The Moon

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Hello and welcome to Citation Meeted.

podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath, and I'll be directing this lunar expedition.

The Stanley Cooper, the episode.

Okay.

And I'm joined

by our Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Alan Shepard, Cecil Tom, Noah, and Eli.

Oh, I love Buzz.

Yeah, to infinity and beyond.

Yo, Alan Shepard was Tom's age when he walked on the moon.

I'll take it.

I will take it.

And I stopped knowing who you were talking about after you said Enright.

So take that, you know?

Okay.

You noted.

So, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

I'm so excited.

The moon.

All right.

The moon.

So,

there's no way to say this without feeling like kind of an idiot, but format kind of demands it.

What is the moon?

What a vapid question, Heath.

But I guess for those unaware episodes,

like Heath, I guess, the moon is Earth's only natural satellite.

And it's got a pretty strong claim to best moon in the solar system.

First of all, it's called the moon, and the other ones are just, they have names and shit.

So there's that.

Secondly, it's fucking huge for a moon.

It's far bigger than, say, Pluto, which some ignoramuses still want to call a planet.

Okay, hey, Noah, I said it before.

I'll say it again.

If I learn something once, I'm done with the learning.

Okay, Do your relearning something.

Do you do math the stupid way then?

My educated mother just served us nine, like the number nine?

Nothing.

She just served us nothing.

You go get it yourself now is what it is.

That's what changed.

Stop relying on your mom to bring you nine pizzas.

My mom's.

Nobody said there would be pizzas.

Where's the pizzas?

Well, there's not.

That's what I'm saying.

God damn it.

I love the idea that someone doesn't know that mnemonic for remembering the name of the planets and they're just like

heath had a stroke

and everyone else is just playing along

wellness check for heath all right call in so let's let me put this in the

moon's ratio to Pluto is greater than Mercury's ratio to the moon and Mercury is a real planet But it's not just that our moon is huge.

It's also huge compared to the Earth.

It is by far the largest moon in comparison to its host planet, unless you count Pluto as a planet, which you don't, as just explained

because the intelligent designer loves human beings and it's all perfect.

I learned that from Ross Duthat, yeah, me too.

Yeah, he's got a new book about it.

Yeah, gosh, he was on Ezra Klein's show, and I had to listen to that piece of shit.

You don't have to.

I love Ezra so much.

Yeah, listen, but yeah, did he really get in on him?

Did he go really hard on him?

Not hard enough, not hard enough at all.

No, he ran his hand up and down him like a soft couch for an hour and a half.

Not pretty much.

It's cool.

So, how great green is even a food couch?

Someone might ask.

How big is the moon?

Thank you.

Its diameter is about one quarter of the Earth's.

That means that from one side to the other, it would be about as far across as China.

And in terms of its total surface area, it has about as much as all the non-China parts of Asia.

But despite being about a quarter of the Earth's diameter, it's only about 1.2% of the Earth's weight.

Yeah, we weren't sure about the weight until we went up there and then we put a bathroom scale on the ground ground upside down.

All right, smarty pants, Noah, but have you considered that things on the moon weigh only a sixth of what they weigh on the earth?

So it's kind of cheating.

Right.

You measure it out.

That's science.

When you think about it, how that was.

So, okay.

But the coolest thing.

Yeah.

Right.

But the coolest thing about the moon's size, of course, is that its size ratio to the sun matches its distance ratio to the sun.

That is, it is as much much smaller than the sun as it is closer to us than the sun, which means that they have the same apparent size from our vantage point on Earth.

And that means that every so often, if you're in the exact right spot, there's not a fucking cloud, the moon will line up between Earth and the Sun and cause the coolest natural phenomenon I have ever seen, a solar eclipse.

Like when Jesus got crucified.

I learned that Ross do that.

Now, I'm not going to say anything more about eclipses here because I'm probably going to do a whole episode on those if I ever get mad enough at Tom.

Yeah, I was about to say, Noah, did you actually do a whole citation-needed essay in an attempt to make us care about eclipses?

But then I remembered that I've done that with multiple internet fights no one's heard of.

So, you know, class laws and all that.

All right, Noah, when the coolest phenomenon in the entire natural world can be defeated by a mildly overcast day, it is hard for me to be impressed.

Yeah, it wasn't even overcast.

It was just one fucking cloud.

One cloud.

