What is moon fever?

Of all the celestial bodies that capture our attention as astronomers, none has a greater influence on life on planet Earth than its own satellite, the moon. When you think about it, we regard the moon with such powerful significance that unlike the moons of other planets which we give names, we only refer to our one and only orbiting orb as THE moon. The moon works its way into our way of thinking, our feelings about romance, our poetry, and literature and even how we feel about our day in day out in many cases. It is not only primitive societies that ascribe mood swings, changes in social conduct and changes in weather to the moon. The physical phenomenon that is directly affected by the gravity of the moon are the tides of the ocean. The tides are an integral part of how maritime life is regulated and the comings and goings of the fishing world in coastal communities. When the moon’s orbit was closer to Earth, it was the effect of the moon that caused massive changes in the topography of the land and on continental drift as well. This reflects the powerful effect the moon has had on both human history and on global geographical history as well. You may sometimes wonder where the moon came from. Was it a planet that travelled too close to Earth and was captured in our orbit? The prevailing theory of modern science is that the moon was the result of a large-scale collision with the still developing Earth early in its development, which caused this large “chuck” to spin off into an orbiting body. This explains the similarity in composition, as has been confirmed by many of the moon exploratory space missions that were conducted by NASA. But this background also highlights another important influence the moon has had on Earth’s development that is seldom recognized, and that is the stabilization of Earth’s orbital pattern. Most know that Earth is not round, but more of an egg-shaped orbit. To be blunt, the earth might wobble. Without the moon’s stabilizing influence, this shape would shift dramatically so the tilt of the axis, that the polar caps would shift dramatically with each seasonal rotation producing climacteric, changes much more violent and drastic than we are used to. A third significant influence of the moon comes from that origin, as it comes from a collision which “ripped” the body of the moon from the developing core of the Earth. Because of this disruption in how the core of our planet developed, the metals that are usually intact in the core of the planet are scattered up and down the geography of the earth in diverse ways. Frequently, the metals of the planet are all concentrated deep in the core. But because of the collision which took the moon out into orbit, metals that have been crucial to the development of our industrial and technological cultures are readily available and easy to use to mine.