Daily Archives: February 9, 2022

Earth's natural satellite as depicted in science fiction works

The Moon has appeared in fiction as a setting since at least classical antiquity. Throughout most of literary history, a significant portion of works depicting lunar voyages has been satirical in nature. From the late 1800s onwards, science fiction has successively focused largely on the themes of life on the Moon, first Moon landings, and lunar colonization.

The Moon has been a setting in fiction since at least the works of the ancient Greek writers Antonius Diogenes and Lucian of Samosata; the former's Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule has been lost and the latter's True History from the second century CE is a satire of fanciful travellers' tales.[1][2] It was not until Johannes Kepler's novel Somnium was posthumously released in 1634 that the subject of travelling to the Moon was given a serious treatment in fiction.[1][2][3] Building on Kepler's thoughts, and similar speculations by Francis Bacon on flying to the Moon in his 1627 work Sylva sylvarum, Francis Godwin expanded on the idea in the 1638 novel The Man in the Moone.[4] Across the centuries that followed, numerous authors penned serious or satirical works depicting voyages to the Moon, including Cyrano de Bergerac's novel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon which was posthumously released in 1657, Daniel Defoe's 1705 novel The Consolidator, Edgar Allan Poe's 1835 short story "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", the 1835 newspaper series called the "Great Moon Hoax" by Richard Adams Locke, Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, and H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.[1][5][6] George Griffith's 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space takes place on the Moon and is perhaps the first depiction of a space suit in fiction.[7] The first science fiction film, Georges Mlis' Le voyage dans la lune from 1902, depicts a lunar voyage.[2][5]

By the latter part of the 1800s, it was clear that the Moon was devoid of life, making depictions of lunar lifeforms and societies lack credibility. A number of authors circumvent this by placing lunar life underneath the Moon's surface, including Wells in the aforementioned The First Men in the Moon and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1926 novel The Moon Maid. Others confine lunar life to the past, either depicting the remnants of a lunar civilization that has since gone extinct as in W. S. Lach-Szyrma's 18871893 series "Letters from the Planets", Edgar Fawcett's 1895 novel The Ghost of Guy Thyrle, and the aforementioned A Honeymoon in Space, or by time travelling to the past to encounter lunar life as in the 1932 short story "The Moon Era" by Jack Williamson. Some works also place lunar life solely on the far side of the Moon.[1][3][5] In the 1977 novel Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan, an ancient human skeleton in a spacesuit is found on the Moon, leading to the discovery that humanity did not originate on Earth.[1][2][5]

The life that has been depicted on the Moon varies in size from the intelligent mollusks of Raymond Z. Gallun's 1931 short story "The Lunar Chrysalis" to the giants of Godwins' aforementioned The Man in the Moone.[2][3] The "Great Moon Hoax" features bat-like humanoids, which according to its author Richard Adams Locke was meant to satirize the then-popular belief that the Moon was home to advanced civilizations.[8] The earliest depiction of life on the Moon in Lucian's True History included three-headed horse-vultures and vegetable birds.[9][10] The near side of the Moon in Kepler's Somnium is inhabited by the earliest human-like lunar life in fiction, whereas the far side is inhabited by serpentine creatures. Based on exobiological considerations, Kepler provided both with adaptations to the month-long cycle of day and night on the Moon.[11][12][13] The 1938 short story "Magician of Dream Valley" by Raymond Z. Gallun portrays energy-based life on the Moon, as does the 1960 short story "The Trouble with Tycho" by Clifford D. Simak.[14] The titular mission of the 2011 film Apollo 18 is a secret project to investigate alien life in the form of lunar rocks.[15][16]

Following the end of World War II, several literary works appeared depicting science fiction authors' visions of the first Moon landing. Among these were Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 short story "The Man Who Sold the Moon" about an entrepreneur seeking to finance the endeavor, Lester del Rey's 1956 novel Mission to the Moon, and Pierre Boulle's 1964 novel Garden on the Moon where the first Moon landing is by Japan and intentionally a one-way trip such that no method of returning astronauts to Earth needs to be devised. One of the last such stories was William F. Temple's 1966 novel Shoot at the Moon; following the actual first Moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, stories of fictional first Moon landings fell out of favour to be replaced by stories of lunar colonization.[1][3][5]