Yeah, one goddamn cloud in the entire It was a cartoon thing following around Noah.

This is a big atheist.

I learned that from guests.

All right, so the moon is also tidally locked to the Earth, which means that we only ever see one face of it.

The time it takes to orbit the Earth, that is 27 days, is the same amount of time it takes for it to spin around.

That is not a cosmic coincidence like the apparent sizes of the sun and moon.

Any two bodies that orbit a common center, which is what the Earth and the Moon do, will impart energy to one another in such a way that they'll eventually become tidally locked.

The smaller one will become tidally locked first.

But given enough time, Earth would slow down to where only one side of it would face the moon and the other hemisphere would never see it.

Though I'm pretty sure that the math works out that the sun will blow up before that actually happens.

Boo!

Boo, really?

Tidelock party was going to be lit.

I am.

Of course, despite what Pink Floyd would have you believe, there is no dark side of the moon.

All of the moon's sides get an equal amount of light, except the small amount that you have to subtract out for lunar eclipses.

So technically, the thing that people call the dark side of the moon is actually a little bit brighter on average.

And even, of course, or the sun's light falling on all the various sides of the moon is what gives it its phases.

I should point out, too, that the phases don't exactly line up with the orbital period.

Because the Earth is also orbiting the sun the whole time.

So the moon always has to go a little bit further to catch up with how far the sun has gone in those 27 days.

Well, if it wasn't back there waxing its crescent, it could catch up.

Yeah, like I don't require a waxed crescent, but I appreciate the effort.

Thank you,

Tom.

Now, I didn't think anybody was going to notice, but thank you.

Now, does Gibbas or Crescent seem more sexual?

You notice?

Oh, Gibbis by far.

Gibbous feels more sexual.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Now, but Crescent's still some sexual.

Say some, yeah, sure.

Everything, some sexual.

Solid point.

Now, nobody really knows who first discovered the moon, but you can imagine it was a real holy shit kind of moment, right?

Just a hundred billion trillion-pound rock hanging right over top of you like that.

But once we noticed it, you got to imagine that it was super handy as a timekeeper for early humans.

You know, instead of being like, our tribe,

yeah, well, there's that, but also like.

No, but like, so instead of going like, hey, so our tribe will meet with your tribe to trade again in 88.5 days.

Sure, hope nobody loses count.

You could just be like, all right, we'll meet you on the third new moon and everybody's within a day of nailing.

Just everyone's dad being like, waning crescent is on time.

New moon is late.

Measure twice, cut once.

Also, Noah, Noah, not for nothing, but I sure as hell hope the first person to notice the moon was also like the first person.

Yeah, right, right.

You know, probably, probably even before.

Stressing otherwise.

Yeah, I would imagine the Australia Pentecines noticed it.

I also think, like, if Tom was back then, he would have a moon that shocks himself awake every eight days.

Okay, but here's the rub, right?

Here's how the moon gets you.

The number of days in a year doesn't match up with any permutation of the number of days in a lunar cycle.

So if you divide the 365 days by the 29 and a half days of a month, you get 12 months with like 11 extra days hanging out, or I guess 11 and a quarter, or 11 and almost a quarter.

And this ends up mattering because it means that if you're trying to count the moons to approximate the year, every three fucking years, your calendar slips by not quite a month, right?

Not even an exact month.

So it makes timekeeping tricky.

Yeah, Yeah, caring about eclipses, check.

Segue to his favorite calendar for nerds, check.

Guys, if he starts talking about how the moon means Etruscans can fold a mirror, we can give him a copyright strike against himself.

I'm just saying.

I was trying so hard to get the Etruscans into the fucking calendar part, but no, I couldn't really do it.

Okay.

Sorry to belabor the point.

Belaboring the point.

How did they know about night?

Well, yeah, right.

But sorry to belabor the point, but belaboring the point is all I've got for you this week.

But here's why that matters.

Imagine you're some like hunter-gatherer times people, and you've noticed that once a year, the salmon run in this particular river at this particular time of the year.

And if you make it at the right time, you can absolutely feast on salmon and you can dry some out.

It can make a significant amount of your food resources for the entire year.

Are we bears in this analogy?

I feel like we're bears in this.

Yeah, no, we were basically bears.

But the problem here is that like the area around that river doesn't have enough food to support people year-round.

So you need to know when to show up up if you want your salmon.

