Goodbye to an Old Friend

The moon has been an old friend to the Earth for a long time now. Controlling tides, helping to oxygenate the oceans for the many sea creatures, the moon has been a necessary ally. But that alliance is very slowly slipping away. At a rate of about 4 cm per year to be exact. A fact we know courtesy of the reflectors installed during the Apollo mission. The distortion in the Earth's shape caused by these tides exerts a force on the moon. A slight force, to be sure, but tangible nonetheless. At the same time, this mass also slows the Earth's rotation. From here, conservation of angular momentum takes over, and, since the Earth's angular momentum is decreasing (in other words, our days are getting longer), the Moon's angular momentum has to increase. As a result, the Moon is moving away.

            This got me thinking. If the moon is moving away from the Earth, then that means it used to be closer right? There is a law in Physics known as the inverse square law which says that when you half the distance of something, you quadruple the attraction. A couple of thousand years ago that wouldn't make a big difference. If you want to tell me that the earth is millions or billions of years old, you had better get your calculator because it makes for a serious problem. If you bring the moon back in closer, it would cause trouble because the moon causes the tides. If you bring the moon back in a couple of million years ago, the tides would have been so high that it would have drowned everything on earth twice a day. Everybody knows that you can only drown comfortably once a day. If you want to tell me that the dinosaurs lived 70 million years ago, then I know what happened to them. They got sick of drowning twice a day! Man, they quit! They gave up! They said, "This evolving is too hard; I'm not going to do this anymore!" The simple fact is: the earth cannot be billions of years old.