Sara Russell

Scientists around the world would be crying themselves to sleep seeing all of their hopes and dreams evaporate with the Moon.

Absolutely.

Because the moon has been our companion for four and a half billion years, life on Earth has evolved to really depend on the moon.

Moths and birds can use it for navigation.

There are plants that flower with the full moon.

I'm thinking particularly of corals as well.

So corals give off their eggs and sperm after the full moon.

That's how they know that that's the time when they all need to synchronise this reproductive event.

So without the moon, they will start to die out.

And that would be

devastating for a lot of ecosystems.

And it would mean that we don't have corals to protect us from tsunamis.

But if the moon suddenly disappears in a puff, there would be this dramatic event where all of this water that's being pulled by the moon, that's suddenly relaxed.

And so they move back to some quiescent state.

Absolutely.

We have things like Star Wars and Doctor Who because we can look up to the moon and we can imagine that it's a world that people could walk on it, right?

And that's the only object in the sky that we can do that for.

No, I love our moon more than any other moon.

How well do we know the moon?

We know quite a lot of thanks to the exploration, like the Apollo program in the 1960s and 70s.