And if your calendar slips by a month, you might show up too early, and your whole tribe starves to death waiting on the fucking fish, or you miscorrect, you know, for that slippage and you show up a month too late, and you starve to death because you missed the best eats of the year.

Yeah, or you get Ramadan happening during the Champions League round of 16, and PSG is playing Liverpool, and you get superstars like Mohamed Saleh and Usman Dembele having a fast, or get deferred deferred fasting exemptions from clerics or deal with weird blowback.

It's insane.

No, and that's...

It's untenable to have lunar calendars.

Yeah, no, that was a problem that early humans had to deal with as well, Heath.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And they still had like, you know, all these tropical diseases to worry about too.

Like it was much harder.

So, no, it's because of shit like this, though.

It's because of our efforts to resolve the lunar and solar cycles that we get our earliest calendars.

You get monumental architecture whose primary purpose seems to be letting people know exactly when the solstice is, you know, when the new year begins, when to start counting moons afresh.

But you also get smaller shit like the Nibra sky disk, which is a relic from 1600 to 1800 BCE that was found by some treasure hunters in Germany and then sold to a series of ever shadier motherfuckers until a museum curator narked on them.

Anyway, it's the oldest identified depiction of the moon in relation to other astronomical features, and it was almost certainly a way of letting ancient people know when they needed to add a month to their calendar.

Just a guy walking around with a little wallet-sized stonehenge.

Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

The only one who can wear an ancient wristwatch is just Eddie Hall.

That's it.

No, of course, ancient peoples had no idea what the giant Seva date in the sky actually was.

It shows up in a bunch of different religious roles in different cultures, but most often it's seen as the opposite or partner to the sun, right?

It rules the night in the way that the sun rules the day.

But even as far back as the fifth century BCE, criminally underrated ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras hypothesized that the sun and the moon were giant spherical rocks and the light of the moon was a reflection of the sun's light.

Elsewhere, Chinese, Indian, and Babylonian astronomers of around the same time were keeping close enough track of the moon to predict solar and lunar eclipses with pretty spot-on accuracy.

See, see, I told you the sun would be blotted out from the sky today.

Wait, why are you making that bonfire?

Well, God, science isn't worth it.

Science isn't worth it.

Right.

But unfortunately, instead of listening to Anaxagoras, pre-scientific Europe latched on to Aristotle, who said that the moon was the boundary between the spheres of the mutable elements, earth, air, wind, and fire, and the imperishable stars of ether.

Not a fan.

Not an Aristotle guy.

No, me.

Not a Socrates guy.

Eh, yeah, he's good.

So, but later Christian thinks.

It's not Earth, wind, and fire, though.

It's funny.

No,

they're pretty sweet.

Agree.

So, but later Christian thinkers would hold on to that basic cosmology, but then they would also turn the moon into like a way station for souls on their way to heaven, hell, or purgatory.

What?

Yeah, it feels weird that there would be a waiting room for purgatory, but what the hell do I know?

You're just sitting on the moon listening to music.

It stops, you teleport, you're all excited, and the music starts again.

Come on!

Really?

Again?

Another waiting room.

You look over and notice that the waiting room for purgatory isn't the moon at all.

It's just Stanley Kubrick's sound studio.

You're like, that was just a second.

Stupid.

Now, back in the Catholic Church's heyday.

Wait, the moon is shining.

Hypothesizing anything other than what they told you to hypothesize could get a motherfucker burned at the stake, as Tom has already alluded to.

So in Europe, people pretty much accepted the purgatory waiting room explanation, but that started to break down with the invention of the telescope and the early telescopic astronomy starting in the early 17th century.

Now, the first record of telescopic astronomy of the moon comes from criminally underrated renaissance english mathematician thomas harriot noah's essays are becoming ancient philosopher mixtapes everybody

ties so when you say becoming

so but along with galileo who was looking at the moon around the same time harriot noticed a curious lack of angels or you know, waiting room benches and magazine racks.

They also noticed that the moon wasn't smooth, which for some fucking reason was super duper important for Aristotelian cosmology.

So all the planets in the sky were supposed to be perfectly smooth, damn it, and a crater-covered, pock-marked moon fucked the whole thing up.

But despite all the steak burning, the Aristotelian ideas couldn't hold up to continued observation.

So scientists started looking for alternative hypotheses.

This is where the green cheese idea first gets popular.

It goes all the way back to the 1500s, if you can believe that shit.

