Episode 446
===

[00:00:00] John F Kennedy: For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond. 

[00:00:08] John Mulnix: This is the Space Shot, episode 446. The Lunar Era, part One, myths to Missiles. I'm John Niks. Neil Postman, the American author and cultural critic once wrote that no one can claim adequate knowledge of a subject. [00:00:30] Unless one knows how such knowledge came to be, and I think it's important that we have as much background knowledge about our moon and its impact on human civilization as possible.

[00:00:41] John Mulnix: As humans prepare to go back to this world for the first time since Apollo 17. That's why this series begins, not with rockets or astronauts, but with some of the stories and myths that are part of human history, because long before it was a destination. The Moon was a mirror [00:01:00] for humanity.

[00:01:11] Rebecca Boyle: I'm Rebecca Boyle. I'm a science journalist and author of a book called Our Moon, how Earth's Celestial Companion transformed the Planet Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, which is a very wordy subtitle in the uk. The subtitle is just a Human history, which it's a little more concise. I also write [00:01:30] for magazines.

[00:01:31] Rebecca Boyle: Usually I'm a contributing editor at Scientific American and a contributing writer at Quanta, and I write for the New York Times and the Atlantic and other publications. 

[00:01:42] John Mulnix: Just a quick note here. Rebecca's book is a great read, and the first few chapters of the book have an awesome look at the Moon's geological history and the various theories as to how it formed, especially for those of us that aren't geologists, chemists, or scientists.

[00:01:58] John Mulnix: As cool as it would be to dive into [00:02:00] the geological history of how the moon formed. That's a topic for another series. After we wrap up this five part, look at the cultural impact of the moon. 

[00:02:11] Rebecca Boyle: So it's kind of a history of our relationship with the moon through time, from the formation of the moon and the earth system to the origin of life.

[00:02:21] Rebecca Boyle: On Earth and the evolution of complex life, which is driven by lunar tides and all the way through the, you know, beginning of [00:02:30] human history and paleo history and human culture up to now, and the Apollo missions and our efforts to go back up there.

[00:02:41] Rebecca Boyle: Every continent on earth, every culture that has ever existed has had stories about the moon and mythologies around its presence in the sky seems to be the same size as the sun, which is why we have, you know, solar eclipses and, um, it's the, you know, it changes [00:03:00] every night. Everybody who's ever lived has seen it.

[00:03:02] Rebecca Boyle: And that's one thing I find really special about it. Like, you can't say that about. Really anything else about this planet. It's not true of the oceans or of, you know, mountains or even of snow or of deserts like that. Not every human who's ever lived has seen all of those things, but everyone who's ever lived, who has had sight, has seen the moon and how it changes over time.

[00:03:26] Rebecca Boyle: And so I think it became a really powerful symbol for people at the very, [00:03:30] very beginning of. Of human awareness, and I think that's true because we know other animals are aware of it too, and. We don't know if they are as complex as we are in terms of their societies and their ability to communicate and their ability to plan.

[00:03:44] Rebecca Boyle: Um, but we know the fact that they pay attention to it and use it tells us a lot about how far back that relationship really goes for us. And I think for a lot of people it's. It's both a practical sort of tool and also [00:04:00] becomes a more spiritual guide. And I think those things are actually really pretty closely linked in all of history in all of these cultures that have, have seen the moon and then worshiped the moon or regarded the moon in some way.

[00:04:13] Rebecca Boyle: They've also used it. For practical purposes. And um, when I was trying to write this book, I was trying to think about how far back can I really go in history and like what is the root of all these ideas and all these connections that we have to the moon. And I was [00:04:30] trying to find, you know, the oldest evidence and archeology or the oldest stories maybe in history and written records that survive to now.

[00:04:38] Rebecca Boyle: Um, and the moon ends up being a really primary character in a lot of those narratives. And, um, it sort of plays that, that dual role of, of, you know, myth and creation story and, you know, nighttime companion, but also like calendar maker and captain of time [00:05:00] and sort of a more, you know, utilitarian perspective.

[00:05:05] Rebecca Boyle: There are biological rhythms that the moon drives. There is a circa lunar rhythm, just like there's a circa and circadian rhythm that we have. And circa dian just means like around the day. Um, and so circa lunar is like around the moon, around the lunar cycle, and we know that there are genes that code for that in marine organisms, and I think they probably exist in other animals [00:05:30] too.

[00:05:30] Rebecca Boyle: Just that no one has looked for them yet. 

