[Andreas]

Yeah, this just popped into my mind, guess I gotta take my medication more often .  What do you think would the consequences be of Earth having two moons? How things such as seasons and other things would be different? And how do you think this would have affected the development of, for example, science?

And lastly, are there any books about this subject?

[Rictor]

We'de have one normal moon, and one deadly battle-moon. You know, lasers, missles, that sort of thing.

I am confident that my claims have a solid scientific backing .

[Bobboau]

Taste the mighty doom of my moons!

[Corsair]

We'd have some messed up tides.

[IceFire]

Different tides, some species would have to be different in their method of migration, things would be twice as odd with a double full moon

[Carl]

is the second moon the same size as our real one? if so, then everything would be way different. if it's like phobos or deimos then it would be negligible.

[Flipside]

The bigger the second moon, the worse it gets to be honest...

Our moon sheperds the axis of the planet and keeps it pointing in more or less the same direction, most other planets wobble a lot more than Earth does. It's that which keeps us within the Environmental 'parameters' that allowed so much life to develop.

[aldo_14]

We'd probably have twice the number of werewolf attacks, too.

[Flipside]

Actually, if they were similar sizes, the gravity tides would probably have ripped the Earth into a Tectonic nightmare to resemble io

[Lynx]

I think the Earth axis orientation would be a lot mor unstable, leading to extensive climatic changes an a monthly/yearly basis.

[beatspete]

Simple answer : there would be twice as many fake moon landing theories.


It would be interesting, one useful thing about the moon being that it stops earth wobbling too much on its axis, hence preventing drastic climate change.  Though i've only really heard discussion about if earth had no moon, basically sayying that it needs one for axial stability.  Though half of the planets have more than one moon in this solar system.  Are they that ustable.
The main thing is, it depends on the moon.  A small asteroid like Mars's moons wouldn't be that important.  A large moon like Titan? Its almost a as big as earth, a binary system could acutally form. And that would fudge up a number of things, including the magnetic field which stops us getting 'toasted' by solar flares.

[Lynx]

It depends how the moon orbits relate to each other. Depending on that it could either mean that the eartha axis gets stabilized or more likely spinning around wildly. As for other planets having mny moons those are gas planets with freaking huge masses..even if they jave over twenty moons like Jupiter it means jack **** since their mass is negligible compared to the main planet.

[Carl]

yeah, because a good definition of the solar system is: The Sun, Jupiter, and a little bit of other stuff.

[Flipside]

Pretty much true, well, it;s more or less Sol, Jupiter, Saturn and 'leftovers'

[Grey Wolf]

Impossible, assuming the collision formation theory was correct, as two moons would have been unstable.

[Flipside]

Yep, the theory is still that the moon was stripped from Earths mantle after a collision with something about the size of Mars. So, I'm glad we didn't hit it twice

Actually, I seem to recall the Earth does have 2 'moons' hang on..... I'll go look

[Grey Wolf]

IIRC, it actually did hit twice within a day or so.  But when they ran the simulation, the scenarios that produced two moons were unstable.

[Flipside]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html

Not really moons as such, but I guess if Deimos and Phobos count, so do these

[Bobboau]

I go through all the trouble of cutting out that clasic sceen and no one even coments.

[Goober5000]

I didn't get it.