The Moon
4.5 Ga — Earth Orbit
Time becomes visible through recurrence.
The Face of Time
or early humans, the night sky was a chaos of stars, but the Moon was a reliable narrator. It told a story of birth, growth, death, and resurrection every 29.5 days—the Synodic Month. This cycle was the first 'month' (a word cognate with 'moon'), a unit of time that belonged to everyone. Scattered tribes could coordinate meetings, track pregnancies, and anticipate the seasons. Before clocks, we had the sky.
The Moon
Before mechanical gears, there was the orbital gear. The Moon's reliable shapeshifting gave humanity its first unit of shared duration: the month.
The Orbital Gear
The Moon does not just mark time; it physically pulls on the Earth. Its gravity drags the oceans, creating tides that rise and fall twice a day. This rhythm is older than any biological clock. Life in the intertidal zone learned to tell time by the water's height long before eyes evolved to see the cratered rock above.
The Moon slowly spirals away from us, stealing rotational energy from Earth. The day and the month grow longer. The clock is slowing down, but on human timescales it remains the most perfect machine we have ever known.
A Clock We All Share
In a world of digital time, sliced into nanoseconds and synchronized by servers, the Moon remains a stubbornly analogue presence. It waxes and wanes without our permission. It is a reminder that time is not something we invented, but something we inhabit. The cycle of the month connects us to every human who has ever looked up at night and wondered how long the darkness would last.
The Moon shows that time is cyclical, not just linear. It is a loop that returns, again and again, offering a second chance, a new month, a fresh start.
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