SciShow Tangents - The Moon with Deboki Chakravarti - It Was a Dark & Stormy Month

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

“It Was A Dark & Stormy Month" rises from its grave once more to deliver knowledge so good... it's scary!Hank accidentally buried himself alive again, so we are once again joined by Deboki Chakravarti to learn about Earth's little buddy, the Moon! This one's guaranteed to have you howling!Need more Deboki in your life? Follow her on Twitter: @okidoki_boki! There you can find links to the myriad of projects she's involved in!Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Eclectic Bunny and Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Fact Off]Coral reef spawning by moonlighthttps://www.sciencealert.com/the-full-moon-just-triggered-one-of-the-largest-mass-spawning-events-of-2016https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071019093814.htmhttps://www.science.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1145432https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(03)00647-0https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/the-reef/corals/coral-reproductionEarthshine on the Moon is less than beforehttps://gizmodo.com/earth-is-getting-dimmer-1847782399https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/weather/earth-dimming-climate/index.htmlhttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/930069[Ask the Science Couch]Moon drifting away from the Earthhttps://public.nrao.edu/ask/why-is-the-moon-moving-away-from-the-earth-when-orbiting-black-holes-ultimately-collide/https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-happens-as-the-moon-moves-away-from-the-earth/https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/explore/marvelMoon/background/moon-influence/http://www.iea.usp.br/en/news/when-a-day-lasted-only-four-hourshttps://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/11/28/3642932.htmhttps://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php[Butt One More Thing]Defecation collection devices on the Moonhttps://history.nasa.gov/FINAL%20Catalogue%20of%20Manmade%20Material%20on%20the%20Moon.pdfhttps://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/earths-moon/overview/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly competitive science knowledge screamcase. a frightly competitive science knowledge scream case. I'm your ghost for this week, Sam Skulls. And joining me, as always, is mad scientist Scary Riley. Eek! And the scariest thing of all is man's inability to plan for the future. So, this week, yet again. Unfortunately for us, unfortunately for Hank, he has to miss the fun Halloween hijinks.

We have Deboki Chakravarti back with us again. Boom. That was mean. No, that wasn't a very assertive ghost. That was a mean ghost who wants to see your manager. Okay, so this week I have to have another question of the week. What is the best Halloween costume that either of you have ever had? In college, I went through a phase of wanting to do instead of like doing like sexy whatever thing, I wanted to do a hipster whatever thing.

So I did a hipster Cleopatra costume that I was very excited about. I just kind of like decked out in leggings and I think a T-shirt about like having found Mark Antony first before everyone else fell in love with them I think and like some other things that have nothing to do with Cleopatra like the actual historical figure and are just hipster reimaginings of what it would have been like to be her that's great a particular point in the 2010s you're really sticking it to the hipsters just like everybody else was I mean. You were really sticking it to the hipsters just like everybody else was. I mean, really, like every Halloween costume,

it's the stuff that you want to wear on a normal basis and don't actually do. Well, Sari, did you think of a costume? Yeah, I feel like I usually try, if I'm with other people, to go fairly all out on a Halloween costume. I think one of the coolest ones that I did was when my hair was really long

and I had dyed it red. I was Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. And my friend Caitlin Salem sewed together a bunch of fabric scraps to make her dress. And then I like painted on it to decorate it to make it look more raggedy. And I just had the hair

and then I painted myself blue. What was that for Halloween? It's always a good one when you have to paint your entire body. I won't be answering the question. No, you got to answer. Please, you also do good Halloween costumes. I kind of thought you guys would go more for childhood Halloween costumes. So my favorite Halloween costume ever was when I was a little kid,

my mom sewed me like a dinosaur onesie with like a big tail. And I just wore it for like two years. It was like what I wore at home. So there's lots of pictures of me just like as a dinosaur with my big old tail sticking out. And I remember walking around and smashing stuff over with it. So that was probably my favorite one. When you say like you wore it, like it was like not even just a Halloween thing. It was was probably my favorite one. When you say you wore it, it was not even just a Halloween thing. It was like my playtime clothes. It was like wearing pajamas. You get home

and you take off your hard pants and put on your soft pants, except I would get home and I would put on my dinosaur outfit. And I was like four. So it was cute. Maybe five five i wasn't like 13 so you know it was okay so every week here on sci-show tangents we get together to try to unnerve disgust and horrify each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic our panelists are playing for gory and bokeh bucks this episode you can also call it bokeh bucks oh bokeh bucks you've been thinking about this i love the alliteration. Well, allow me to start over. Our panelists are playing for Gory and Boke Bucks, which Javoki will be awarding as we play.

