Humanity without a moon

Humanity without a moon

I was reading a old Asimov nonfiction science book on extraterrestrial civilizations, and in it he described the development of human farming methods with particular reference to the moon, and the cycles that it corresponded to. He described the development of astronomy as a way of knowing the seasons so that farmers could know when to plant and when to farm. Now this wasn’t anything I didn’t already know, I knew even about the idea that he described about Stonehenge being a way to measure the star’s for seasons. No what I found myself asking when reading this was what would happen to a civilization’s development ,assuming they were roughly comparable to ours and assuming they evolved roughly similar to ours as well, if they had no moon, and also a second question what if they had no seasons? In the first scenario, we have I think the answer in Stonehenge, in which the tracks of stars were measured to determine the seasons, however it would not be as easy or accurate as using the moon as a useful  determinate of seasons. This translates into our hypothetical civilization starving as its agriculture at times not syncing up with the seasons means that not enough food is grown at times. This might have led to even more exact astronomy, because the measurements would have been the difference between life and death. So I think a world without a moon, might have developed astronomy even more than ours did, and have even more exact measurements of stars then ours ever did. So what about a world without a moon and no measurable seasonal difference? This is a world which is very predictable, and requires very little knowledge about when to plant and when to harvest; it is a world in which I think that there would be little reason to develop astronomy at all. It is a world in which astronomy is not important to growing the food, and if it is developed would be developed much, much later. What this means to the hypothetical human or alien civilization that develops on this world is that their knowledge of the stars would at best be confined to the religious and at worst be nonexistent.  It is a world where perhaps religion would not be as powerful because it never attained the preeminence it gained in our world due to predicting the times to harvest. Would this be the same as saying it never developed at all, or that it did not eventually attain the same amount of power as it did in our world? I don’t think so, mainly because religion didn’t get created just because of that, but it would certainly have to follow a different path then it did in our world.

I do think that a lack of seasons and a moon, combined with some temperate conditions, mean that the hypothetical alien or human civilization on this world would not be as advanced as ours has been. This is mainly because developing the higher arts would not have been as critical to survival. This world would not likely have a space program, nor much knowledge at all of the heavens. Would they be as high technology as us, not sure, I specified temperate regimes as the requirement for temperature, but I suspect that even if it was not temperate, the predictability of the temperature regime would still lend itself to not developing too much technology at all. I make a lot of assumptions of course, there could be modifications to this, say the world was as I described but had fairly unstable volcanic emissions, or had a nearby planet which altered the tides, all these could contribute to enough variability at times to conditions for a higher tech civilization to develop, but if not it makes you think doesn’t it? Think about how important the moon and the seasons were to our development as a species, and you can realize from this that perhaps it would not have been around if not for those two important factors.