Full Moon, Blue Moon, No Moon — What Would the Earth be Like if it Didn’t Have a Moon?

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Last week, somebody asked me what life on Earth would be like if we didn’t have a moon.

Our moon is something we take for granted, but it’s destruction is a trope of science fiction writers. Neal Stephenson starts Seveneves by blowing up the moon. There “used” to be a moon in Richard K. Morgan’s grimdark (think gay Game of Thrones, except worse) fantasy series A Land Fit For Heroes. The Seasons in N.K. Jemisin’s award-winning The Broken Earth series were caused by the moon being put into an unstable, elliptical orbit, resulting in massive devastation each time it approached.

Of course, the destruction of the moon in A Land Fit For Heroes did nothing, but in Seveneves it results in the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The weird and very adult fantasy series The Magicians (I’ve only seen the show) has an episode where the moon is accidentally destroyed and the characters have to prevent the same event.

Destroying the moon would almost certainly end all life on Earth. But what if the Earth had never had one in the first place? Needless to say, this isn’t explored as much in science fiction, and there’s a peculiar tendency to assume inhabited planets have some kind of moon.