If you're ever lucky enough to visually experience the moon on a long late night drive; you can easily fall into the movement of awe or euphoria, what ever word you must use to describe the feeling of appreciation that this cosmological event is giving you, by looking at the beautiful color shifts from red-orange to white, or perhaps the cycle of full moon to new moon. We as the observer from earth get to look at this strange sphere floating in space by some long range force called gravity and deduce what external effects are changing this sphere's appearance. The amazing implication about searching the skies to understand the universe, even in Galileo's time, is that it offers us an improved version about how the universe began, and maybe how we can learn from it.
Taking the moon cycles into consideration, we can look back to stone painting records found from the Aurignacian Culture of Europe, C. 32,000 B.C. (found on NASA website). They would use these recordings to help understand the natural cycles of their climate; very useful tool if you're trying to hunt for food, or perhaps to keep warm. If we were to time travel back into early modern man night skies, your only night light was the moon. Without it your field of vision is very limited. This is a great advantage on predators that have a tissue layer called Tapetum Lucidum in the back of their eye; which increases the amount of light available to the eye to give them night-vision. Being aware or predicting when the moon would rise up and be full or new moon has been an important survival skill.
The moon is 238,900 miles away from earth and is still moving away from us each year. Our moon is a natural stabilizer in our planets rotation and axial-tilt, of course it's slowly slowing us down due to the moving away vector of the moon, since the earth use to spin a lot faster during young earth and moon formation. The moon has also probably saved us from extreme or cataclysmic asteroid impacts (too bad the dinosaurs didn't get helped out). Even though the moon isn't being controlled by someone, us earth life-forms are listening to the universe and its elliptical motions.
So the next time you find yourself pondering at the moon and it's beautiful ancient light show, know that information is awaiting for your discovery!