Fictional first Moon landings also appeared in film in this era. Examples include the 1950 film Destination Moon which envisions the first Moon landing as a private sector venture[5][17][18] and the 1968 film Countdown which reuses the idea of getting to the Moon more quickly by not waiting until a return trip is feasible from Garden on the Moon.[3][17][19]

Colonization of the Moon is depicted in Murray Leinster's 1950s Joe Kenmore series starting with the novel Space Platform, Larry Niven's 1980 novel The Patchwork Girl, and Roger MacBride Allen's 1988 novel Farside Cannon, among others.[1][2] Lunar colonies are sometimes humanity's last refuge when the Earth is no longer habitable, as in Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth" where the Earth has succumbed to nuclear holocaust and Stephen Baxter's 1998 novel Moonseed where the Earth is destroyed by an alien nanotechnology from the Moon itself.[2][3][20] The Moon is terraformed in a handful of works including the 1991 novel Reunion by John Gribbin and Marcus Chown.[1][3]

The residents of lunar colonies often seek independence from Earth. The 1931 novel The Birth of a New Republic by Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer adapts the story of the American Revolutionary War to the lunar surface. In Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the prisoners of a penal colony on the Moon revolt. In the 1997 novel Moonwar by Ben Bova, the proposition is rejected by Earth on the grounds that the Moon is not self-sufficient but relies on resources imported from Earth.[3][21] Lunar colonies are also used as military bases in several works. Heinlein's 1947 novel Rocket Ship Galileoupon which the aforementioned Destination Moon was loosely baseddepicts the discovery of a secret Nazi German colony on the Moon upon the arrival of what was thitherto thought to be the first crewed lunar landing. Leinster's 1957 novel City on the Moon portrays a US nuclear missile base on the Moon which functions as a deterrent, as does Allen Steele's 1996 alternate history novel The Tranquility Alternative.[21][22][23]

The social structure and governance of fictional lunar colonies varies. Heinlein's aforementioned The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls portray lunar societies based on libertarian ideals such as laissez-faire capitalism,[21][24] while the 1992 novel Steel Beach by John Varley depicts a post-scarcity society where the central authority guarantees both jobs for all who wish to work and access to necessities such as air, food, and heating.[21] In Nancy Holder's 19982000 novel trilogy starting with The Six Families, organized crime families vie for control.[2] The Moon is a tourist destination in Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust.[21] The first permanent lunar colony contends with social ills such as drug addiction in the 1973 short story "Luna 1" by Ernest H. Taves,[14] and the 1957 short story "The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller Jr. provides a rare example of considering the possible effects of the Moon's lower gravity on human reproduction and child development.[25] The lunar colony in the 1991 novel Lunar Descent by Allen Steele is inhabited by manual labourers engaged in space mining to extract resources from the lunar surface.[21]

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Moon in science fiction - Wikipedia

Introduction

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's Moon is the only place beyond Earth where humans have set foot, so far.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610.

In Latin, the Moon is called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side the hemisphere we never see from Earth the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full Moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new Moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust.

The Moons core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moons near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different composition and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration, but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water thats coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASAs Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moons southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

The Moon has no rings.

Earth's Moon has no moons of its own.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

Read more here:
In Depth | Earth's Moon NASA Solar System Exploration

In the summer of 2021, I spent a week in northwest Montana. It was easy to forget there was a pandemic going on. People were zip-lining, hiking, whitewater rafting. The family who lived next to the house that we rented invited ustotal strangersinto their home for drinks (sans masks), and all of our children played together a bit each day. At the end of our trip, we saw a beat-up truck with a wonderful bumper sticker: Safety Third. We laughed at what seemed to be a perfect summation of the carefree attitude that allowed the rugged sort of liberty we had seen in Montana.

