Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
And what about that fact demonstrates the Moon is a "shield" that prevents Earth from getting hit by meteors? It's getting hit by 31 times as much space rock as the thing you want to call its shield.

If anything, and assuming I'm doing my maths right, Earth gets more meteors by weight for the same surface area.

The Moon's radius is about a quarter of Earth's. Surface area is 4(pi)r^2, the comparative bit that matters is r^2, simple maths of r=1 vs r=4 would mean Earth has 16 times as much surface area and yet it is hit by 31 times as much space rock.

That seems odd, so perhaps there are other factors that contribute to the Earth collecting more.

Still, if I've calculated that right, it indicates that the Moon gets less impacts than I would have thought.
You're going by raw size still, and that's not the whole equation. Everything with regards to a cosmic scale and space scale has to be looked at over eons and eons. Even small things change a lot on such a vast scale.

Do a thought experiment for me. Imagine there was no Theia or other speculated moon formation for Earth. 1.4 tons per year for 4.2 billion years is an added 5.88 billion tons of meteroids that would have other wise hit the Earth. We'd have no atmosphere and no life to record such things, either, since there'd be no barrier magnetosphere for 600 million years to let the main planet form its atmosphere. No oceans, no grass, nothing but another Mars.

As far as why the Earth gets so much more meteoroid tonnage... it's because they count all meteoroids, even those considered to be dust(meteoroids that are basically less than a millimeter in size, this makes raw surface area more important). It's all done with equations and theory, as is everything we're talking about, with regards to this, so it's actually unprovable but is the most likely reality. No scientists nor scientific coalition has observed enough impacts to even actually give us concrete data. It's incredibly interesting because they always have to do stuff like compare crater age on the moon to like kimberlite volcano pipes vs. soil erosion rates and stuff to provide evidence that the Moon and Earth's impact rates line up.

And in recent years they're(NASA) finding that the moon gets impacted more and more than they ever thought or calculated, so I'll stick by what I said. It'll likely change again in a few years, and then again a few years after that. If it pleases Judge Moonsong though, we can call the Ancients' Moon a meteor auspice or meteor monitor. A monument to power over something the Ancients feared, mayhaps. /shrug It's not like Final Fantasy is above using farfetch'd science fiction explanations in their plot either, considering in FFIV the Blue Planet is supposed to be our Earth, and the Lunarian's Planet was the 5th planet and blew up turning into the asteroid belt (which is a "debunked" theory going around for decades now).