Orrin Judd emails me with a link to a very nice (and long) essay in the Atlantic on exploring space from your computer.

I haven’t read the whole thing, but glancing over it, this paragraph jumped out at me:

A ghostly mass of battered rock, Earth’s satellite is an archetypal solar-system object, with surface features echoing those of many of the planets and moons arrayed in far-flung archipelagos around the Sun. But it’s much more than that?at least in the human context. The longer one considers it, the more its tidal influence grows. Without that luminescent lure would there even have been a pull to leave this planet?

The Moon is much more than that. Without it, we might not have developed the mathematics needed to get us to it. But more fundamentally, it’s possible that we wouldn’t exist at all–without the tides to periodically strand creatures in the shallows, none of them might have ever transitioned from the ocean to the land.

I remember reading an essay by Asimov many years ago, in which he described all the ways that the Moon might have been critical to the development of both life in general, and to intelligent life, and our own development in particular. In fact, I believe that he argued that such a large secondary body might be a necessary prerequisite for LAWKI (at least for it to develop naturally), and that this added one more factor to the Drake equation, further narrowing the odds of finding company in the universe.