One of my favorite theories, though, was that the moon was ejected by the Earth, specifically the part of the Earth where the Pacific Ocean is now, which is why there's such a big empty space there.

There used to be a continent there, and it's the moon now.

But there were also less outlandish theories.

A lot of scientists believe the moon was captured by the Earth's gravity in sort of a fortuitous encounter.

Others that the Earth and Moon were made from the same spinning disk in a sort of protoplanetary dumbbell.

But to answer the question with any kind of real certainty, it turns out we were going to have to actually go there.

Yeah.

And one day that'll happen.

Oh, in the meantime, we're going to take night break or some apropos of nothing.

Where, where am I?

Dave Smith, you come before St.

Peter to be judged for your sin.

Here is your blanket.

Sorry, my what?

Yeah, I'll explain if it comes up.

Anyway, you are here to be judged for the sins of Jesus.

Is this the moon?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Every freaking time.

Yes, this is the moon.

Now, you are here to be aware of the moon.

Why are we on the moon?

Seriously?

The moon has been on record as the stopping place before heaven since like 1200 AD.

Oh, I guess I never read that part.

Yeah, a lot of people don't read that part.

Well, that doesn't make it any less true.

Now, you are here to be judged for your.

Oh, fuck, cover, cover.

What?

What?

Cover the with the blanket.

Cover up.

What are we?

What are we?

Joshua.

Okay, we're good.

We're good.

Sorry.

Kid with a telescope in Kansas.

Wait, the reason people haven't seen the gates of heaven on the moon is because you hide under blankets?

Oh, a blanket that looks like the moon, yeah.

Well,

that's stupid.

Well, tell me about it.

I used to have to hide like once a year, maybe.

Now it's 40 times a goddamn night.

It's ridiculous.

Sure, sure.

Anyway, you will now be sent to hell for the crimes you committed in life, where you will burn forever and ever.

Got it.

Right.

You're taking this really well.

Sorry, I'm just, I'm honestly distracted by you lightly bobbing.

Yeah.

No, I get that a lot.

So where's hell orlando yeah nope that track

we are back with an all new season of snippies cruising confessions and this time we're going much much deeper join me chris patterson rosso and my co-host gabe gonzalez as we explore queer sex relationships and culture in season two of our hot and hilarious iHeart podcast.

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Good thing you and your friends don't go cruising together, right?

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Okay,

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Great question, Eli.

Because

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Eating grass optimizes your nutrition?

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All right.

Well, so long grass.

Hey, where's Cecil anyway?

Oh, he's inside Sue eating his grass.

Right.

Yeah.

Should we stop him or

it's been like 11 hours?

Yeah, we'll let him finish.

Nice medium rare.

And we're back.

When we left off, a Catholic priest was losing an argument because he couldn't decide if some gray area guy goes to heaven or hell, so he invented purgatory to try to win that argument.

Also, the fucking moon or whatever.

What's next?

Yeah.

So I should admit up front that the current dominant theory on how the moon was formed hasn't been proven, right?

Like it's a dominant theory and the consensus leads heavy its way.

But I think it's fair to say that science is still at a point where we're accepting applications for the answer to this question.

And even within the dominant theory, there's still plenty of room for disagreement.

But this theory is called the giant impact hypothesis, because even when the theory postulates a Mars-sized object smacking into the proto-Earth and completely obliterating it, astronomers can't be bothered to give it a more grandiose title than the giant impact hypothesis.

Yeah, I'm actually more of a get-them-emotionally invested first hypothesis guy myself.

There you go.

So, okay, so the idea here is that around four and a half billion years ago, the solar system was a far more crowded place than it is today.

Computer modeling suggests that there would have been a lot more planets early on, but possibly more than twice as many, but gravitational influences from their neighbors would have slung a bunch of them, probably most of them, out of their orbits and off to wander the interstellar void for eternity as rogue planets.

But not all of those various slingings would just take the doomed planet out of the solar system.

Some would be hurled into the sun, and at least one would careen itself right the fuck into another planet.

And that's what the giant impact hypothesis hypothesizes.

Yeah, it's like how it's impossible to get out of an airplane seat without putting your dick or your butt in someone else's face.

Okay, Eli, you sit on the aisle.

It's very possible.

You just refuse to do it.

It's called paying the toll.

So

the pre-moon objects

in that scenario.