And at the end of the episode, one of us will be crowned the winner. And for this most horrible, awful, and bone-chilling month of all, we'll be focusing on some traditionally eerie topics. But each week, we will all collaborate on an exquisite corpse poem. eerie topics, but each week we will all collaborate on an exquisite corpse poem. And if you haven't been listening, exquisite corpse poems are collaborative poems where the participants take turns writing the next word of a poem without being able to see the words everyone else has written. So now we introduce this week's topic of terror with our next exquisite corpse science poem. Illuminated satellite, glowing, waxing, a bright howl from shadowy moonlight the evening face a morbid veil eerie fright space flight all eyes watching the nocturnal orb sightlessly radiating

from the midnight shroud monthly bloody eye satellite absorbed in its shimmering craters, the pale beasts of night, harsh, waning werewolf phases. The looming traitor shines from orbit, an opaque seer, haunting, skulking suspects, floating patiently, quietly. This topic this week is moon. Sari, what is the moon? So the moon? Used for any sort of rocky thing or minerally thing that orbits a planet, a dwarf planet, or a small solar system body. And natural satellites can have smaller natural satellites all the way down. I don't know what the difference is when it gets to be a small enough rock, if you call it a natural satellite, or you're just like, that's an asteroid. That's a piece of dust.

Yeah, that's a fleck of dust. And the moon's origin story is basically that scientists think that it formed around 4.51 billion years ago. So a little bit after Earth, when there was a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized rock in space called Theia, T-H-E-I-A. And then, because it was a smaller chunk than Earth, as the gravity pulled on each other, then it started orbiting around Earth instead of the other way around, even though the Earth is also influenced by the moon in the way that our planet rotates and revolves. Did you look into why the moon's scary at all? I did.

I think the moon has been written off as spooky because it has been blamed for strange behavior. That's like a time-honored tradition. It's like, oh, that full moon, people are up to no good. And it's possible that this, it is solidly a myth. It's been fully debunked by scientific studies comparing behavior on full moon nights versus new moon nights and things like that. But it's possible that before artificial lighting, like gas lighting, the light of the moon was just bright enough that it allowed people to go outdoors for later and for longer than they normally would. And get up to no good. Yeah, they could get up

to debauchery because they just had more vision as they were outside and probably got less sleep. And when people are a little bit sleep deprived, they a little little nuts sometimes like that probably played into it like the idea of lunacy that came from the the idea of people being wild uh in relation to the moon i think it's interesting though because a lot of the mythology around the moon being associated with like spookiness and debauchery and creepiness also comes from, I think, cultures where Halloween is a thing. So like very largely like European cultures. But in a lot of other regions of the world, the moon is seen as sacred instead. So like the basis of lunar calendars or like the fact that it orbits about once a month around the earth. And like that is a lunar cycle, lines up with like a menstrual cycle. So it's associated with fertility and is otherwise like

revered in other ways as seen as like a very important part of the night sky. And I think that a lot of the moon creates bad things comes from the same lore as European vampires and werewolves and ghosts and things like that. Right. But in other parts of the world, they're like, that guy? That guy's not scary.

Yeah. I love that guy. I agree. Did you look up any moon words? I did. world they're like that guy that guy's not scary yeah i love that guy great did you look up any moon words i did uh so the the origin of moon meaning the orb that revolves around the earth it comes from the proto-indo-european root m e like meh i think which means to measure in in reference to the moon's being used as like a measurement device. So people used to use the moon as timekeeping in like the lunar calendar kind of sense. And that stuck around where it turned into words for month and moon and month kind of co-evolved as words and nouns.

That's wild. Very interesting. That means it's time to move on to the next part of the show. The quiz portion of the show. The quiz portion of the show in this episode will be hosted by Deboki. So today we are going to be doing. Mysterious moon edition because the moon is very mysterious, but also astronomers have found ways to accidentally make it more mysterious by misplacing or obscuring their notes and records about the moon, leaving it to future generations to solve those mysteries. So, for today's Truth or Fail, I will present to you three historical moon mysteries and the intrepid scientific detective work done to solve them, but only one of them is a real story. So, which of the following mysteries is the real mystery? Mystery number one. In the 1970s, scientists were surprised to find that the moon had gotten warmer after astronauts landed on it, but several years' worth of temperature data went missing, leaving the cause of the moon's

