Where was the moon in Planet of the Apes?

[DarrenTR1970]

Hello all
I don’t know if this has been brought up before or if anyone else has ever thought of it, but have any of you ever wondered where the moon was in the original ‘Planet Of The Apes’?
If you recall, when Dodge, Taylor, and Landon are making their way across the Forbidden Zone, Dodge makes the observation that there’s luminosity at night but no moon. What do you suppose Dodge meant by that? Was the Earth knocked off its axis so that from where they were they couldn’t see it; or was it something completely different?
If Dodge, Landon or Taylor had said, ‘Well there’s the moon up there, we must be on Earth 2000 years in the future’, then you would have had an almost completely different movie.
I know story-wise the reason they writers probably included the line was to preserve the surprise of seeing the Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie. If they hadn’t then people would have questioned it; ‘If they were on Earth the whole time, why didn’t they see the moon at night or some other familiar constellation?’ By including the line moviegoers were left wondering what planet the astronauts were on and how it got that way.
So I know story-wise that’s the reason the line is there, but can you think of an in-universe explanation as to why there is no moon in the sky 2000 years in the future?
Personally when I saw the movie for the first time on television in the mid-seventies it was around the same time that ‘Space: 1999’ was on the air, and in my 4-5 year old head I put two and two together, ‘Oh, the reason there’s no moon in the sky in POTA is because it was blown out of orbit in Space: 1999’. There were a series of disasters, environmental and/or biological, and in the end someone pushed the button, mankind fell and the apes rose to take over. I know that subsequent sequels went with the nuclear bomb as the reason for mankind’s fall and the rise of the apes but I’ve clung to the notion for the last 40 years or so that knocking the moon out of orbit caused the disasters that lead to the planet of the apes.
So what do the rest of you think? Why was there no moon in ‘Planet Of The Apes’?

 

[T J]

They blew it up! Damn them! Damn them all to hell!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

It wasn't Earth.
What we saw at the end of the movie was just the crashed remains of Mega Maid.

Didn't you watch Spaceballs?

 

[theenglish]

The moon was blown out of Earth orbit after a disastrous nuclear accident in 1999.

 

[The Old Mixer]

IIRC, Charlton Heston showed us the moon at least once in that film.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Maybe during the course of the human/ape war, the moon got Jax-Ur'ed out of existence.

 

[Robert D. Robot]

From my understanding of astronomy and physics, the moon helps stabilize the earth's rotation on its axis and greatly affects variations in the cycle of tides. If the moon was indeed gone (I have not seen the movie in years), its absence could have created conditions on the future earth making it seem [subtly] different from the planet that they were familiar with and helped lead them to believe that the Planet of the Apes was not earth. Apart from a conspicuous lack of moon!

 

[Mudd]

The scriptwriters tried to address this, clumsily, with the remark "Cloud cover every night and that strange luminosity, and yet no moon." What Dodge is saying is that there's a glow that can't be accounted for by light from any moon, because the night sky is always overcast. The "luminosity" is presumably supposed to be radioactive residue of some kind. The idea that the Moon would never appear during the day time during all the length of Taylor's stay is ridiculous, as is the arbitrariness of ever-present nighttime cloud cover.

 

[Ethros]

It was a new moon?

Bit of a coincidence they happened to land at that time, but it does happen once a month.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

@ Dennis,
That is probably the best explanation I've heard so far. Thanks

 

[N-121973]

It was a new moon?

Bit of a coincidence they happened to land at that time, but it does happen once a month.

Well I looked it up on the following website: www.moonpage.com and on the 11/11/3978 which is the chronometer reading on the spaceship, the Moon will be approximately 4.5% full. Now taking into account dialogue in the film that it took them several days to traverse the Forbidden Zone the Moon's phase was approximately 1.25% full with it being a New Moon on 13/11/3978 at approximately 10:45am est. Don't know if any of that helps.

 

[Ethros]

^ Ha, I doubt many people watching the movie would be that nitpicky.
I haven't actually sat down and watched it for years tbh, I did just think though, it probably takes place over more than three days doesn't it?

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Yeah we don't know how long it takes for Taylor's wound to heal. A clue could be found in some of the early drafts/script where there is a either an unfilmed or deleted scene at the end of the movie where Zira tells Taylor just before he heads out into The Forbidden Zone, that Nova is pregnant. If you figure that Nova was 4-6 weeks along, then Taylor was probably there 6-8 weeks. That's my guess anyway.

