Sara Russell

So it's from that that we learned how the moon formed in this really dramatic event and that we can use the moon basically as an archive of what's happened to the Earth over four and a half billion years because the Earth is continuously reprocessing itself.

For example, we can see from its cratered surface that the moon and also the Earth have been bombarded throughout its history.

I can't express enough how devastating this would be to the scientific communities.

Yeah, there's lots of discussion about ways we can use the Moon and there are things on the Moon that we would find useful.

The Moon has this thin layer of helium-3 over it, which is very rare on Earth but also very useful for lots of medical applications.

or the Moon has certain layers that have rare Earth elements in them, which are quite scarce on Earth.

We could put a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon that would be completely free of contamination from the Earth, and we could use that to look right back in time to the beginning of the universe.

And we could use the Moon as a launch pad to launch rockets around the solar system because it's so much easier to launch rockets from the Moon.

So all of those plans would have to be cancelled.

So the moon is responsible for most of our tides.

The sun does a bit as well, but there'll be much less than we are used to and on a different cadence as well.

So that would be really devastating for an awful lot of wildlife that live in that intertidal region.

So lots of things like...

crabs and mussels, seaweed that live in this region.

So the tides play this big role in both bringing nutrients from the sea and also getting oxygen into the water.

I think it's going to change a lot of our coastal lifestyle.

Yeah, it won't be all bad.

Sailing will be a bit safer as well if they don't need to worry about tidal flow so much.

Yeah, I can imagine our grandchildren saying, oh, Granny, going on about the moon again.

I hope we still have samples of lunar rocks on Earth that we can still study in the form of the Apollo samples and the Chinese return samples.