warming a mystery until a group of researchers managed to track down a set of forgotten archives containing the missing data. Mystery number two, John Herschel was a 19th century astronomer who created models of the moon's craters using boiled potatoes that he carved and then photographed for the public. But Herschel's penmanship was not very legible, leaving historians of science unable to replicate his preferred potato carving methods until they tracked down letters from his aunt and astronomy mentor, Carolyn Herschel, describing her tips for potato modeling success. What? Mystery number three. In the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci painted a series of

portraits whose subject's skin appeared unusually gray compared to his more famous fair, leaving art historians stumped as to why he would make such a strange choice. Until they uncovered a set of his notes describing and illustrating his theory on what the moon is made of and in particular how light would hit a subject if they were posing on the moon. Whoa, what a weirdo. So mystery number one, scientists hunt down missing data to solve the mystery of the warming moon. Mystery number two, historians decode the recipe of the tater crater. Mystery number three, art historians illuminate da Vinci's moonlight inspiration. What's the use of the potato thing?

So that he can create little model craters to then take a picture of, because you can't take a picture of what he's seeing through his telescope. Oh. So he's like, this is what the's seeing through his telescope. Oh. So. So he's like, this is what the moon looks like. Yeah. Is this just Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Have you seen that movie?

No. No, I have not. Okay, well, it's not then. All right. There's very famous potato sculpting that happens in that movie. Oh, there is? I don't really have questions. They all sound fake to me. Yeah, they all sound really fake to me too.

Lunar warming doesn't seem possible. Yeah, or like losing data in that way seems very silly, but also very human. But could the moon warm up? There has to be energy transfers from somewhere. I don't know if there's some way where the sun could warm the moon

with like a solar flare or if that outburst of energy could warm up the moon in some way or if it would just be particles. The problem is thinking of heat as just atoms vibrating or as molecules vibrating is what messes up my idea of the moon getting warmer or colder because it's just like a lot of things can make the moon shake. I feel like the Da Vinci one seems just crazy enough that he would have thought of it maybe. Yeah, you're the art guy. How do you feel about Da Vinci? I don't know anything about him really.

He seemed like a bona fide kook though. He might look at the moon and be like, hey, what if I had a naked guy up there? How would that look? So that sounds about right to me. So I think I'm going to pick that one. Great. You're going with Da Vinci. Yeah, the potato thing seems not useful for long enough for anybody to try to replicate it.

I'm going to do the potato one because of that. I feel like you just don't have anything better. What do you have? Clay? You don't have anything better what do you have clay you don't have styrofoam you don't have you named something better with clay we've had clay forever we've had clay longer than we have potatoes yeah but he's just a scientist man looking around from his telescope being like what do i got what do i got an onion no potato sure we've got sari down for the potato crater and we've got Sam down for the Da Vinci moon series

you look really proud of yourself I'm so proud of myself I get so nervous about these because I am always convinced that you guys

are going to see through my lies and this time you did not I it was number one oh no it was

the moon warming. In the 70s on the Apollo 15 and 17 missions, astronauts actually set up temperature probes to collect data on the temperature both at the moon's surface and then a few meters below it so that we can learn more about what's going on inside the moon. And so those probes collected data from 1971 to 1977. probes collected data from 1971 to 1977. The measurements from the probe showed that after the astronauts landed, the temperature on the moon went up one to two degrees Celsius. But it wasn't clear why this happened. There were some theories that maybe like there was something about the astronaut activity. Maybe there's something about the moon's orbit that was like weird. But unfortunately, the raw data was recorded on magnetic tapes. But unfortunately, the raw data was recorded on magnetic tapes. And when NASA went to go archive those tapes, only a few years worth of data was archived. For some reason, a whole section of that whole timeline in the 70s just went missing and no one really knew where it went until 2010 when researchers decided they really wanted to solve this mystery. They really wanted to be able to look at all of this data and come to some kind of theory about why the moon seemed

to be getting warmer with the astronauts on it. So they hunted down a set of archival tapes that I guess people just didn't remember had existed that contained the data. And then even then, even when they found those tapes, they still had to extract the data and analyze it. So that took several years still because these are like 70s magnetic tapes. So it took a while, but they actually based on the results from the data collection and also looking at images of the moon during the mission, they came up with this hypothesis that humans actually heated up the moon by walking on it. actually heated up the moon by walking on it. Because as astronauts were walking on the moon, their footsteps disturbed the soil so that it actually got darker,

which then absorbed more light from the sun. It's like as they were walking, there was like the top layer of soil would kind of get disturbed and the bottom layer would come to the top and that was darker. So yeah, it would absorb more light from the sun and that in turn might have slightly warmed up the moon.