 

[N-121973]

I was just talking about the three days it took them to cross the wilderness. I guess you can chalk it up to them not thinking through the consequences of relocating the film to a future post-apocalyptic earth instead of an alien planet. Time dilation was another factor about the film that didn't quite ring true. I used the website below and found that travelling at 0.999 of light speed only 33.56 years would pass for someone on earth whilst 18 months passed for the crew, not 2000 years and it was clear from the opening sequence on the ship from the way the clocks altered that they were going quite fast.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?...f4=0.999c&f=TimeDilationRelativistic.v_0.999c

 

[Galileo7]

The moon was blown out of Earth orbit after a disastrous nuclear accident in 1999.

As a Space:1999 fan since I was a young boy in '75, I like this answer.

The scriptwriters tried to address this, clumsily, with the remark "Cloud cover every night and that strange luminosity, and yet no moon." What Dodge is saying is that there's a glow that can't be accounted for by light from any moon, because the night sky is always overcast. The "luminosity" is presumably supposed to be radioactive residue of some kind. The idea that the Moon would never appear during the day time during all the length of Taylor's stay is ridiculous, as is the arbitrariness of ever-present nighttime cloud cover.

Agree. Any possible excuse that the Moon is not seen, but must be there. It would have been awesome if the film had a real answer.

 

[publiusr]

Not unlike in Damnation Alley...

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

It hatched, and this time didn't lay a new one.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

@ N-121973
You bring up another interesting point - Where were Taylor and the others headed? Was it a one way trip or were they on their way back from wherever they were going? The opening dialog and the conversation Taylor has with Landon makes it sound like they knew the time dilation was factored into the journey and that they expected to return to Earth long after the people who sent them were dead. If they were returning then they should have known they were on Earth and that they just overslept.
Which brings up another question - why send Brent and 'Skipper' on a rescue mission if the planners knew that time-dilation would mean that they wouldn't come back in their lifetimes? And how long was Taylor gone before they decided to send Brent? The more I think about it, the more questions it raises.

 

[Relayer1]

It can't be time dilation if the escaping apes were able to return to the 1970's. More like a temporal wormhole.

 

[N-121973]

Planet of the Apes 1968 is one of my top ten favourite films and its one of several that at a pinch I could recite the dialogue to word for word. I tend to watch it and all the extras on the blu-Ray in one sitting once a year, usually in the run-up to Christmas. I can't say I've much time for the sequels though as I find them too bleak.
As you say DarrenTR1970 the destination of the Astronauts is a mystery. Some sources say that its Alpha Centauri http://www.goingfaster.com/icarus/index2.html, whilst others say its one of the stars of Orion. That's somewhat evident from Charlton Heston's line: "We're some 320 light years from Earth on an unnamed planet orbiting a star in the constellation of Orion..." Heston's delivery implies there's nothing amiss about the destination. When I first wrote my previous post I included the list of the principle stars of the Orion constellation but changed my mind and took them out, I'm including them below.

Alnilam - 1359 LY away.
Alnitak - 800 LY away.
Bellatrix - 243 LY away (and suggested by one of the astronauts to be the sun they see in the sky before being dismissed on the grounds that it was too white. In actuality Bellatrix is far whiter and brighter than our own sun).
Betelgeuse - 643 LY away (and the destination for the astronauts in the original Pierre Boule novel).
Mintaka - 900 LY away.
Rigel - 772 LY away.
Saiph - 724 Ly away.

Now with reference to the 320 light year remark there is one possible contender. According to Wikipedia there is a star known as 15 Orionis that is 318 LY away but its brighter than the sun and is in a multiple star system so it couldn't have been mistaken for the sun.

For me its about the time dilation. They're away from Earth 18 months ship time or 2000 years Earth time yet they "only" travel 320 light years. From the opening sequence they've clearly been travelling at a rate of knots for some time already and they've only been gone from Earth 6 months ship time but almost 600 years have already gone by on Earth, which doesn't make any sense. Its why I hunted around the net for a good time dilation calculator to see how fast they must have been travelling for time to go by so slowly. From watching and timing the opening sequence I estimated it as 1 minute of ship time equalled approximately 1 day on Earth.

Of note apparently there is an inconsistency between Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. In the former the year is given as 3978 but in Beneath its 3955.

Other things bothered me was the presence of gravity aboard the ship (okay possibly due to acceleration) but also how suspended animation was handled. They don't go into SA until 6 moths into their voyage, what did they live on? And even in a 1G environment how come when they woke up were they in such good physical shape after spending a year in bed?

I know its just fiction but its fun to speculate