Our spaceship moon (extraordinarily coincidental qualities and the supernatural).

How likely is it that the same side of the moon would remain facing the Earth, its rotation and orbit in nearly perfect synchronization so that we see only one side?

NASA image of Crater 308 on the far side (dark side) of the Moon

No one knows how we got our moon, though there are some good guesses. Remembering now back to the days when I read Discover magazine pretty regularly, it could have been ejected out of the earth by an impacting asteroid, or captured by Earth’s gravity as it passed through our orbit around the sun, or could have been left over from the formation of the solar system (etc).

But there it is, like watch works, the same side facing us every night, despite us both moving.

The odds must be (ahem) astronomical, like correctly guessing which leaf will be the last to fall from a tree in autumn, or how the stock market will close, or that my car will collide with another on the Interstate.

But there is a last leaf to fall from every tree in autumn, and there is a final number at the closing bell every business day on Wall Street, and every day thousands of people do have auto accidents because they left the house at precisely the right moment, hit all the right lights and had just the perfect road conditions to encounter another driver who also found a path to the same accident.

What are the odds?

Things happen every day that, before they happened, you would say they couldn’t.

I’m not surprised that over the centuries, folks have speculated on some supernatural cause for one side of the moon always facing us, or imagined alien space stations on the dark side.

And so I do not doubt that there are other things in this world that happen to have extraordinarily coincidental qualities that appear to be (and are therefore indistinguishable from, and may as well be) supernatural.

[2014-01-10]

c0

BTW, this is why: Why Do We Only See One Side of the Moon? >

"...since the rotational period is exactly the same as the orbital period, the same portion of the Moon's sphere is always facing the Earth."

c0