Yeah I think the impact that created the moon is the main reason why there's life on this planet. That impact also mixed up the heavier metals and liberated enough phosphorus making the composition of earth's crust unique. Also the two metal cores fused and made it oversized, prompting the difference between the rotation of the Earth and the core, making the magnetic field that protects our atmosphere possible...

So yeah, I'm definitely not optimistic about life on different planets....

In the fifth or sixth book of the Foundation series they follow a map to Earth that mentions a planet with huge rings and a planet circled by a giant moon. Throughout the universe, this combination was so unique you could identify the home of humanity among trillions of planets.

It's a weird book but I'm glad I read it.

Well technically Charon is bigger relative to its parent body but, y'know, Pluto isn't a planet...

Due to tidal effects the moon is slowly getting further away from the earth, so we're living at just the right time to see such spectacular eclipses

The Whack theory still has some important exceptions, which is why there’s a Double-Whack theory, which also has exceptions.

“The moon was created this way” is an opinion.

So evangelion was right?

Jokes aside, the probability of moonlike-moons forming in earthlike-planets should be added to drake's equation and see what that begets.

Might explain a lot of the silence, at least for life as we know it

But the moon size thing isn’t a coincidence, thats part of what makes solar eclipses so rare, the moon needs to be at the correct distance when it passes in front of the sun or it isn’t as impressive, and it does do that some times.

WE LIKE THE MOON!

There are some schools of thought that say that a large moon like ours should be a part of the Drake Equation, because without which life would have a very hard time even on supposed “garden planets”.

Another factor that is likely to affect civilizations is an easy source of energy, like oil. We got lucky, in that the evolutionary development in Lignin in plants - and the several million years needed for bacteria to catch up and be able to break it down - are what created those massive deposits of organic matter that became trapped deep in the Earth and modified into oil. Without that oil we are unlikely to have reached several milestones, including transportation, population levels, trade, high technology, and even access to space. And this would start affecting us several hundred years back, with steam engines.

I like to imagine an alien "watcher" with a lifespan measured in billions of years who has been hanging out in our solar system since its formation. It finally decides to contact us humans and tells us that it saw our moon being formed from another planet smashing into Earth billions of years ago. "Yeah, we know - wanna see the movie we created showing it?"

I love that one of the characters in Iain Banks' "Transition" tries to find aliens by spotting airtight -looking vessels (ships, vans,..) during solar eclipses, for this exact reason.

Sometimes I wonder if the moons size / existence is one of the reasons why life is even possible in the first place - Maybe aliens would know what it's like to have a moon a quarter the diameter of the home planet because otherwise life has no chance, maybe life is even more likely on dual planet systems like Pluto and Cheron, maybe that's already too similar in size and life has no chance, maybe the median sentient creature in the universe has experienced a tide, or maybe not - anyways I dunno that much about exoplanets or astronomy in general so every thing I've said might be completely bonkers xD

It sounds more like the moon is just earth spare parts. Like when I put things back together. Always a bin of extras that hang around in the back of the truck, sliding around and what not.