Tom recently passed along a few notes about a theory that a large body striking the Earth formed the Moon, when a large piece broke off and stayed in orbit.
I’m not sure why there’s any doubt about this. It’s pretty easy to prove that’s what happened.
The moon has a decaying orbit. Over time, the moon’s average distance from the earth is increasing. Eventually, the moon will break away altogether. (Whether this will be accelerated by explosions in the nuclear waste dumps on the far side remains to be seen; that’s nearly seven years overdue at this point.)
Following the trend backward then, you can see that the Moon must have been closer to the Earth at one time. Follow it far enough and you’ll eventually discover that some 65 million years ago, the average distance between the Earth and the Moon was about 10 feet.
This coincidentally is why the dinosaurs are extinct. They got clobbered.
(I’m not sure where that comes from, I don’t think it’s a Blair original.)
Ponch being Ponch, he wondered if it might be the other way around. Why couldn’t it be that the Earth broke off from the Moon?
Well, as Einstein would tell you, it’s all relative. Specifically, it would be his older cousin, the well-known baseball player, Victor Gahverguen. Victor got his start at baseball at the age of six, playing in the streets of Rock Island Illinois. By age 10, Victor had put so many baseballs through so many windows that his father, Paul Phillip Gahverguen decided he’d be better off just opening his own window company (I’m sure many of you are aware of the Paul Phillip Gahverguen, or PPG for short). By the time Victor was eligible to play baseball in High School, his glass shattering record had gone to new heights, making well known throughout Illinois that if something was broken, it was probably something to do with Victor.
So the question of whether the Moon broke away from the Earth or vice versa really is relative. Either way, Victor was probably involved.