Oh, man, we ruin everything. And then for the other mysteries, John Herschel did not use potatoes, but he did create little paper mache structures to like depict the moon that he took pictures of and share with people. pictures of and share with people. This was also partially inspired by the fact that according to NASA.gov itself, Saturn has a moon that is shaped like a sweet potato and another moon shaped like a potato. So I was just like very into like a potato moon at the moment. Did his mom really help him with stuff? So this was his aunt, Carolyn Herschel, and she was also an accomplished astronomer. She discovered comets. She worked with William Herschel, and she was also an accomplished astronomer. She discovered comets. She worked with William Herschel, who was John's dad, and they discovered Uranus together. And I think she was actually like his mentor and helped John Herschel learn how to do the astronomy.

Cool. And then da Vinci did not paint a series of moon portraits, but he did theorize about this thing called Earthshine, which is basically why we can see the moon during the day, like even when the sky isn't completely dark. And it's because like sunlight is reflecting off of the earth onto the moon. And he theorized that this might be what's going on, but he did get like a few details wrong. Like he thought that the moon had oceans on it. And he also thought that like light was reflecting from our oceans but actually it's like reflecting from our atmosphere but uh i do think it's cool that he even though like he got a few of these details wrong he like had this like idea

overall about how how we see the moon something tells me we're gonna learn a little bit more about earthshine all right well we both completely turfed out. We did our best. Yeah, yeah. Well, next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it's time for The Fact Off. Welcome back. And now, get ready for the Fact Off. Our panelists, me and Sari, have each brought a science fact to present in an attempt to blow Deboki's mind. After we've presented our facts, Deboki will judge them and award Boke Bucks any way that she sees fit. But before we start, Deboki will have a trivia question for us to determine who will go first.

we start, Deboki will have a trivia question for us to determine who will go first. When extra lunar materials hit the moon, they often leave behind a bit of themselves. This process of adding materials or layers to the moon from impacts is called accretion. Based on the materials in moon rocks, researchers estimate that about 2.7 times 10 to the 19th kilograms of material has accreted on our moon's mantle and crust. But the earth has accreted even more materials. So how many orders of magnitude less accretion does the moon have compared to earth? So is it like orders of magnitude are like 10 to the power of something? Yeah. So orders of magnitude are like 10 to the power number. So like 10 to the power of something. Yeah. So orders of magnitude are like 10 to the power number. So like 10 to the 1 is 10.

10 to the 2 is 100. So maybe like if you want to just give the exponent, does that make sense? Okay. So why don't you go ahead and answer first?

I think it's 10,000 times less than the Earth. Got four or aka 10,000. less than the Earth. Got four or aka 10,000. I'll say five. Or 100,000. Yeah. So Sam's got five or 100,000.

The answer is three or 1,000. There are three orders of magnitude lower than what has accreted to Earth. The Earth is estimated to have accreted two times 10 to the 22 kilograms of extraterrestrial material. That makes sense. Earth is like a slightly bigger blob, so more dust gets stuck on it. Yeah. It's like, eh. Anyway, who goes first, Sari? I'll go first. Moonlight can set the scene for lots of different things, from monsters awakening to hidden romances blossoming.

In fact, it does a little bit of both for the corals in the Great Barrier Reef every year. Corals are animals. They're little marine invertebrates that live in big colonies and secrete calcium carbonate to make a sturdy exoskeleton. And they often have symbioses with photosynthetic zooxanthellae and respond to stimuli like the movement of tides, the temperature and composition of the water and the weather above the surface. But every year, a couple nights after the full moon in October, November and December, so right around the corner, the corals go through a ritual. They produce what looks like an underwater blizzard with white and red and orange colors swirling around in moonlit ocean water. It's not dead cells like marine snow or a feeding frenzy. It's sex, baby.