Seven months later, much of the nation remains in the grips of authoritarian overreach. The draconian policies that have been implemented to shut down the virus have failed. In fact, it has been obvious for the better part of a year that the virus cant be shut down. By now, it should be clear to everyone that the pandemic is being leveraged by the media, corporate entities, government, and the medical establishment to justify more regulatory insanity, imposing control over the minutiae of daily life.

So far, this power grab has gone largely uncontested. In less-densely populated states like Montana, citizens retain a good deal of individual liberty, and large states like Texas and Florida have protected personal freedom. But most of this is thanks to the election of conservative-minded officials, rather than any organized popular resistance. Indeed, the publicdemonstrations against Covid tyranny in Europe and Canada have dwarfed any American opposition in terms of size and frequency. This should be a source of embarrassment for a nation with such a rich history of liberty and civic engagement.

Why, then, have Americans been reluctant to push back against the abuses of power that have unfolded since the onset of the pandemic? Sadly, the answer seems to be not so much fear as safety. An obsessive concern for safety is a particular kind of fear: It is a generalized apprehension of the world and the different ways it threatens our comfort and well-being. That so many Americans are so worried about their own safety and that of othersdue to an illness that over 99 percent of people will survive and fully recover fromspeaks poorly of any free nation. But it is especially unbecoming for Americans, because we have never been a safe people.

But who are we? I can hear the leftist scolds singing in my imagination. Thats not who we are! was a favorite phrase of Barack Obama, albeit one that was always deployed cynically. For him, we betrayed our identity when (and only when) the public expressed distaste for the policy whims of the progressive left. But since those halcyon days of Obama ended, it has become fashionableto pretend that the American polity is so diverse that its impossible to make any generalizations about our collective identity. Fortunately, thats false. We have many shared characteristics as a people. And safety has never been a defining concern of any Americanswhoever they are and whatever their heritage.

The native Americans who were here before European colonization: Were they concerned with safety above all else? Many tribes were seasonally nomadic in response to the various abuses and calamities inflicted by nature. Other tribes maintained great warrior traditions. In their time, war was not a matter of pressing a button from the safety of a remote computer, as it is today. It was a noble, hand-to-hand test of strength and courage on behalf of your community. When the Europeans arrived, the native people fought valiantly and doggedly to save their families, homes, and way of life from a powerful and technologically superior foe. These are not the behaviors of people consumed with worry about safety.

The early European colonists to America did not sail across the ocean because they wanted to kill Indians. And most didnt undertake such a dangerous journey because they expected to get rich. Anyone concerned with greater comfort, stability, and even wealth would have been better off staying in Europe in the 17th century. But their monarchs did not allow free practice of religion. The New England colonists were people of such great faith that they would leave their ancestral homes and risk deathincluding the death of their childrento go on a sea voyage that might end in utter destruction. In the best case scenario, the pilgrims would arrive safely on the shore of an unknown, inhospitable land, where they would need to begin the monumental work of building a new society from the ground up. These are not the behaviors of people paralyzed by fears about safety.

What about the African peoples sold into slavery and brought across the ocean in conditions that undermined every shred of human dignity? For centuries, those people endured the inhumanity of chattel slavery: No one can call the condition of the American slave safe. Runaways werent looking for safety, either. They sought liberty. The journey to freedom could be deadly, and even when it was successful, there was precious little safety to be had in the north: There was hatred and violence toward black people there, too. Thats to say nothing of the risks and hardships they faced in procuring their own food, their own land, and their own work in a new region of the country. And when discrimination and abuse endured for a full century after emancipation, black Americans protested and resisted this treatment, again risking life and limb. These were not people obsessed with safety.

What about the people who pushed further west? The Americans who set out into uncharted lands, crossing the continent in a wagon train at the pace of an ox? They embarked on that trek in full knowledge of the threat of serious illness, of attacks from hostile Indians, of winter so severe that they might simply freeze or starve to death along the way. They took these risks on the assumption that they were heading west to a better placenot a safer place, but one with a greater promise of human flourishing. The same can be said of the Asians who came to a land with a tongue that couldnt be more different from their own, but who nevertheless thrived even as they worked to exhaustion building a network of railroads.

