All my life the Moon has been fucking with me.

[onehandle]

Always the same face. Tonight is a perfect full Moon.

I've been an amateur astronomer since I was a little kid.

I've seen copper moons, blue moons, ice moons, bright as Hell moons.

Always the same face.

Does it take a randomly synchronous moon to spur life throughout the universe?

Or does it require God to make a moon synchronous to spur life?

Time will tell.

[In_The_Wind]

1. ...

[img]

[onehandle]

2. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Run Away!

[Nuclear Unicorn]

11. .

[arcane1]

3. "If We Had No Moon"

It's been awhile since I saw this, but it was pretty cool. I don't recall it saying our moon is necessary for life, but that it played a big role in how life evolved here:

[onehandle]

4. 100% of known planets with life have a big moon, regulating and oscillating elements.

Seems necessary to me.

No wonder it's historically so worshipped, or placed to worship.

[nolabear]

5. Here's a poem I wrote years ago for a moon viewing festival.

A Mostly True Story about the Moon

Once upon a time I held a piece
of the moon in my hand,
a pebble no bigger
than a postage stamp.
It didn’t look like moon;
it looked like desert.
It looked like it needed
documentation, an affidavit
to prove it wasn’t a lie. There were people
who still believed the moon surface we saw
on television was really Arizona,
an American trick to fool
the little countries and the children.
And so I tested it.
It didn’t shine.
It didn’t make the level
in my water glass rise or fall.
Nothing bled or stopped bleeding.
Nothing howled.
The crumb of moon lay
in my palm like a broken off
piece of a dream,
a quarter note parted
from a hundred thousand moony songs,
love’s magic gone incognito.
I tried to remember it
from when I was small and
lay on my back in
dewy summer twilight
staring up and wondering
about jumping cows and green cheese,
and who it would make kiss me someday.
I didn’t recognize it
after all these years,
didn’t trust it, even though
I, too, turned out
more ordinary than I thought I’d be,
further from the things I’d been a part of.
I wished I could take its lonesome self out
and show it, up close, how
the tide really feels around your feet
and what an eclipse looks like from here
and how, if I held it at just the right distance,
it would blot out the rest of itself
in the night sky.
But as I said, I too had grown
a little less sure of myself
than I used to be, so
instead I left it, knowing two things—
that I couldn’t help it any more
than it could help me, and that
the moon in the summer twilight
would never be quite full again.

[onehandle]

6. It is truly space matter.

And truly mind matter.

Never as impressive as it was when we were young.

But constant. For the moment.

[nolabear]

7. While I'm being all show-iffy, here's another.

I did a project around the history of a local town and this was written around the original creation story of the tribes that lived here.

Moon the Changer Makes this Place

There was a day, the people told their children,
When you could fish that slough by hand.
When the salmonberries bent
so low over the water the dog salmon would leap for the buds
thinking they were dragonflies,
when the spring air tasted like loam just waking,
just throwing back the covers of its dirt bed,
the maidenhair ferns and horsetails shaking themselves free of winter
and the cottonwoods seeding the air like late, warm snow.
The Snoqualmie say that Moon made all these things,
Moon the Transformer, Moon the Changer.
Moon changed an angry man into fire
And a fish trap into a waterfall.
He made the salmon go out to hunt in the spring
And come home, fat and fertile in the fall.
Moon the Changer and his brother Sun watched from the Sky World
Through trees so tall they could brush them with their hands
And the people, satisfied, stayed for a long time,
Snoqualmie, Salish, Moon and Sun, all
in this bowl of earth between the mountains.

[Xipe Totec]

8. Full Moon Silhouettes

[petronius]

9. But given enough time, won't all moons eventually become tidally locked?

Although actually, I don't think it's the constant face that spurs life to develop, I think the constant face spurs life to develop space travel and leap outward. See, if we'd been able to view the whole moon, we wouldn't have been consumed by the nervous nagging questions of "What the fuck is hiding back there, anyway? And is it edible? Or does it think we are?"

[MiddleFingerMom]

10. It's enigmatic, ain't it?

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[bluesbassman]

12. Try this on for size...

[cliffordu]

13. Grapefruit moon.....

[pinboy3niner]

15. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie...

Dean Martin, eat your heart out!

[Xyzse]

14. I've never seen the man in the moon

I have seen the Rabbits though.
I lived in Asia when I was much younger, and I did see the Rabbit.

When I came to America, I was expecting to see the Man in the Moon but never did.

[pokerfan]

16. Big Moon Rising

over New Zealand... (in real time)

[OxQQme]

17. Saturn's Iapetus

<pic>

<Overview> http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sat_Iapetus


from A Room with a view: http://www.enterprisemission.com/moon1.htm

<snip> … the ship had long since passed the boundary set by outermost Phoebe, moving backward in a wildly eccentric orbit eight million miles from its primary. Ahead of it now lay Iapetus, Hyperion, Titan, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, Mimas, Janus – and the rings themselves. All the satellites showed a maze of surface detail … Titan alone – three thousand miles in diameter, and as large as Mercury – would occupy … months …

There was more; already he was certain that Iapetus was his goal.

… One hemisphere of the satellite, which, like its companions, turned the same face always toward Saturn, was extremely dark, and showed very little surface detail. In complete contrast, the other was dominated by a brilliant white oval, about four hundred miles long and two hundred wide. At the moment, only part of this striking formation was in daylight, but the reason for Iapetus’s extraordinary variations in brilliance was now quite obvious ….

[Spike89]

18. We like the moon...

[link:http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song]