Lunar laser ranging shows the Moon is receding from Earth at about 3.8 cm per year today, a rate that, if extrapolated backward with simple tidal models, would imply an Earth–Moon collision far more recently than the well-established 4.4+ Gyr age of the system (Dickey et al. 1994; Williams et al. 2014). ΛCDM assumes that cosmology and dark energy have no measurable influence on Solar System tidal evolution, so reconciling the present recession rate with geological and paleontological records has required increasingly complex, fine-tuned models of Earth’s oceans and dissipation, leaving a long-standing tension between straightforward tidal theory, precise modern measurements, and deep-time constraints (Laskar et al. 2004; Auclair-Desrotour et al. 2022).