Society.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the pre-moon object was about the size of Mars, and scientists call it Thea because Thea was the moon's mom in Greek philosophy, I guess.

And there's apparently still some disagreement as to how Theia struck the proto-Earth, whether it was a glancing blow or a rear ending or a head-on smack or even a glancing blow that came around tens of thousands of years later and smacked it more thoroughly.

But suffice to say, Theia hit Earth, and when two planets hit each other, it does not go well.

At least not at first.

All right, so after this big collision, the Earth is damn near destroyed, and Theia is destroyed.

But a lot of the matter from the two bodies stay in mutual orbit afterwards.

And from here, the actual formation of the Earth-Moon system goes very quickly.

And I'm not talking about very quickly in astronomical terms.

I'm talking about genuinely pretty quick.

Like, there are some models that would have the moon forming within hours of the collision.

Now, from what I understand, that's pretty unlikely, but it was almost certainly formed within a few decades of the impact.

The moon's doing that thing you do when you fall down as an adult where you have to like spring up to your feet and tell everyone you're fine.

You're like, doing great.

Probably just going to be a bus stop to heaven.

Now, so in the meantime, while they're waiting for the stable system to develop, there was hell on Earth.

and on the moon.

Both worlds would have been covered in magma oceans.

The moon would have been a hell of a lot closer than it is now.

Like hold a basketball in your hand at arm's length.

That's how big the moon would have been in the sky, at least at first.

But so, okay, but the moon would have moved away pretty quickly at first for a couple of reasons.

The main one is the tides.

Now, we haven't really talked about the tides to this point because there's only so much that Tom can roll his eyes before we do permanent damage to them.

But the Earth and yeah, right, yeah, no, I know, I know.

Um, but the Earth and the Moon, they tug on each other as they orbit.

Caliente?

Fuck yeah, it is.

But that tug results in sort of a rolling gravity sink that orbits both worlds.

And of course, being the larger of the two partners, the Earth exerts a much stronger tidal force on the moon than the moon exerts on the Earth, right?

So

where the moon can raise and lower our oceans by a few feet, or dozens of feet, I guess, at their most extreme, the Earth is squeezing and tearing at the rock itself and stressing the shit out of the moon.

And the closer that you are,

the more extreme these tidal forces are.

So early on, the tides were literally repelling the moon oh you just know the earth and the moon are that couple that want to take everyone to their swing dance class it's like we get it thea you guys don't anymore we don't need to involve big band jazz in this

jesus christ

so okay so During this early period, both the Earth and the Moon are getting bombarded with debris from the still forming solar system.

Earth is more geologically active, so it's better at cleaning up afterwards, but the moon wears those scars a little bit more openly.

Now, that is not to say that the moon isn't geologically active.

The Earth's tidal forces are still enough to move rocks around on our celestial sidekick, but up until about like 1.2 billion years ago, it was still geologically active enough to have volcanoes and shit.

Well, I would be more geologically active if I didn't have to spend all my time cleaning up all this debris you left everywhere.

Okay, also, can we say something is still active if it hasn't done shit in a billion years?

Like, there's got to be a cutoff.

Right?

No, but it is actually still active today.

So, the earth tides cause moonquakes pretty regularly, which may be the coolest sentence I've ever fucking written.

Now, of course, when you look up at the moon now, you see these big dark patches.

In the West, we tend to call them a face in the moon.

In the East, they more often call it a rabbit.

Both are really quite a stretch.

But the dark patches that make up the face and or rabbit are what we call lunar maria.

That is basaltic plains that were formed when lava flowed into impact basins.

Incidentally, they're called Maria because the early mappers of the moon thought that they were looking at seas.

So all of the major features of the moon that you could see back in the 1600s and 1700s are named as though they were water features, a bunch of bays and seas and shit like that.

Okay, I see a really bad sonogram.

Like, it's not looking good.

Like, everything's disconnected.

Everybody says they see faces or rabbits, whatever.

I always have to lie and agree because the one time I was honest and said sonogram, my girlfriend didn't like it.

Okay, for the last time, Keith, I am sending you photos and he is almost five.

I still don't see it.

No, so the moon isn't retreating as fast now as it was in the early days, but it is still slipping away from us a little bit at a time.

The moon's orbit is elliptical, so its distance from the earth varies by like 25,000 miles from perigee to apogee.

But every year, the average distance retreats by about an inch and a half.

which means that in a couple million years, eclipses will kind of suck.

