someone with the same birthday at a wedding etc).
we have gained from this awesome coincidence. A solar eclipse was used to prove einstein's theories the first time. This coincidence was exactly what they needed to observe the stars which appear very close to the sun, without the sun's light washing them out, and measure how much their light was bent by the sun's mass. Too big or too small and it would have taken much longer to prove.
This event might have been harder but how many would have been easier to solve earlier in our history?
Only for this specific eclipse. Sometimes the moon is closer, so it completely shrouds the sun and we get to see the ghosty heliosphere of illuminated gasses. Other timed the sun is smaller and we get a ring of fire. Curiously sometimes Mercury gets in the way, but it's so far away, and so close to the sun it appears as a tiny black dot.
But the earth (and most of the solar system) is so tiny it barely exists. Jupiter retains a tiny bit of mass, to the sun, we are microbial. We humans are fleas on fleas.