Me and the Moon

Where will we be without our tether to the universe?

By: Jillian Eckert

For billions of years, the moon has been drifting away from us.

I vividly remember the first time I heard this. I was around ten years old, watching a random space documentary that happened to be on TV. The narrator told me in that deep, dramatic documentary voice that in the distant future, the moon would be pulled into Venus’s gravitational field, leaving Earth to spin out of control without our moon’s orbit to ground us. Even though I certainly won’t be around to witness that, and it’s likely that humanity as a whole won’t witness it either, something about this knowledge fills me with dread. What is Earth without its moon? Where will we be without our tether to the universe?

The scientific answer, if my memory serves, is that the earth’s axis will tilt farther, the ocean’s tides will be out of control, the ice caps will melt, the climate will drastically change, and every coastal city will be buried underwater. It’s world-ending stuff (if there’s a world to end in a few billion years). However, that’s not what scares me about this knowledge that our moon is ever-so-slowly creeping away. It’s the symbolism of it all, the idea that even our moon, that eternal fixture in the sky is not permanent. This heavenly body that humanity has been looking up to for millennium, that has been the muse of so much art and poetry and music, that connects prehistory to the present, will one day be out of our reach.

When I was little, I used to ask my dad to go outside and look at the moon with me. We’d get home at night and I’d just want to stand in the driveway, gazing up at the night sky and pondering the moon. Its magic and mystery struck me as something divine, something beyond a rock in the sky. I love the idea that all of humanity has gazed upon the same moon—in a way, the moon is our one point of connection throughout history. Perhaps, sometime in the distant past, there was another young girl who longed to visit the moon with her dad. Perhaps she also pondered such subjects as the vastness of the universe and the impossible truth that we’re all connected in some way. Perhaps that girl and I are similar in every single way, apart from the point in time that we inhabit. I like to think so.

The moon is drifting away from us, but we can count on its presence for a while longer. It’s up to the humans of the unfathomable future to mourn that loss—for now, we can simply look at our moon with reverence, appreciating the ever-present reminder that we are not as disconnected from one another as we may think.