The great waves of immigrants who came from Europe in the 19th century? Those people were not coming here for entitlements: Unlike today, there were no promises of debt forgiveness, or free schooling, or workers compensation, or welfare payments, or universal health care. They left their families and homes for the possibility of prosperity and liberty. They got on the boats with the understanding that securing these benefits would depend on their own effort and hard work. They knew it wouldnt be safe. But they werent looking for safety.

We were the first nation to send people to the moon. We have more turnover in our upper class than most countries the world over. Fortunes are lost and made and lost again in the pursuit of innovation and progress. Thats not what happens to people who play it safe. The actions of the everyday Americans aboard Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, saved countless lives on the ground. Storming a cockpit full of murderous terrorists is not the behavior of people preoccupied with safety.

The American character is defined by three things that unite all the different groups of people who make up our nation: mobility, risk-taking, and optimism. Were movers and we always have been. A fearful people do not move the way Americans do. Safety demands that we take coverthat we stay in one place. But we keep moving. Even in our darkest times, we maintain our optimism. That optimism is evidenced by our risk-taking: People who believe that things cant or wont get better dont make the calculated risks that Americans make.

All of this begs the question: Are we still the same people as we were? Are we still a mobile people with hope for the future? People who live our lives as though we are masters of circumstance rather than its victims?

Quarantines and lockdowns, especially for a virus as commonly survivable as Covid-19, are decidedly un-American. They undermine our natural inclinations for mobility and free movement. The idea that everyone must take an unproven, fast-tracked vaccine, not merely for their own safety, but for the safety of others, is one more manifestation of this monomania. Required masking continues, despite the limited evidence that cloth masks reduce transmission in any significant way. One cannot deny the absurdity of regulations that ask restaurant patrons to cover their faces long enough to walk to a table, only to unmask after being seated. The demand for vaccine boosters represents a whole new level of fear over safety. The vaccine offers great protection, we are told. It is, ofcourse, safe and effectivebut not effective enough to live your life without fear, in a way that becomes the American spirit. Better get another booster. Just to be safe.

We are now entering our third year of pandemic insanity. Many of the measures that were taken in early 2020 were justifiable because we faced a novel virus about which we knew very little. We can no longer claim that kind of ignorance. Covid-19, generally speaking, is not a deadly virus. Nevertheless, we have sacrificed immensely to try to keep Americans safe. We have done the lockdowns. We have done the masking. We have done the contact-tracing. We have done the double-masking. We have done the vaccines. We have done the boosters. We have done the public shaming. We have asked people for their papers. We have made their employers comply. Weve done it all. And Covid is still here. The fact is, it will always be here. Covid won. But we dont have to become a defeated people.

The question now is how we will respond. Will we be Americans worthy of the name? Or will we live in fear, compromising everythingindeed, compromising who we areto ensure that everyone is just a little safer? Are we willing to make those sacrifices? Are we willing to demand them of our children? For how much longer? And for how long will we allow our government to make such decisions for us?

Americans must now make a choice. Its not merely a choice about how we want to live. Its a choice about who we want to be. Those who fetishize safety posture themselves as virtuous people; they pretend that their concerns are an expression of a deep, abiding care for others. But this is a lie. Ultimately, safetyismwhere the avoidance of harm becomes a way of inhabiting the worldis a radical form of self-regard. To elevate safety to the status of an idol reveals a fear of life; it conceals a pathological mindset where worry and uncertainty become a controlling presence. It is solipsistic navel-gazing, a decadent wallowing in anxiety and self-pity.

The dehumanizing aspects of safetyism are disguised by endless platitudes about the well-being of others. But insisting upon others compliance so that you can live a safer life (after all, we can never be entirely safe) is ultimately an expression of personal weakness. It is a betrayal of the national character. Taken to the scale of society at large, safetyism threatens the dignity of our people. The time has come for a collective embrace of riskthe inherent risk that is the price of freedom in an uncertain world. The time has come to reclaim our dignity, to become again who we areand who Americans have always been. Safety third.

Adam Ellwangeris a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. He is the author ofMetanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, available in paperback this April. You can follow him on Twitter@DoctorEllwanger.

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Safety Third: Covid-19 and the American Character - The American Conservative