Sunset Fadeth In The West
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. ― from Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare When Earth was young and Moon was new, the two locked themselves in a gravitational dance. The tidal lock forced the Moon to always show us the same face - that's not such a rare thing among orbiting bodies. But the Moon's gravity was then just right to stabilize the Earth's tilt over billions and billions of years - that is quite a rare thing, perhaps unique. This provided a stable enough place for life to evolve and us to eventually come to be here. That permanent tilt gave us seasons of the year. There is not an organism on the planet that is not in some...