I’ve been looking at the sky a lot and recently it has been interesting to me that we only have one moon. Mars has two moons. Saturn has 82 moons. Like, what the hell that is so unfair! Why can’t we have several glowing orbs of different sizes hurtling at different speeds through our night sky? That would be so beautiful!
But the deal is, Earth’s gravitational pull isn’t as strong as Saturn’s or Neptune’s so it’s harder for Earth to pull outer space trash into its orbit. Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky to have even one moon. After all, Mercury and Venus have no moons. We could have just as easily ended up with none. But perhaps that’s an irrelevant point because if we had no moon maybe humanity as we know it wouldn’t even exist. The moon has shaped our understanding of time. It influences the oceans and our bodies. I read that it even affects a cup of tea. (I read that in a poetry book but I trust poets more than anyone.) So maybe it’s thanks to our one moon that we even exist. And when you think about it actually it’s nice to have only one moon that rotates around us at a slightly different speed than we rotate on our axis and that goes dark sometimes so that once a month we get the chance to look at the night sky and see all the stars there.
Anne Foster 