So the moon is just doing that thing where it tries to leave the conversation.

It's slowly backing away.

The Earth won't stop.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

No, it's retreating

at the speed of a fucking Midwestern goodbye.

No, of course, much of what we know about the moon.

Yeah.

Now, of course, much of what we know about the moon comes from the fact that we were able to actually go there and pick up samples.

I don't want to go into a bunch of detail about the Apollo missions right now because A, we're too far into the episode.

B, there's at least one future citation-needed episode about the Apollo program.

And C, Tom knows where the people I love sleep.

But

suffice to say, the fact that human beings were able to reach the moon, walk around, drive on it, hit golf balls on it, pick up some rocks, and make it home alive remains one of the coolest things our species has ever done.

And it's so incredible that even today, 56 years after we first managed it, a lot of people can't believe we ever did it.

But we did.

And believing otherwise is stupid because it's provable.

Counterpoint.

Sorry, podcast listener, Eli's microphone fritzed out.

So we missed all that.

Let's talk for like 12 minutes.

Well, yeah, I'll pipe in.

I just want to point out that even on the moon, golf is still boring.

Yeah.

I would play lunar golf, though.

Now, of course, one of the reasons people refuse to believe that we actually reached the moon is that we haven't done it in a really long time.

Now, hopefully that's going to change soon.

NASA's Artemis mission is still on schedule to land people back on the moon by the year 2027,

but that's dependent on Donald Trump's successful stewardship of the government and its finances for a further two years.

So

I feel like we're probably more likely to be using thundersticks to get to the bullet farm by then.

With all the retaliatory tariffs from the moon at that point, it wouldn't make any moon sense.

USA 2027 is just Elon Musk controlling his fiefdom and impregnating a harem.

Do not, my friends, become addicted to government funding.

It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.

Right, right, yeah.

I think that's America 2025.

Yeah, I don't.

So

America isn't the only nation dreaming of returning humans to the moon.

China is planning on doing it by 2030 and they're way less a bunch of fuck-ups than we are.

They still have access to magnets, for example.

There you go.

Right.

Yeah.

And fireworks and everything.

Now, Japan might do it by 2028.

India, Russia, and the European Space Agency all have ten U.S.

plans to send people up there.

So an optimist can still dream of a future with lunar tourism that they won't be able to afford.

But here's the thing about lunar tourism, okay?

The only thing that you need to know about it to know that it's worth whatever sacrifices we have to make to make it happen.

If you could build a dome of like three or four stories, right?

So like a large mall-sized dome, and then you could pressurize it to one Earth atmosphere and you put little bird wings on your arms.

You could flap those motherfuckers and fly around.

And if that does not sell you on the idea of lunar tourism, what the fuck are we even doing here?

I like pickleball.

I like pickleball.

Moon pickleball would be awesome.

Oh, God.

Look, if I have to flap my own arms like a Pavo, I'm not going to bother Paul.

Jesus Christ.

No, of course, the trip to the moon wouldn't be as comfortable as most multi-million dollar vacations.

The trip would take three days, assuming we don't figure out some radically new means of propulsion that doesn't kill people between now and then.

And that's assuming that you don't have to ascend a space elevator first, which you probably would, and that would easily take you five days.

Now, along the way, you got to imagine space would be a little cramped.

The upshot, though, is that there's no weight on your ass because you're weightless.

One guy turns on speakerphone and that space elevator gets fucking beat up by a flying mob.

I was going to say, when the smelly guy gets on your car, you got to wait five days to switch to a different one.

So, okay, so once you get to the moon, you'd have to go from the ship to the moon base, right?

Which would be like your first experience on the moon's one-sixth gravity, which would probably be fun and shit.

But since you'd be coming from zero gravity,

It might not be as liberating as you hoped.

Also, because you'd have to be in a big fucking suit.

Yeah, you'd be like mad at that point because it like

fixed it for you.

Right, right.

That's what I think.

So, so once you like, once they're able to corral all the hopping tourists inside, the next step would probably be a very serious shower to wash all the lunar regolith off of you.

So, unlike Earth's dust, moon dust never has moisture wearing down its hard edges.

So, instead of the nice, round, friendly dust that you get here on Earth, on the moon, you get little tiny fucking barbs of dust that just cling to to everything and wreak havoc on human lungs.

So it's basically a coal mine tour with a taller ceiling is what you're saying.

