🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Our Moon has been essential in the development of life on Earth, most probably made possible the evolutionary transition from sea to land animals, and played the largest role in ancient agricultural societies’ development.
- The history of the Moon is the history of humans in awe of the Moon, learning to understand and utilize the Moon anywhere on Earth over the course of thousands of years, culminating in the first human footsteps on the Moon.
- It’s as much an exploration of our common past with our Moon as it is an important reminder to think about what sort of future we would like to have with it.
🎨 Impressions
Asking questions about the circumstances we’re all born into is something many people love to do, including me. Looking at the night sky nothing is more obvious than our Moon, but still a lot of people just take it for granted or don’t care. But it has played an instrumental role in all of our lives and even made life on Earth possible in the first place.
Rebecca Boyle set out to write a book about our shared history with our Moon and it became an adventure to read it. I got the recommendation from Jason Kottke’s popular blog and since I’ve had the obviously insane idea to try and become the first human to ever run a marathon on the Moon my interest in our satellite has grown even more. I’ve been fascinated with Space for as long as I can think and becoming an astronaut was my childhood dream. But I never really got into the science and history of it all, unfortunately being told early on that pursuing such an exclusive job would lead to nothing but disappointment. Maybe now is my time to dream again, because space travel is looking like to become a rediscovered fascination of humankind.
It was great to read Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire recently. The story about Apollo 11 from one of the three astronauts who went to the Moon. It left a lot of questions open, though.
At first, I wasn’t sure about this book. It starts off quite dry in telling about our current understanding of the Moon’s conception. Boyle didn’t really convince me that the science surrounding it is to be taken seriously – it’s a bunch of educated guessing and drew on for too long for my taste. It’s also just very hard to grasp for me how the beginnings of the solar system or even the whole universe can be understood in a scientific way at all. It all just is so abstract.
Here and there, some interesting facts like how the dusty surface was such a problem for the astronauts landing on it, or the colorful and definitely not just grey rocks got me fired up again.
Then, I was happy to learn about how the gravitational tides created by the Moon working the oceans to swell and recess were instrumental in the evolution to sea animals becoming able to breathe air. No land animals without the Moon.
Later on I was surprised to find out that Boyle included her own adventures in the narrative while investigating our shared history. I expected a lot of plain information but instead I got a story around it. She went to Scotland to see one of the first human-made calendars, dating back many thousands of years. Humans came up with the concept of the calendar we now have largely due to the behavior of the Moon. Full Moon was essential for ancient hunters to survive, and knowing when in the year they happened and how they aligned with the seasons was a clear evolutionary advantage. Knowledge is power.
Something that many of us might have thought before is how close the female menstrual cycle is to the lunar cycle. It’s not exact and drifts apart very quickly, but theories have surrounded this phenomenon for a long time. The field of astrology deals a lot with emotions connected to the Moon. Emotions which are created by hormones, which in turn go through a cycle in women as well as in men. There’s not yet been any clear evidence for the connection, but Boyle presented a good idea I hadn’t thought of before: On the nights with the sky illuminated partly or fully by the Moon it was probably more successful for the men to use the advantage to hunt. On those other, darker nights of the lunar cycle, most might have been home with the tribe, in bed with the women. Those women who were fertile during that time of the lunar cycle had a better chance of creating offspring, therefore an evolutionary advantage.
It’s not a strong cause and effect situation, but it helps explain it a little bit. It also explains why the human cycle is not exactly aligned: creating offspring can definitely also happen very well during a full Moon. That’s just a small side note in the book, sure.
In other parts, it had its lengths. When I reached the point where Boyle started discussing the influence ancient philosophers such as Aristotle had on our understanding of the Moon, I got distracted by how interesting that field was instead and started reading a book on the history of philosophy, finished it, and then came back to this one.
While ancient philosophers made good progress, there was a long period where nothing worth noting happened. We call it the Dark Ages. That’s another very interesting phase of humankind I want to know more about I realized. We continue in the late Middle Ages with Galileo, Kepler, and the first telescopes to make us able to take a real look at that large object in the sky. All of that builds to culminate in the penultimate chapter which retells the Apollo journey to the Moon. With all the history before it, it made the achievement all the more powerful. Boyle’s style of writing here grasped me much more than the first third of the book did. It’s crazy to think how many billions of people over hundreds of thousands of years looked at the Moon with awe, and then, in July of 1969, some of us finally walked on it. Just incredible.
