The rotation of the Earth has been slowing down for billions of years. As the Moon moves further away from the Earth, it causes the Earth’s rotation to slow. When the Moon was at its closest point to the Earth, a full day and night only took somewhere between as little as two hours, some say and as much as six hours others say. I wonder if they used different numbers or different Math or both, I will use no Math and just go down the middle and say as little as four hours for the Earth to make a full rotation, two hours of Day and two hours of Night.
So a full Day then was twenty hours shorter than a full Day today and with the earth turning many times faster than today, the gravity would have been so great that a person dropped off here back then would be instantly turned into a pancake. And don’t get me wrong, I like pancakes. I have never met one I did not like, very much, but can you imagine being a pancake living on our planet over four billion years ago, looking up into the sky and seeing a moon fifteen times closer and bigger than it is today, it would eclipse the sun every day.
Today the sun and the moon are exactly the same size in the sky and before long the moon will be smaller than the Sun in the sky and will no longer cover the Sun during an Eclipse. Along with a much slower rotation of the earth, and just about the time the Sun is ready to vaporize the Earth a day and night will last almost twice as long as today. How would you like twenty hours of day and twenty hours of night every day? Well, don’t worry that won’t happen for billions of years. And I can not be Certain but I believe we will all be long gone and forgotten by then, we will probably be long gone before a billion years from now, when the average daily temperature will exceed 160 degrees.
Our time on this planet is just a blink of an eye in all of time, we are very lucky to be living during the gentlest weather cycles of our planets history, thanks to moon slowly moving further away. The moon does far more than just affect our ocean tides. It affects all of Life. After billions and billions of years of time there has only been life here for millions of those years. Life is just a drop in the bucket of time. I hope life is a cycle throughout the universe through all of time.
We live in a very special moment in time. Life is ever changing as the cause of life is ever changing. We are a very fragile balance of carbon energy and spent carbon energy, the by product of fuel burning efficiently and the cleaner the burn the higher the level of spent carbon energy produced to make and support all of plant life. Hydrocarbons carry the energy fuel and CO2 is the spent fuel carbon absorbed by plants and trees and once again the CO2 is changed back into carbon with energy for food or fuel.