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[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 135 points 5 months ago

I gotta admit though that it's a pretty awesome coincidence that the moon is the size and at a distance that makes it look approximately the same size as the sun and allows us to have amazing looking eclipses.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 38 points 5 months ago

But the moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth so it will not be true in the relatively near future.

[-] NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 68 points 5 months ago
[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 42 points 5 months ago

Okay, not as near as I thought, although I did mean "relatively" compared to the age of the Earth.

[-] Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago
[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

Or, you know, me admitting I was wrong but still clarifying.

[-] thetreesaysbark@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago

I mean, and I'm saying this just to mess with you a little more, you could have said that you meant "relatively" compared to anything as a follow up depending on how your replies went XD

[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 13 points 5 months ago

They said "relatively". So it's okay.

[-] NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

I don't know if this is sarcastic, but pedantic and edifying are a venn diagram

[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah it was a sarcastic joke. LoL

[-] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 1 points 5 months ago

Earth will be a desert planet by then (not because of humans).

[-] ladicius@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

And the sun is expanding, too.

May take a while but if you look closely you will notice. Just wait.

[-] Rekonok@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 months ago

I was concerned about my eyes so I asked google before.

Gemini said it is ok to stare at it

[-] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 11 points 5 months ago

I followed it's instructions and glued my eyes open!

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 months ago

What if the earth and moon hung out a bit more and developed some better shared hobbies or something? Can we heal this relationship and stop this drifting-apart problem?

[-] joneskind@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

How many centuries of science progress do you think we lost with this “awesome coincidence”?

A bigger or smaller moon in the sky would have probably made the mechanism of the solar system a little more obvious for sure.

[-] jpeps@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago

I'm guessing basically 0 years, honestly. Both are visible in the sky at the same time, so I'm not really sure what being different sizes would clarify.

[-] joneskind@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

I think too much order lead to a loss of information.

Of course they are visible at the time so we know they are not the same. But the way we Humans generalize concepts around ridiculously little set of data makes me think that most of people must have looked at the sky, decided they were the same type of things that have definitely always been there, and just forget about it. “Nah we good, those are Gods. Don’t think about it and don’t make them angry”.

This is the type of coincidence that is blinding in a way. People naturally give way too much attention to random things. There are literally tons of textbooks examples of events that look totally improbable, but will in fact appear constantly (meeting someone who knows someone you know in an airplane, meeting someone with the same birthday at a wedding etc).

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

we have gained from this awesome coincidence. A solar eclipse was used to prove einstein's theories the first time. This coincidence was exactly what they needed to observe the stars which appear very close to the sun, without the sun's light washing them out, and measure how much their light was bent by the sun's mass. Too big or too small and it would have taken much longer to prove.

[-] joneskind@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

This event might have been harder but how many would have been easier to solve earlier in our history?

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 5 months ago

Only for this specific eclipse. Sometimes the moon is closer, so it completely shrouds the sun and we get to see the ghosty heliosphere of illuminated gasses. Other timed the sun is smaller and we get a ring of fire. Curiously sometimes Mercury gets in the way, but it's so far away, and so close to the sun it appears as a tiny black dot.

But the earth (and most of the solar system) is so tiny it barely exists. Jupiter retains a tiny bit of mass, to the sun, we are microbial. We humans are fleas on fleas.

this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
852 points (98.3% liked)

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