High tides and low tides are caused by the moon. The moon’s gravitational pull generates something called the tidal force. The tidal force causes Earth—and its water—to bulge out on the side closest to the moon and the side farthest from the moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet’s wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

Tides are the result of the gravitational tug from the Moon and Sun that the Earth feels. If we disregard the Sun for now, the Earth’s oceans facing the Moon bulge up in response to the lunar gravitational force: a high tide. The Moon’s 27-day orbit of the Earth means the times at which high and low tides occur change.

The force gravity exerts on a person determines the person’s weight. Even though your mass would be the same on Earth and the moon, if you weigh 132 pounds (60 kilograms) on Earth, you would weigh about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) on the moon.

If the satellite were slightly closer, the tidal bulge would grow. Low tides would be lower and high tides would be higher and any low lying coastline would be flooded. If the Moon got much closer, say 20 times closer, it would exert a gravitational force 400 times greater than what we are used to.

But a bigger moon probably wouldn’t affect Earth’s stability much, Siegler said. It would make the planet’s tilt harder to change, which would mean a more stable climate, which “just means maybe ice ages wouldn’t happen as often,” he told me. But there are other ways a bigger moon could make a big difference.

Destroying the Moon would send debris to Earth, but it might not be life-exterminating. If the blast were weak enough, the debris would re-form into one or more new moons; if it were too strong, there would be nothing left; of just the right magnitude, and it would create a ringed system around Earth.

NASA cameras have captured video of the largest explosion it has ever seen on the moon… ‘For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a fourth magnitude star,’ NASA said. The meteoroid was traveling around 56,000 miles per hour when it slammed into the moon’s surface.

This is expected to occur between 1.5 and 4.5 billion years from now. A high obliquity would probably result in dramatic changes in the climate and may destroy the planet’s habitability.

Many scientists think Earth has a maximum carrying capacity of 9 billion to 10 billion people.

Understanding Carrying Capacity Human population, now nearing 8 billion, cannot continue to grow indefinitely. There are limits to the life-sustaining resources earth can provide us. In other words, there is a carrying capacity for human life on our planet.

An estimate on the “total number of people who have ever lived” as of 1995 was calculated by Haub (1995) at “about 105 billion births since the dawn of the human race” with a cut-off date at 50,000 BC (beginning of the Upper Paleolithic), and inclusion of a high infant mortality rate throughout pre-modern history.

1.5 billion to 2 billion people

Three out of five of the most populous countries in the world are located in Asia. Ultimately the highest population growth rate is also found there, the country with the highest population growth rate is Lebanon. This could be due to a low infant mortality rate in Lebanon or the ever -expanding tourism sector.

This rapid growth increase was mainly caused by a decreasing death rate (more rapidly than birth rate), and particularly an increase in average human age. By 2000 the population counted 6 billion heads, however, population growth (doubling time) started to decline after 1965 because of decreasing birth rates.

Countries in the world by population (2021)

#	Country (or dependency)	Population (2020)
1	China	1,439,323,776
2	India	1,380,004,385
3	United States	331,002,651
4	Indonesia	273,523,615

Up until the beginning of the industrial revolution, global population grew very slowly. After about 1800 the growth rate accelerated to a peak of 2.1% annually in 1968; but since then, due to the world-wide collapse of the total fertility rate, it has declined to 1.1% today (2020).

China is one of the largest countries in the world by population and landmass, with over 1.4 billion citizens and 9.6 million kilometers of land. Overpopulation in China has resulted in the difficulty to sustain a quality of living that a majority of citizens would prefer.

Other effects of population decline include:

• fewer schools, due to there being fewer children;
• a drop in house prices because more homes are unoccupied;
• fewer new homes being built;
• less demand for rented accommodation;
• fewer care facilities;
• less turnover for shopkeepers and businesses;
• fewer sports facilities;

Since Japan’s overall population is shrinking due to low fertility rates, the aging population is rapidly increasing. Factors such as improved nutrition, advanced medical and pharmacological technologies reduced the prevalence of diseases, improving living conditions.

Finally, in October 2015 the government, “to balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing population,” allowed all married couples to have two children, which still attracted criticism on the grounds that the government cannot dictate how many children one can have.

According to Tom, there are three main ways in which the Moon impacts on life: time, tides and light. ‘For many animals, particularly birds, the Moon is essential to migration and navigation. Other will time their reproduction to coincide with the specific phases of the lunar cycle. ‘

An OTEC system in which warm, surface seawater is the working fluid. In open-cycle ocean thermal energy conversion, warm, surface seawater is placed in a low-pressure container that causes the water to boil, turning a turbine as the steam expands.

water vapour

An OTEC system in which working fluid with a low-boiling point is circulated. Warm, surface seawater is pumped through a heat exchanger where the working fluid is vaporized and driven through a turbine, which then generates electricity. …

Geothermal power plants use steam to produce electricity. The steam comes from reservoirs of hot water found a few miles or more below the earth’s surface. The steam rotates a turbine that activates a generator, which produces electricity.

US

Geothermal Power Plants

1. Hot water is pumped from deep underground through a well under high pressure.
2. When the water reaches the surface, the pressure is dropped, which causes the water to turn into steam.
3. The steam spins a turbine, which is connected to a generator that produces electricity.

Most of the geothermal power plants in the United States are in western states and Hawaii, where geothermal energy resources are close to the earth’s surface. California generates the most electricity from geothermal energy.

Geysers Geothermal Complex

Flash steam power plants are the most common. They use geothermal reservoirs of water with temperatures greater than 360°F (182°C). This very hot water flows up through wells in the ground under its own pressure. As it flows upward, the pressure decreases and some of the hot water boils into steam.

There are three types of geothermal power plants: dry steam, flash, and binary. Dry steam, the oldest geothermal technology, takes steam out of fractures in the ground and uses it to directly drive a turbine. Flash plants pull deep, high-pressure hot water into cooler, low-pressure water.

Because geothermal power plants do not burn fuel like fossil fuel plants, they release virtually no air emissions.

An entire geothermal field uses 1-8 acres per megawatt (MW) versus 5-10 acres per MW for nuclear operations and 19 acres per MW for coal power plants. Coal power plants also require huge acreages for mining their fuel.