Humans were aware of the cycles that govern our lives long before we understood them. The most obvious cycle is the day/night cycle. Objects floating in space, or orbiting other objects under the law of gravity, have a natural tendency to spin on their own axis. There are exceptions, but our planet is not one of them. Its period of rotation is now twenty-four hours (it used to spin faster) and we experience it, of course, as night follows day.

Because we live on a relatively massive body, we think of gravity primarily as a force that pulls everything towards the centre of that body, which we experience as ‘down’ But gravity, as Newton was the first to understand, has a ubiquitous effect, which is to keep bodies throughout the universe in semi-permanent orbit around other bodies. We experience this as the yearly cycle of seasons, as our planet orbits the sun. Because the axis on which our planet spins is tilted relative to the axis of rotation around the sun, we experience longer days and shorter nights during the half of the year when the hemisphere on which we happen to live is tilted sunwards, the period that climaxes in summer. And we experience shorter days and longer nights during the other half of the year, the period that, at its extreme, we call winter. During our hemisphere’s winter, the sun’s rays, when they strike us at all, do so at a shallower angle. The glancing angle spreads a winter sunbeam more thinly over a wider area than the same beam would cover in summer. On the receiving end of fewer photons per square inch, it feels colder. Fewer photons per green leaf mean less photosynthesis. Shorter days and longer nights have the same effect. Winter and summer, day and night, our lives are governed by cycles, just as Darwin said – and Genesis before him: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’

Gravity mediates other cycles that also matter to life, although they are less obvious. Unlike other planets that have many satellites, often relatively small, Earth happens to have a single large satellite, which we call the moon. It is large enough to exert a significant gravitational effect in its own right. We experience this principally in the cycle of tides: not just the relatively fast cycle as tides come in and out daily, but the slower monthly cycle of spring tides and neap tides, which is caused by interactions between the sun’s gravitational effect and that of the monthly orbiting moon. These tidal cycles are especially important for marine and coastal organisms, and people have rather implausibly wondered whether some kind of species memory of our marine ancestry survives in our monthly reproductive cycles. That may be far-fetched, but it is a matter for intriguing speculation how different life would be if we had no orbiting moon. It has even been suggested, again implausibly in my opinion, that life without the moon would be impossible.

Excerpted from ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ by Richard Dawkins