Comments on: Earth's two moons

By: jim80y

jim80y — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:57:00 +0000

No it doesn’t! The same side of the moon always faces the earth.

By: baronkarza

baronkarza — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:15:00 +0000

Our pal Ban Bern knows all about the time when the Earth had 2 moons. What happened to it? We sold it, long ago, to the planet Kababa:
Back when the earth had two moons
It seemed as though eclipses were incessant
Every seven years they were both full
Sometimes when one was full the other was a crescent!
We sold it to the people of Kababa
For the Berlin wall and all the tea in China
For the gross national product of America
For the cash crop of North Carolina
Back when the earth had two moons
Nobody had any money
Nobody ever had a fever
No one ever slept alone either
Shoes were the only transportation
No one ever heard of litigation
There was hardly anybody who could spell
But every body slept pretty well

But we sold it to the people of Kababa
For cars and roads and offices
For Warner Brothers, Exxon and Sony
For hamburger meat and baloney
Ah, but now we’re better off–don’t you see
With CNN on the TV
Child hookers in the Philippines to screw me
Karaoke for every wannabe
We got fast food and condoms and hair spray
We got the right to vote to take all of our rights away
We got life and the means to spend it
We’ve even got the bomb in case we want to end it

But if you ever find yourself wishing
The moon was back in its original position
There’s a rumor that the deal was never signed
And Kababa isn’t difficult to find
Go to Jupiter, take the first right, fly north north north for 30 billion light years
Remember that space is curved and you can’t miss it
Remember that space is curved and you can’t miss it

By: masamunecyrus

masamunecyrus — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 06:07:00 +0000

Well, assuming that the Moon accreted from debris left from a huge collision, there were once billions or trillions of moons. And then those moons merged to form bigger moons. At some point, of course there were two moons. And then those, too, merged to form one moon.

By: Spriggan_Prime

Spriggan_Prime — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:24:00 +0000

I saw a recent ‘documentary’ and the rough patches on the dark side of the moon were due to a large space ship from a race of warring metamorphic robotic aliens crashing into it. There was also a bunch of the robots hidden in the moon dust. Something about a government conspiracy and the 60s moon landing. It was in 3-D!

The explosions were awesome.

By: Spriggan_Prime

Spriggan_Prime — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:18:00 +0000

Needs more plot bunnies.

By: john832

john832 — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:31:00 +0000

Good Lord! Are you one of those people who comment on articles about airliner crashes to say that black boxes aren’t actually black, and are usually painted bright orange to make them easier to find? “Dark” means “hidden” (in addition to “not illuminated”), and the far side of the moon has often and long been called the “dark side”.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:49:00 +0000

Is it the one eating rice cakes on the moon?

By: mccrum

mccrum — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:26:00 +0000

“Which would have been way cool, actually, but expensive.”

Because the rest of the money spent getting there in the first place was relatively cheap? I mean, sure by then they were trying to justify Apollo 17 and why some old rocks were pretty cool but I think if you’d left it to the guys actually doing stuff, chatting with the CM every once and a while would have been enough, Houston would just have had to suffer.

By: Donald Petersen

Donald Petersen — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:15:00 +0000

Somebody will have better information than I do, but I expect the same side has been facing us for a long enough time for there to have been many more impacts on the far side. Surely on the order of a billion years or two.

But I expect the fine folks at MIT and the University of Bern have considered such things.

By: liquidstar

liquidstar — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:06:00 +0000

If I’m not mistaken, (and I certainly may be) this theory is being proposed at least in part to account for the “mountainous” terrain on the far side of the moon. This is interesting, as it is probably due to the automated alien machines mining mostly on the far side. It’s funny to see a spurious scientific theory being proposed to account for this, a distinct wobble in academic circles.

By: Bucket

Bucket — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:24:00 +0000

Before the later Apollo missions were cancelled, some people at NASA wanted one of the later missions (Apollo 20, IIRC) to land on the far side. I would imagine rocks collected from such an expedition would have confirmed or denied this theory pretty quickly.

However, that would have been a risky mission and would have required putting small satellites in lunar orbit to maintain communication. Which would have been way cool, actually, but expensive.

By: t3kna2007

t3kna2007 — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:22:00 +0000

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.

By: nosehat

nosehat — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:11:00 +0000

It seems to me that an enormous impact, like a smaller moon hitting a larger one, would produce a very smooth surface, not a rough one, since everything would be liquefied.

The article says the impact may have been “slow”, “less than the speed of sound”. But no matter how slow their relative speeds, something with the mass of a small moon will still have a huge amount of kinetic energy, and all of that would be converted to heat on impact, and all this heat would be at the region of impact–the surface. It seems like the surface melting would be a given.

By: Glen Able

Glen Able — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:11:00 +0000

Can anyone confirm that the moon has always had the same face pointed towards us? I sort of understand the idea of tidal locking, but I don’t know if that precludes any additional rotation over long periods.

By: Andrew Singleton

Andrew Singleton — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:09:00 +0000

Occum for the win.

Nice deductive reasoning. Anyone mind testing this with a tethered ball and lots of nerf objects to fling at the pair?

By: Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:57:00 +0000

I’ve always heard it used in fiction writing as a good idea that could turn into a story, but isn’t one yet. So, you might offer another writer a plot bunny and see what they do with it. Or you might be reading something else and think up a plot bunny that you file away for yourself to use as a story concept later.

By: MDwebguy

MDwebguy — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:52:00 +0000

I thought the far side of the moon is where the aliens hang out.

That’s the problem with growing up; your most quixotic and unlikely notions are dispelled, one by one, until the day comes when you find yourself yelling at the neighborhood kids to keep off your lawn and you realize you used to be one of those kids.

By: Steve Pankow

Steve Pankow — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Time for a new shirt design!

By: MDwebguy

MDwebguy — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:44:00 +0000

I was wondering about the ‘plot bunny’ reference as well. Thanks for asking!

By: Bradley Hall

Bradley Hall — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:41:00 +0000

What’s a plot bunny?

By: taras

taras — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:59:00 +0000

The dark side of the moon changes, and is sometimes the side facing us. The correct term is far side.

Also, this reads strangely to me – I always thought the far side had smaller and shallower craters (though I’m just going by images.)

By: relawson

relawson — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:53:00 +0000

So the moon is our… dirt shield? ;)

I read this the other day somewhere else and went looking for desktop pictures. I will share the one I chopped up and threw together for my dual screens (3840×1200). and the source image, too…

Enjoy!

By: Paul Giachetti

Paul Giachetti — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:44:00 +0000

I think there’s a simpler solution: Since the side that faces us always, well, faces us, it’s pretty much shielded by either the Earth itself or it’s gravitational pull. If you twirl a Basketball around on a rope and throw a rock at it, chances are it’s either going to hit the side facing out, or the twirler (you).