Do We Really Need The Moon? ~ Environment Clean Generations

The number of extrasolar planets that could harbor advanced life-forms could be ten times higher than hitherto assumed. It is thought that to stabilize the rotation axis of a planet, requires the presence of a massive satellite, as Moon is for Earth.
In 1993 the French mathematician Jacques Philippe and Robutel Laskari showed that the presence of the Moon had the effect of stabilizing the axis of rotation of the Earth, which had prevented the large variations in terrestrial climate, thus creating us favorable conditions for the emergence and evolution of life on the planet . In the absence of the moon, gravitational perturbations caused by other planets, like Venus and Jupiter, would seriously disturbed our terrestrial tilt axis.

The two French mathematicians offered an example of the Solar System: Mars, the inclination of the axis of rotation which ranged between 10 and 60 degrees in the past, causing massive climate changes and largely contributing to the loss of Martian atmosphere.

At present it is estimated that just only 1% of Earth-like extrasolar planets have a massive satellite, such as Month for November, which would have major implications on the existence of life in the universe.
And yet ... Jack Jack Lissauer, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center is much more optimistic in this regard. Together with physicist Jason Barnes from University Idaho, and astrophysicist John Chambers from the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism Carnegie Institute, conducted a set of numerical simulations on some "Earth without the Moon," for analysis of such evolution in time of this type of celestial bodies. The outcomes that were reached are enough promising to give us the opportunity to be, in turn, optimistic.

They found that changing the tilt of the axis of rotation of such planets generally occurs very slowly, which provides conditions for the emergence and evolution of life. Lissauer said in a recent conference of the American Astronomy Society that "change in tilt of the axis of rotation of the Earth would have been really great, in the absence of the moon.

But changes to the current value would be produced over billions of years. "This means that life has enough time to grow and evolve in relatively stable climatic conditions, although still unknown what would happen to life-forms when climate change could reach extreme values.