What I find unsettling is that our Moon rotates at a the precise perfect speed to make us "see always the same side". From all the possible speed values in the universe, why precisely that one?!
That’s actually fairly common. The really unsettling question is “why is the moon exactly the same size in the sky as the sun?”. A little bit smaller and we wouldn’t see full solar eclipses, a little bit bigger and we wouldn’t see the suns corona during an eclipse. Another unsettling feature is that the moon is moving further away from the earth so in a few million years’ time, we won’t even have full solar eclipses. So now what are the chances that in the 4B years the earth’s been around, we’re alive at the relatively short time period that we can witness this earth/moon/sun relationship?
Shooting from the hip… But I bet it’s actually not that crazy rare for moons and suns to be a similar size in the sky of world that could harbor life. Factors at play: habitatal zones of different stars, the size of those stars, and the distribution of moon sizes for planets that could harbor life.
Out of all the possible numbers, what are the odds? 1 in a billion! Two consecutive 0's! And two consecutive twos! What do you think they mean? And 5 in between? Well 5 times 2 is 10 which ends in a 0. But it starts with 1971, which is only 1 year off from the start of Unix time, which can't be a coincidence! etc.
But to be more precise on what that means, on a long time scale, the rotation speed of one object orbiting another tends to either speed up or slow down until one side is always facing the larger object.
Many other moons in the solar system do this with their parent planet, and Mercury does this with the sun.
It's happening to Earth as well, albeit too slowly to matter.
I had no idea Mercury was tide locked to the sun. What a bizarre surface it must have with one half permanently pointed at the sun and the other perpetually dark.
Tidal locking. All two-body systems stabilize in a similar configuration. The Moon isn't quite done yet, we still see IIRC 59% of the surface on average due to libration.
Ganymede, Europa and Io orbit Jupiter in periods with precise 1:2:4 ratios. Pluto and Uranus have a 2:3 orbital period ratio.
A superstitious person might suspect there were some cosmic hand tuning the celestial clockwork. Perhaps the motions of the planets has deep resonances with our own lives? You can see why astrology might have some appeal…