Basically, the corals synchronize and spew out trillions of packets of eggs and sperm from their guts all at once to increase the chance of eggs and sperm from their guts all at once to increase the chance of fertilization and let their larvae drift away in the nighttime currents to settle in new locations. As a 2007 study found, the synchronization is because the bright moon is a clear visual cue

for all these coral reef species, even though none of the polyps have eyes. Instead, it's a different molecular mechanism that involves a kind of photoreceptor called cryptochromes, which are a pretty ancient class of proteins found in animals, plants, and bacteria at the very least. And cryptochromes get their names not because of their mysteriousness or something Halloween-y like a crypt, unfortunately, but because they were heavily studied in cryptogams, which are plants like ferns that reproduce by spores instead of flowers or seeds.

But anyway, cryptochromes are photoreceptors that detect blue light and play a role in circadian rhythms in various species, so they're involved in biological timekeeping. And this 2007 study focused on the coral Acropora millipora and found that cryptochrome genes, specifically CRY2, were expressed significantly more on full moon nights than new moon nights. So they concluded that these corals probably get in the mood because of various ocean water factors,

but the bright light from the full moon is the signal to all reproduce together. So if you're snorkeling near the Great Barrier Reef on a warm October night just after the full moon, watch out for coral sex. Yeah, you're going to get coral jizz all over you. Yeah. Get out of there. Spooky. So they're studied in this one plant.

Are they found in other species? Yeah, they are. I think we found them in various species of animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates. So like corals, but also I think mice and humans. Oh, right. That makes sense. And then plants, a variety of plants, I think both like ferns, which are reproduced by spores, but also plants that reproduce with seeds and flowers. And so we think that because they're in so many different organisms, they're like a pretty ancient kind of protein. And they evolved

pretty early on in our sensory explorations of the world. So we like really needed to know what's going on with the moon. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. Ready for me now? Yes. So when you look at a waxing or waning moon, you see the part illuminated by the sun, obviously the really shiny part, but you can also generally see the rest of the moon very dimly illuminated and being a big dumb guy i thought that the dim illumination might somehow be also coming from the sun and like i don't know wrapping around it somehow uh but that is not what it is it is light from the sun as most light tends to be but it is bounced off of Earth back onto the moon in what is known as Earthshine or the Da Vinci glow.

Oh. That's also what it's called. Yeah. Because we heard all about why it's called that. And like all things, Earthshine is quantifiable and there are observatories out there that make a point to measure the brightness of Earthshine every night. One of those observatories is the Big Bear Observatory on Big Bear Lake in California, and they recently graphed out their Earth's shine brightness measurements from every night for the last 20 years. And that process must have been very boring

because they said that after about 17 years of very little change, they didn't want to finish the last three years and they almost gave up. But it's a good thing they didn't and they powered through because they discovered something sort of like unnerving and bad in the last three years of measurements. So what they found was that Earth is reflecting half a watt less onto the moon than it was 20 years ago, which suggests a 0.5% drop in the Earth's reflectiveness. And a lot of that drop happened, like almost all of it, I think, in the last three years. It happened so much so that the team thought that they had done something wrong. They went back and ran all the numbers, discovered they weren't doing anything wrong. It was just dropping really fast. So Earth's reflectiveness, or albedo as eggheads would call it, has been

something that climate change scientists have been keeping an eye on. Any light that doesn't get bounced off of Earth's surface assumedly stays trapped as heat energy, and melting sea ice has already been increasing Earth's albedo. But climate scientists thought that the warming Earth might be more clouds would form, which would increase Earth's albedo and maybe help us out a little bit. But this Earthshine report kind of debunks that idea. And specifically, they pointed to massively reduced cloud cover over the Pacific Ocean as like the biggest culprit of reduced Earthshine. So if you're a witch, a werewolf, or some other creature of the night, reduced Earthshine might make a darker, more mysterious night for you to do your dirty deeds in and make more dramatic moons. But it'll also mean yet another terrifying contributor to the greatest monster of our time, global warming. Man, it's like we're,

there's been this running theme of just how much we are changing the moon by changing things on Earth or just by going there. Whoops, sorry. I was thinking about this when, in terms of how we always talk about the moon in terms of how we're affected by the moon, but it's like the moon's also affected by us. It's our satellite. It can't escape us.