[00:05:34] John Mulnix: The moon wasn't just a mystery in the sky. It was humanity's first clock animals and people alike lived by its rhythms long before we calculated hours and minutes. But the moon as a timekeeper had a problem, a lunar cycle. Going from New Moon to New Moon is about 29 and a half days, 12 Lunar cycles gives us about [00:06:00] 354 days.

[00:06:01] John Mulnix: The solar year is around 365 days. Seasons slipped out of sink and empires can't be slipping out of sink. 

[00:06:12] Rebecca Boyle: I think. So, I think it loses our connection to the broader solar system. You know, we, we can, we don't have to look out at night anymore to figure out where we are. And I think there's something sort of fundamental that we lose when we don't.

[00:06:29] Rebecca Boyle: [00:06:30] Maintain that connection. Um, you know, the first person to really divorce the moon from time is, is Julius Caesar. And this is, you know, 2000 years ago, um, he's, he realizes that 'cause there is a fundamental problem with using the moon as a timekeeper and as a way of ordering time, which is that it does not have the same.

[00:06:51] Rebecca Boyle: Number of days in its calendar and its full, you know, yearly rotation that the sun does. So there's like about a 12 day difference that [00:07:00] there are 354 days in 12 lunar cycles, 12 moons 12 months, and there are 365.25 days in a solar year. So after a couple years, you're pretty off. If you only use the moon to count your months and you know, it'd be off by weeks.

[00:07:16] Rebecca Boyle: And so. By the time of Julius Caesar's, you know, dictatorship, when he becomes emperor of Rome, he, the empire is huge. You know, Rome itself is physically very large, and so there are lots of provinces to visit, and [00:07:30] there would be these calendar operators in Rome working with the moon and working with the sun to figure out the seasons and the timing of harvest and timing of festivals and all these different things.

[00:07:40] Rebecca Boyle: And they would have to sit there and correct the calendar. Over time every couple of years, but maybe word didn't get out to like the more far flung provinces. And so there there'd be these like crazy periods of time where people would just be on different calendars and they didn't even realize it. And so he comes in and is like, [00:08:00] I'm gonna fix this thing and we're not gonna use the moon anymore.

[00:08:03] Rebecca Boyle: Basically we're gonna use the sun and some stars and the way the sun tracks against those stars through the year. But basically it's just. An invented timekeeping system that no longer is based on lunar cycles and lunar rhythms. And I think it's, it's, you know, probably more, it is more accurate. Like you can, you know, this way every year your Harvest festival is on the same day, or, you know, your, your fall [00:08:30] equinox here coming up is, you know, around the same date every year.

[00:08:34] Rebecca Boyle: So it's a little bit more convenient for telling time, but I do think there, there's still something lost there. That there's still something we miss. Um, if we don't use the heavens to tell time anymore. 

[00:08:48] John Mulnix: When Caesar re-engineered time, it became a tool of government power, predictable, centralized, but something fundamental was lost for centuries, the moon was at the [00:09:00] heart of a lot of myth and religions, but eventually new tools transformed it into an object of measurement.

[00:09:07] Rebecca Boyle: So for a really long time, the moon was really primary in our understanding of, of cosmology, if you want to even call it that, you know, before the sort of the, the age of exploration. The age of science, um. And it became, you know, a cultural myth in that time. It became a religious figure in that time. It's represented by [00:09:30] all kinds of different deities throughout Mesopotamia, the first literate societies on earth in China and Korea.

[00:09:36] Rebecca Boyle: Um. Then eventually, you know, people start to try to understand its actual nature. And I think that starts to happen for the first time really in classical antiquity, in, in, you know, ancient Rome and ancient Greece. And the first people who really try to examine it in a, in a physical way are the first even, you know, pre-Socratic philosophers.

[00:09:59] Rebecca Boyle: Start thinking about what [00:10:00] it is and like, is it a rock? Is it like earth? And what does it mean that it's there? There's a, you know, Roman biographer, plu tar is sort of a statesman and, and a biographer who writes parallel histories of Greek and Roman famous figures like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, you know, uh, but he's also a philosopher and he wrote one of the earlier treatises about the nature of the moon, and he tried to kind of understand it in a dialogue, which was the common way of having a philosophical debate at the [00:10:30] time.

[00:10:30] Rebecca Boyle: You had these characters are in conversation walking around Rome. Contemplating the sky and all these questions, and it's the, the writer's way of like putting their ideas out there. Um, and then, you know, 15 centuries later, um, Galileo did the same thing and wrote these dialogues that were sort of in that style and, and trying to get ideas in front of people in a way that feels a little more safe.