The last chapter inevitably centers around the future of us with our Moon. It could have been longer, for my taste. These questions are highly engaging to me. What do we want to do with the Moon? Should we go there again just for the sake of it? What about mining its resources, such as vast amounts of aluminum and silicon? Putting the part of our Earthly industries which are too disruptive for our own fragile environment on the Moon because no one there will presumably be affected by it? There’s a treaty about the usage of the Moon, obligating all of us to peaceful intent. But as the past has shown, these treaties are only good until someone’s interests suddenly outweigh the benefits of keeping to it. Then, there’s the spiritual worth not to forget – there were a bunch of people offended by the Moon Landing, feeling like we desecrated a holy place. What to make of this?
In the end it seems so obvious to me that it was important to learn more about the Moon. It’s our constant companion in the sky, after all. Whenever I can see it, I’ll look at it with different eyes after having read the book. I’m very grateful to Rebecca Boyle for having written it.
📔 Highlights
Introduction
The Moon has shaped our rulers, and their conquests, since civilization’s earliest days, but its power over us is far more ancient than even our conflicts.
Part I: How the Moon Was Made
Put another way, if you were standing on the Moon, it would take a full Earth month for the Sun to rise, set, and rise again. This also means daylight lasts for two weeks—and so does the night.
It turns out humans need to feel about 15 percent of Earth’s gravitational force to sense which way is up. The Moon’s gravity is just a smidge higher than this, at about 16.6 percent of Earth’s. The low gravity and resulting disorientation might explain why it’s so hard to walk on the Moon.
Until Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, dotted it with scientific instruments, and brought bits of it back home, we didn’t know about Theia. We had no Earthly idea how the Moon got here, just a series of educated guesses.
Theia may have added a veneer to Earth’s mantle, endowing it with an extra load of elements, like gold, palladium, and platinum, and other materials. These would typically bond to iron and sink to the core, but they are found throughout Earth’s mantle and crust, suggesting they were added after Earth was made.
“Tidal locking” is a boring term for the graceful way the Moon maintains the same face toward us. The Moon actually does rotate, but its spin is equal to the time it takes for the Moon to circle Earth. So it appears to be locked in place.
The Moon’s unusually large size and its distance from Earth mean that Earth and the Moon are a system, working together.
And through complex interactions involving gravity and other forces, this sloshing water transfers energy to the Moon, pushing it into a higher orbit. The upshot is twofold: The Moon is moving away, and the rate of Earth’s spin is slowing down, just as George Darwin figured out.
Part II: How the Moon Made Us
Earth had clouds and rain made of water, some probably delivered by comets and some left over from the planet’s birth inside Immanuel Kant’s spinning protoplanetary disk.
After life diversified into endless forms of bacteria, plants, and animals, the tides ensured that nothing remained at rest, constantly flowing, sinking, rising, mixing, evolving.
The Moon guided the strongest creatures to the shoreline, where they transmogrified into a dazzling array of shapes and sizes. The cradle of vertebrate diversity was the tidal zone.
Water is the most powerfully erosive force on this planet, and, over time, tides weather continents. They sculpt continental shelves and build beaches.
During the new Moon, on the other hand, nights are prohibitively dark, so the men may have stayed home and, maybe, in bed with the women. Women who were ovulating during the new Moon phase would therefore be more likely to become pregnant.
The lunar cycle is also known to affect sleep, through both light and an apparent gravitational effect that scientists are still unsure how to explain. In a major 2013 study, researchers studied volunteers in a sleep lab where they were isolated from artificial light at night.
The word “solstice” is derived from the Latin words for “sun” and “stand still,” because twice a year, the Sun seems to pause in its daily path before reversing direction.
the Moon also experiences something like a solstice. It’s technically a “lunistice,” but very few people use this term; instead, we call it a lunar standstill. While Earth experiences two solstices a year, the Moon takes much longer to reach its highest and lowest points in the sky: 18.6 years, to be precise.
The men who make the time are the men with the power. Just as Egypt’s pharaohs observed the stars to predict the seasonal flooding of the Nile, the Moons of the Nebra sky disk could have turned its owner into an oracle—and given that person great control over the burgeoning early society of ancient central Germany.
