I’ve always been weirdly obsessed with the question of how life on earth would have evolved differently if there had been no moon. So I was delighted to stumble across this fragment of an essay by Isamov from the early seventies called The Triple Triumph of the Moon. His most provocative conclusion: land-based life might have never have evolved without the moon:

Life spread outward into the rims of the ocean, where the

sea water rose up against the continental slopes and then fell

back twice each day. And thousands of species of seaweed

and worms and crustaceans and molluscs and fish rose and

fell with those tides. Some were exposed on shore as the sea

retreated, and of those a very few survived, because they

happened, for some reason, to be the best able to withstand

the nightmare of land existence until the healing, life-giving

water returned.

Species adapted to the temporary endurance of dry land



developed, and the continuing pressure of competitor saw



to it that there was survival value to be gained in developing



the capacity to withstand dry-land conditions for longer and



ever-longer periods.

Eventually species developed that could remain on land



indefinitely…

And of course the tides are the product of the Moon. The



Sun, to be sure, also produces tides, nearly half the size of



those produced by the Moon today, but that smaller to-and-fro



wash of salt water would represent a smaller drive towards



land and might have led to the colonisation of the



continents much later in time, if at all.