What if the Moon Didn’t Exist is a collection of speculative articles about different versions of Earth, published in book form in 1993. They were originally published in Astronomy magazine. The individual scenarios are:
- Solon – Earth without a Moon
- Lunholm – Moon closer to Earth
- Petiel – Earth with less mass
- Urania – Earth’s axis tilted like that of Uranus
- Granstar – More massive sun
- Antar – Effects if a supernova exploded near Earth
- Cerberon – Star passing through the solar system
- Diablo – Black Hole passing through the Earth
- Seeing the world via infrared
- Effects of ozone layer depletion
Famous quotes containing the words moon and/or exist:
“And then we’ll sit
in the shadowy spruce and
pick the bones
of careless mice,
while the long moon drifts
toward Asia”
—John Haines (b. 1924)
“Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.”
—Saul Kripke (b. 1940)