The Moon’s role as a marker of time connects our ancestors to us, through untold millions of lunations. The Moon is responsible for the beginning of time.
The Torah, the Christian Bible, and the Quran mention the Moon God mainly to condemn his worship. The holy books do not mention Ennigaldi or Enheduanna or the other uncountable women who made the Moon God paramount in the thousands of years before the God of Genesis revealed himself. But a straight line connects the Moon to the God of Genesis, the God of Abraham, the God most people on Earth worship today.
In losing Babylon, Nabonidus lost much more than his own kingship. He forfeited the divinity of nature. The Moon, the Sun, the sky, the waters were all exposed as weaklings, controlling just a few aspects of the natural world.
Writing around the same time as Anaxagoras, Meton of Athens figured out that nineteen solar years and 235 lunar months are almost the same length: the Metonic cycle.
Part III: How We Made the Moon
While Harriot was content to contemplate the Moon from his roof and publish nothing, Galileo got global attention because he sought it. He wanted a broader audience for his ideas.
Galileo’s painterly views could not divorce the Moon from the divine, nor remove it entirely from myth. Exploration could not kill spirituality. Galileo’s frequent correspondent, Johannes Kepler, understood this better than arguably anyone else of his generation. Though he revolutionized astronomy by giving us the laws of planetary motion, Kepler imagined that the heavenly bodies produced music, harmonies, as they moved around, and he was unafraid to attribute meaning to the tunes. Though his conclusions are scientific, his writing is imbued with the mysticism of the medieval world he inhabited.
“A mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of astrology], resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle,” Kepler complained in one exemplary letter.
They thought the Moon was monochrome, the way it appears from Earth, but the Moon visitors found its landscape full of browns, yellows, golds, even rosy pinks.
The rocks were so obviously not from around here. Most Earth rocks have a weariness, no matter where they are found. They are molded by beach waves and rain, smoothed by wind and time, covered in lichen, surrounded by trees or grass. The Moon rocks are nothing like Earth rocks. They are jagged, blocky, crystalline. Some are inky black and others are chalky, sparkling white.
Most are made up of minerals that are also found on Earth, though one called armalcolite (named for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins) was found first on the Moon and is vanishingly rare on this planet.
And from its unique, disorienting point of view, the Apollo program gave us—all of us—Earth. Viewing Earth from a distance totally revised our thinking about this planet, ecumenically and scientifically. Apollo brought the Moon down to Earth, and it brought Earth down to size.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there!” Anders shouted. “That’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.” All three astronauts stared, and Anders and Lovell switched the camera to color film. All three would recall the sight countless times during the next five decades.
The Apollo missions were the culmination of uncountable dreams since the beginning of time, maybe since the beginning of eyesight. They were the pinnacle of human exploration, the most stunning events of the second millennium C.E.
We don’t often pause to think about how strange the whole thing was, how strange to send a bunch of strapping young men to the Moon just because. How utterly odd that sentient pieces of Earth—because that’s all we are, really, bits of the planet remolded by time and sunlight—made a choice to send some of their brethren away from it.
The influential twentieth-century photographer Edward Steichen once noted that “a portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” Once captured, the moment really exists among three parties: the subject, the photographer, and the viewer. In this photo of Aldrin climbing down, all three are on the Moon for the first time.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
The Moon can bring us knowledge, pure information, for its own sake. And it can also afford us a spiritual experience. It helps us understand time, both the daily rhythms of human life and, from its quiet vantage, the grander scale of the entire universe, to the time before we evolved, to a time before even the first stars existed.
The Moon landing occurred during, and because of, the Cold War. So in one sense it is impressive that the language included “for all mankind” in that (unfortunately gendered) last line. NASA officials didn’t need to say this. They could have included a silver-and-black engraved American flag instead.
Yet in the early twenty-first century C.E., the Moon is widely perceived as a place to build, to extract, to maybe get rich or die trying. Some modern scientists now argue we should use the Moon to move some types of dirty manufacturing off this fragile planet and onto its barren companion.
We have to identify the real reasons why we’d like to revisit the Moon, and what we would do once we got there. Will we go back because it’s still hard? Because we have something to prove, some faceless enemy nation to impress? Because we would like some rocks in the name of science? Because we would like to make money? Or because of something grander, something more ineffable?
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