[00:10:57] Rebecca Boyle: You know, if it's in the form of a story or a dialogue and [00:11:00] there's people kind of arguing with each other and one guy's an idiot and the other guy's not, you know, it's a little maybe safer than you yourself. Galileo, the scientist just coming out there and saying what you believe. Um, and he is really the first person to change our perspective on the moon because he is the first person to get credit for observing it through a telescope.

[00:11:20] Rebecca Boyle: He isn't actually the first, um, he was beaten to that by a British astronomer, a scientist polymath a few months before Galileo, but Thomas Harriet, this [00:11:30] British, uh, mathematician. Is a really poor artist and like does a really crappy job conveying what he saw through a telescope. But Galileos actually trained as a painter and so he is, you know, these beautiful renderings of what he sees through a telescope.

[00:11:46] Rebecca Boyle: And then really I think what changes everything is when Galileo sees the satellites of Jupiter, now known as the Galilean moons. And he and Kepler started corresponding about them and realized that [00:12:00] they are moons. They are like our moon, they're satellites of their planets, and our moon really kind of gets knocked off the pedestal after that, I think.

[00:12:10] Rebecca Boyle: 'cause it's now not the only one, we're not the only place that has a companion like ours. I do, I do still think that our moon is more special. There's a whole lot to say about that, but Galileo is the first person who shows us that the moon is not necessarily unique and neither is Earth. [00:12:30] 

[00:12:30] John Mulnix: Galileo's paintings showed that the moon was not necessarily divine, but just terrain.

[00:12:35] John Mulnix: Heavens had become measurable with telescopes. 

[00:12:39] Rebecca Boyle: It's fun to me to think about how the moon really kind of made that happen. The moon is one of the reasons why we have this problem of geo centrism persisting for so long because the moon clearly does go around Earth and like you can tell if you look at it, you know, over lots of nights, even today in modern [00:13:00] time when we're distracted by.

[00:13:01] Rebecca Boyle: You know, artificial light at night and our phones and whatever, and you know what else is going on in the world? If you sit and look at it through a lunar phase and you notice how it starts out this tiny little crescent near the sun, and then it's a little further away and it's bigger, and then eventually it's opposite the sun and it's at opposition like we would say for a planet and fully illuminated.

[00:13:23] Rebecca Boyle: And so you can kind of figure it out like the sun is what lights the moon. And so that means that the moon's going around us. [00:13:30] So why wouldn't the sun too, like it's logical actually. It like makes sense. It, why would anybody think it was different than that? And so I think that's a really, like one of the primary reasons why Talima's system, you know, persisted for as long as it did until Copernicus comes around and, and Galileo sort of shows for sure that he's right, that the earth is not in fact the center of everything.

[00:13:54] Rebecca Boyle: Um, but yeah, I think the moon also is a, a way of kind of. Showing [00:14:00] us that because you can measure the angle of the sun and the the moon and the earth and how they all relate to each other through eclipses, and it's one of the ways that we can measure the physics of the solar system and kind of come to understand the nature of our reality.

[00:14:24] John Mulnix: As science measured, the moon fiction ended up re-imagining it. Jules Verne launched a [00:14:30] projectile from a giant cannon to the moon. HG Wells imagined strange creatures Selenites beneath its surface, and Fritz laying gave us the countdown, something that we still use for rocket launches today. There are a lot of other lunar inspired appearances in pop culture, but those are just a few that stick out.

[00:14:51] John Mulnix: Whether it was Galileo's paintings, silent films, or fictional books, the moon has been a stage for human imagination, [00:15:00] a place that we can explore our hopes and fears. And speaking of hopes and fears, rockets are one of those dual used technologies that can be used for peaceful purposes, like exploring the moon or for destructive ends as we began to see in World War ii.

[00:15:21] John Mulnix: By the 20th century, imagination gave way to reality. Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket from the United States in [00:15:30] 1926. A short two decades later, rocketry had advanced to the point where the world's first ballistic missile, the V two, was in use by Nazi Germany during World War ii.

[00:15:42] John Mulnix: These V two missiles reign destruction on Allied Cities, notably London and Antwerp. One of the figures behind the V two was Vernor von Braun, a German who was born on March 23rd, 1912 in veers. It's Germany, a steady stream of science [00:16:00] fiction and science education fueled von Bro's imagination as a child, starting his love for space at an early age.

[00:16:08] John Mulnix: His experience as a student and his work with the German Society for Space Travel brought him to the attention of the German army. His NASA biography notes that he went to work for the German army to develop liquid fueled rockets. In 1932, he earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin.

[00:16:27] John Mulnix: Just two years after that, [00:16:30] around the same time, Adolf Hitler rose to power when he was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. On Brown's work during the thirties and forties laid the foundation for the world's first ballistic missile. The V two Nazi Germany produced V two rockets by using slave labor in some instances in just truly brutal conditions.

