Today I desovered that our Moon drifts away from Earth 3,8cm each year. And I remember watching a documentary years ago that said that without the moon, the Earth would rotate much faster causing a turbulent atmosphere, strong blowing winds and unending gales. So my question is, that's the future of our planet?
Good Question! If we negate all human-caused destruction (e.i. climate change or a nuclear war) then we have to calculate the time it would take for some scenarios to play out.
Our sun will eventually run out of “fuel” to “burn” (and by fuel I mean atoms such as hydrogen, helium, … all the way up to iron. The sun will stop fusing atoms together once it reaches a critical amount of iron. It will then explode to form heaver elements.) But, before the sun explodes, it will undergo a period of expansion. The expansion of the sun will render the earth dry and lifeless about 7.6 billion years from now. We’ve got a long time until then!
It is true that the moon is moving away from earth. This is happening at a rate of about 1.48 inches per year. This is known as “tidal acceleration” and is well understood for objects of these relative sizes. If this movement is left unaltered, the moon will eventually reach a stable state where it takes 47 days to orbit earth and the earth-moon system will have sides that constantly face each-other. This is known as Tidal locking: The left animation shows the moon in a tidal lock and the right animation shows it in a normal pro-grade orbit.
This could slow the earth’s rotation down by as much as 1.5 hours (so day’s are now 25:30 hours long!). It is thought that the moon helps in some ways to stabilize earth’s climate, but it’s unclear what effects distancing the moon would have on the climate of earth (some models even predict chaotic variations of earth’s rotational axis/axis tilt). Most of this is very speculative and based on best/worst case estimations but the figures suggest about 1.5 million years until all of this occurs. It’s unclear what effect these changes will have on life.
Good Question, hope I answered it well and gave you a few more things to think about! & We won’t have anything to worry about as long as we become a multi-planetary species! I for one am optimistic that we will. I’ll leave you with what Carl Sagan had to say on the matter:
"… I think a strong case can be made. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze… “
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994.