If you're wondering if the moon will eventually escape Earth orbit and go spiraling away, it won't. One reasson is that it won't have time, because the sun will go nova and destroy the solar system in about 5 billion years. But if that didn't happen, the moon would keep moving away for about 50 billion years, when it would stabilize and the moon and Earth would tecome tidally locked - meaning one side of the Earth would always face the moon. At that point the moon would slowly begin moving back toward Earth. Then somehow it would eventually get torn apart by gravitational effects - I don't understand that part, it's just what I've read.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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I've talked to fundamentalist Christians (I had a weird childhood) who would say that the universe couldn't be as old as 14 billion years old because extrapolating backwards in time the distance from the moon to the earth, the moon would be intersecting the earth much more recently than scientists have estimated the age of the moon to be. And this was advanced as "proof" not just that the universe was far younger than "evolutionists" thought it was, but also that in fact the universe was created in 7 literal days by God about 6,000 years ago.
The flaw in these "creationists'" thinking is that the moon is receding, but it's only been receding since the moon became "tidally locked" (meaning the same side of the moon always faces us) which is a very short time ago compared to the age of the moon, so the rate at which the moon is receding is no proof of a "young universe".