Yeah, we're stepping all over it. We're messing up the earth so we can see it differently. Yeah, maybe now it's going to get colder again. Like we warmed it up. Maybe if there's less light reflecting back on it, I don't know if that'll lower its temperature at all. I would assume so. It'll snow on the moon. Okay. So we've got two very good facts about the moon. I like them both a lot. We have from Sari, the fact that moonlight is used as an indicator for coral reefs to engage

in very dramatic mating behavior. And then from Sam, we've got the earth has been reflecting less light onto the moon over the last 20 years, most likely because the grim effects of man-made climate change on the natural world and now onto the rest of the universe. I really like both of these I don't love that we are screwing over the rest of the universe but I guess it is inescapable and I also just really like that they really wanted to give up on collecting this data

and then it turned out to be very good that they did it but I think I'm going to have to give it to the coral reefs because I love a moon detecting gene that was a nasty trick I give it to the coral reefs because I love a moon-detecting gene. That was a nasty trick. I can't resist a dramatic coral mating that's driven by moon-detecting genes.

Of course you can't. I guess that makes sense. Well, with that shameful performance, I will usher us into Ask the Science Couch, where we ask listener questions to our creepy couch of devious scientific minds. And this question is from our very own Paola Garcia Prieto, who you can follow on Twitter at Paola G underscore P. And Paola asks, why is she leaving us? I assume referring to the fact that the moon is getting farther away is that the case yeah so it's actually been happening for as long as the moon has existed it just has been because of physics and i will do my best to explain those physics so the way that gravity works starting from the very basics is that

anything with mass pulls on anything else with mass like a little bit so like the earth's gravity is acting on all of us but like we are also ex like a little bit so like the earth's gravity is acting on all of us but like we are also exerting a little bit of gravitational pull on the earth it's just negligible and so like the earth and moon are both exerting gravitational pulls on each other and there's like a transfer of energy there um the moon's gravity pulls on earth's oceans to cause an uneven distribution of water called a tidal bulge. And that bulge of ocean water as the Earth is rotating is what makes high and low tides. It would be very different, like the water levels would be very different if the moon

was not there, for example. But in addition to affecting that, because the Earth is rotating and the moon is rotating and the Earth is revolving around the sun and the moon is revolving around the Earth, there are effects on how all these objects are moving around each other too. So as the oceans slosh against the Earth's crust, it causes some friction and it is gradually slowing the earth's rotation down uh about 1.8 milliseconds per century specifically because of the moon it's like a long-term change but the energy doesn't just disappear so some of that energy gets transferred back to the moon making its uh speed, so like how fast it goes around the earth, a little bit faster, but also pushing it farther away from the earth at around 3.78 centimeters per year. So like a metaphor from a scientist that I liked was if someone was

sitting on a chair and like spinning around, the person spinning around in the chair is the earth and you are the moon uh and you reached out to try and stop them then there would be some energy transfer to you whether like your hand hurting or you'd be like bumped out of the way a little bit and that bump is what's happening to the moon as the earth is slowing down the moon is like whoa i'm flying away a little bit and like in a wider orbit. And so we've calculated that 3.78 centimeters per year based on measuring the distance from the earth to the moon with lasers and like doing the math backwards. And we don't really have to worry about it because it'll take around 15 billion years for the moon to stop moving away from the earth because its revolution is exactly matched up with the Earth's rotation.

Wild. If you want to ask the Science Couch, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Ivearelli, at 666fruits, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Deboki, thank you so much for being here with us again. We hope it wasn't too scary. I survived. Thank you for having me. Deboki's also very good at posting on Twitter all the stuff she's working on, so it's all there as well. Yeah, it's now the only thing I use

Twitter for is posting my thoughts about reality TV and then updates on stuff I'm working on. Perfect. That's all anybody should be using it for, I think. If you like the show and you want to help us out, it's real easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron and get access

to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Second, leave us a review wherever you listen. It's super helpful, and it helps us know what you think about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Sari Reilly us i've been sam schultz i've been

sari riley i've been deboki chakravarti scishow tangents is created by all of us and produced by caitlin hoffmeister and me who edits a lot of these episodes along with the horrible haruka matsushima our scary social media organizer is paola garcia prieto our editorial assistants are deboki chakravarti and alex billow our sound design is by Joseph Bounamedesh, and we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing.

Like we've been talking about all this episode, we have put 12 humans on the moon, and we've also put a lot of their waste on the moon. And NASA, in fact, keeps a catalog of man-made items that we've left behind because they're not needed for the flight home. So besides just bags of poop, this list includes 25 defecation collection devices, 15 urine collection assemblies, and three urine receptacle systems, among other things. So the moon is a literal wasteland. I like to imagine those are all just different ways to say buckets.

High tech buckets. Just some like Home Depot buckets that they went and bought. Yeah, truly wild that there's like different amounts of urine collection assemblies and urine receptacle systems. Seems fake. They're all toilets.