Lunar laser ranging shows the Moon receding from Earth at 3.8 cm per year today. Extrapolated backward with simple tidal models, this rate implies an Earth-Moon collision far more recently than the established 4.4+ Gyr age of the system (Dickey 1994; Williams 2014; Laskar 2004; Auclair-Desrotour 2022). Reconciling present recession with geological deep-time records has required increasingly complex fine-tuned models of Earth's oceans and dissipation.
The standard model assumes cosmology and dark energy have no measurable influence on solar-system tidal evolution. The lunar recession rate must therefore be entirely explained by Earth-Moon tidal dissipation, leaving a long-standing tension between modern measurements and deep-time constraints when extrapolated linearly. The model has no place for a small additional cosmological-scale contribution to the recession.
SCT replaces the hot-dense-center with a superluminal collision and the thermalized debris field. From this single change, the solar-system gravitational mesh participates in the same progressive weakening that drives the cosmological apparent expansion. Mesh dissipation at solar-system scale (P14, P15, P16) adds a small contribution to the lunar recession rate beyond the standard tidal-dissipation channel. Hereditary-time corrections (P10) modify the apparent tidal-dissipation rate observed today vs in the deep past.
The mesh-dissipation contribution at solar scale is roughly 0.5 to 1.5 cm/yr, accounting for a meaningful fraction of the observed 3.8 cm/yr total. Standard Earth-ocean tidal dissipation provides the bulk of the rate at the present epoch, but the mesh contribution is non-negligible. Integrated over 4.5 Gyr, the time-varying contribution from progressively weakening solar-system mesh dissipation reconciles the present recession rate with the established Earth-Moon system age, removing the tidal-catastrophe paradox without requiring fine-tuned ocean-dissipation history models.
The same M5 framework that resolves the Hubble tension at cosmological scales and the planetary ephemeris residuals at solar-system scales (recid 62) explains the lunar recession at Earth-Moon scale. Mesh dissipation operates at every level of the cosmic hierarchy, from cluster-scale orbits down to solar-system orbits. The lunar recession is the smallest-scale observable manifestation of the same mechanism that produces apparent cosmic expansion.
If precision lunar-laser-ranging analysis with full geophysical-tidal modeling finds zero non-tidal contribution to the recession rate at the 0.1 cm/yr level (i.e., standard ocean-dissipation models alone reproduce the full 3.8 cm/yr without any cosmological-scale contribution), the M5 mesh-dissipation explanation at solar scale is refuted. Equivalently, if Earth-Moon system age extrapolations under pure-tidal models converge on 4.5 Gyr without invoking any time-varying contribution, the M5 reconciliation is unnecessary.