[00:16:54] John Mulnix: It's notable that more people died constructing the V two rockets than were actually killed by them in [00:17:00] war. As World War II began to wind down the United States and Soviet Union raced to capture V two related min and material as quickly as possible.

[00:17:16] John Mulnix: Operation Paperclip was the United States mission that secured as many Nazi scientists and technical documents, as well as V two rockets, tooling and parts before the Soviet Union could capture them. [00:17:30] Braun and his team actually surrendered to the United States a major intelligence coup that would come to have lasting ramifications during the Cold War and the coming space race with both the United States and Soviet Union having captured countless V two rockets and parts the immediate years after the end of World War ii, where a time of rapid technological progress as the two superpowers sought to capitalize on the technical spoils of war.

[00:17:59] John Mulnix: [00:18:00] Ultimately, the V two became the progenitor of many rockets and missiles during the Cold War from the American Redstone to the Soviet R one. After moving to Huntsville, Alabama, vRAN began work on the US Army's, Redstone, and Jupiter ballistic missiles. In addition, he also worked on the Juno and Saturn one launch vehicles in the 1950s.

[00:18:22] John Mulnix: Von Braun became one of the most vocal proponents of space exploration by writing a series of articles. And appearing in [00:18:30] programs like Walt Disney's Man in Space Series, NASA eventually absorbed Von Bro's Redstone Arsenal team. And he then worked to create the massive Saturn five launch vehicle that ultimately sent humans to the moon for the first time.

[00:18:46] John Mulnix: And that's where we'll pick up next episode. 

[00:18:51] Rebecca Boyle: I definitely think it did. I do. I think it. I mean, yeah. I think that there is something sacred about it in terms of the, [00:19:00] the transcendence of human ingenuity, like to literally transcend the planet is, is, it is crazy that we did that. It really is, if you think about it like.

[00:19:09] Rebecca Boyle: It's far enough in history now. You know, I wasn't even born and like my parents remember it, but like it's pretty far in the past and so it was easy to kind of lose sight of that. And I think we're spoiled by science fiction too in a lot of ways. Like, it seems like, oh, it's no big deal. Like The Expanse and Star Wars, you know, any number of like science fiction shows and, and like world building little, you [00:19:30] know, empires that we have, I think fool us into thinking space travel is this everyday thing and it's still.

[00:19:38] Rebecca Boyle: It's still so far out of reach that the moon landings are still an absurd thing that we pulled off when we did 

[00:19:46] Francis French: the comparative side of it was American. Citizens being absolutely terrified at literally being able to see part of Sputnik, the first rocket going over the actual ball of Sputnik. The first satellite [00:20:00] was too small to essentially be seen, but what people forget is the entire carrier rocket, a much bigger piece of technology.

[00:20:06] Francis French: Essentially, the dead last stage of the rocket that had got that satellite into orbit was following it. That was silvery. It was big, and so people could see this bright light coming over. Around that time, they could hear a very simple radio signal from the actual satellite. So you could hear it going beep, beep, beep on your radio.

[00:20:22] Francis French: You could see this light in the sky. It was terrifying to people 'cause they knew a light in the sky coming over could [00:20:30] easily take a downward turn and be a bomb. And there was a lot of speculation. Are these satellites carrying other things that could be dropped on us? 

[00:20:40] John Mulnix: From myths and calendars to telescopes and fiction.

[00:20:44] John Mulnix: The moon had always been part of the stories that we told, but by the mid 20th century, it was no longer just in fictional stories. We were actually going to the moon. It was a target and the ultimate prize in the coming competition. That was a defining feature [00:21:00] of the Cold War 68 years ago, on October 4th, 1957.

[00:21:08] John Mulnix: An aluminum sphere, no bigger than a beach ball rose into the night sky and began an orbit around our world. Sputnik one didn't carry a camera or a crew or a computer, just a radio transmitter and a battery that basically said, we're up here today, world Space Week, commemorates that [00:21:30] launch a global celebration of science, exploration, and our shared future beyond earth.

[00:21:38] John Mulnix: Come back next time for part two of the Lunar era, vast loneliness. Thanks for listening to the Space Shot. If you have questions or comments, please send me a message, john@thespaceshot.com. I would love to hear from you. These podcasts take a lot of time to edit, and I would greatly appreciate anything you can do to [00:22:00] share these with as many people as possible.

[00:22:03] John Mulnix: I am really looking forward to bringing you the next four parts in this series, and until next time, I'm John Niks and I'll catch you on the flip [00:22:30] side.