Few things have captured human imagination throughout the ages quite like the Moon . It ’s inspired bygreat Latinian language , thrilling work ofliteratureandfilm , and at least onepizza - pie - focused making love song .
But perhaps more than anything , our nearest neighbour and honoraryother halfhave lead people throughout history to stare up at the night sky and think to themselves : “ I bet there’ssome really cool stuff up there . ”
golden for us , some of them decide to write it down .
The Moon In Ancient Times Was Covered In Ghosts
The Moon of antiquity was , to put it mildly , kind of spooky . Around AD 75 , the historiographer and philosopher Plutarch wrote an essay calledDe facie quae in orbe lunae apparet(“Concerning the face which appear in the ball of the moon ” ) in which hedescribed itas the home of the souls of the beat . Specifically , the souls of the bushed wearing fancy hats and sparkling like a vampire in a adolescent romance .
“ All soul , whether without psyche or with it , when it has issue from the body is destined to wander in the region between earth and moon but not for an equal time , ” Plutarchexplainsin what is otherwise apretty respectablework of scientific analysis . “ Unjust and licentious souls pay penalties for their offences ; but the estimable soul … go about like victors crown with wreath of feathers … [ and ] in appearing resembling a ray of light . ”
The Renaissance Moon Was Hella Religious
The Renaissance was an odd time . On the one hand , we seesome of the very first realistic representations of various cosmogonic phenomena and advanced observational knowledge of the moonshine . On the other , we have Dantespending two Holy Writ agonizing over whether or not the human race in the moon is actually Cain , the “ first murderer ” of Christian mythology .
But that was n’t the only scriptural principal part people figured a lunar traveler might fill . Ludovico Ariosto ’s epic poemOrlando Furioso(that’sRaging Rolandfor the anglophones in the hearing ) place John of “ Matthew , Mark , Luke and John ” fame on the moon , while the seventeenth - century novelThe Man in the Moone ; or , A sermon of a Voyage thitherdescribes moon inhabitantsas a backwash of grandiloquent , " lunar"-colored people who experience no hate , love Jesus and savor a cigarette or two .
Batman On The Moon ?
The nineteenth century was an age in which skill flourished , and while alchemy and physics leaped forward on Earth , astronomers once again ferment to the sky in the Leslie Townes Hope of finding lunar lifespan .
They did n’t have to wait long . In 1835 , it was report in the New York Sun that the extremely respected astronomer John Herschel had find aristocratic " manbats " on the Moon – along with sheep , pygmy zebras , and ( of course ) unicorns . These manbats apparently had quite a advanced society : Herschel had seen them building temple and there were murmur that whole town had been seen on the lunar Earth’s surface .
Of course , there are no blue manbat civilizations on the Sun Myung Moon , and John Herschel had seen no such thing . The “ Great Moon Hoax ” was dismissed within a few week – but many astronomer of the Clarence Day remained convinced that there was life on the moon . Three years after the hoax , pop - uranology author Thomas Dickwrote that"the Moon is … more or less cover with vegetation not unlike to our own Earth … [ and ] great artificial employment … erect by the lunarians , " while textbooks of the timetook it as factthat the moon was dwell .
The Modern Moon
Humans in conclusion made it to the moon in 1969 , and our hopes of group meeting lunar civilizations were mostly dashed . But you might be surprised to learn that even at this late stage , NASA was taking the idea of lifespan on the moon quite seriously , enlistingscientific luminaries such as Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov to propose them on what might be wait for lunar explorers . In fact , NASA ’s quarantine procedures werepartly shapedby the belief that regress astronauts might have organic lunation material still on them from the misstep .
And , perhaps ironically , there may be life on the moon after all . In 2019 an Israeli ballistic capsule malfunctioned and crashed into the moonshine ’s surface , spilling consignment across the lunar landscape . Among that cargo was thousand of bantam tardigrades – some of the hardy organisms on Earth . According to scientists , they ’re probably still up there .
“ I would guess [ the tardigrade ] would survive for some prison term , ” astrobiologist Philippe Reekie toldThe Guardiana few months after the crash . “ The main problem with the synodic month is the vacuity and the mellow irradiation , but tardigrades are seek to subsist those conditions . ”