Yes, yeah.

Fucking just tourists bouncing around inside the dome like dust-covered human super balls.

Right, so that's the upshot of it, right?

So there's a down and an up.

So now on your trip, in addition to flying around the mall with arm-powered cloth wings, you'd probably go on a tour of the lunar surface where you might get to see the Eagle lander that shuttled Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the moon back in 1969.

and was that me back on earth on the

no setup no stamp

but while you were there you might also get to look at the footprints that they left because there's no wind on the moon to erode those footprints i mean if you went early uh you'd get to go until some guy named mike smushed them to protest a pipeline or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, right.

But but any time that you spend on the lunar surface would be disorienting as fuck, right?

So not only would you have to deal with the fact that the horizon is so close to you that you feel like you can fall off the planet if you got moving too fast, but you also have to deal with the lack of atmosphere, which means that things don't disappear into the distance when they get further away from you, like they do on Earth, right?

So, something that looks small and close by might be enormous and way the fuck away.

Even worse, your brain requires a certain amount of gravity to definitively say, yep, that way is up.

And it's more gravity than the moon has to offer.

So, it's really hard to tell what's a comfortable grade and what's a steep drop.

That's what Fed Chair Powell said last week.

Isn't it, though?

Yeah.

But I digress.

When this comes out, he might not be Fed.

Who knows?

But I digress because the more I describe the moon, the less I'm making it sound like an awesome tourist destination.

So in conclusion, let me just say that ours is easily a top three moon in the entire solar system.

Possibly even number one, maybe

not number one, but it's top three.

And I'd give it an official rating, but it seems rude to rate the moon with a certain number of stars.

All right.

If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Our asses should be flattered by the comparison.

And are you ready for the quiz?

I am dying for it.

All right.

Noah.

I'm over the moon for it.

Nice.

Well done.

Noah.

When you do the first Christian Mass in space, they're going to have to change one phrase.

What is it?

Hey,

give us this day your daily bread.

I'm such a new that I have to point out that it wouldn't be that the first Christian mass in space actually happened already.

But

come on.

I know.

I know you're trying to go up there and I'm sorry.

Jesus.

Boo.

That's my answer.

Jesus.

A, give us this day.

Well, Boo on the Christian Mass, too.

So that's A and Boo.

All right, Noah.

After the moon landing, we left 96 bags of piss and shit on the moon.

Why?

A,

Frank War.

B, seriously, that weight was there on the way up.

They could have taken it back.

C,

they didn't.

D, we literally leave our shit everywhere we go.

All right, it was either 96 bags of shit and piss or that weight of moon rock.

E, that was like, obviously you leave some shit there.

You leave a bait.

We're lucky that they didn't like set it on fire so that like the next astronauts didn't stomp it out.

If that's how they figured out how much they had, they should have brought Eli.

They could have just towed the moon back home.

Right?

Tom gets ding-dong ditch on a lunar landing.

Yeah.

Dive back in, fly away.

All right, Noah.

We learned a lot about the moon today, and the moon certainly has been the subject of a lot of songs.

Which of the following is a more scientifically accurate song title?

A moon river bed that was probably lava.

B,

it's all one side because it's a sphere of the moon by Pink Floyd.

Or C,

the mote

of dust

that's apparently very sharp up here.

Mote, because moat

is happening with this joke.

I miss these sometimes.

That's a moat.

Oh,

no, that's not anything.

No,

no.

I was trying to get a chance.

Cecil Cecil did the one, and I can't, you can't, only one person.

That was B.

That was the good one.

Thank you.

D, if the moon does hit your eye like a big pizza pie, you should take some thorazine and lay down for a little while.

Sure.

Correct.

I was supposed to, but no, I'm supposed to be incorrect.

You are incorrect.

Correct.

You're incorrect.

I think we all lose.

I agree.

And whenever

you lose.

However, the winner is Eli.

He's stomping Noah or something.

I want Tom to do an essay next week.

Sure.

All right.

Well, for Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and Tom will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Distance, The No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dad's God-awful movies, A Scathing Atheist, Skepticrat, and DD Minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect us on social media, or take show notes, check out citationpod.com.

And after we're done flaying you, you will be rolling salt for your screams, too.

Excuse me, are there any secret Mickeys in here?

No, this is a staff area only.

And now, are you sure?

Because

I really want to see him.

Does that happen a lot?

Like so much.

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