Our Moon

Informationen zum Autor Rebecca Boyle Klappentext "Far from being a lifeless ornament in the sky, the Moon holds the answers to some of science's central questions. Silent, dry, and barren, Earth's 4.34-billion-year-old companion is essential to life on earth. Its gravity stabilized the Earth's orbit, and, as it once guided evolution, its tide stirring up nutrients that fostered complex life, it now influences everything from animal migrations and reproduction to the movements of plants' leaves. More than 30,000 years before humans invented writing, they used the Moon's waxing and waning to track the passage of time, and, in a tectonic shift for human consciousness, used it to plan for the future. Unsurprisingly, the Moon was a primary feature of the first religions, written language, and philosophy. But our relationship to the Moon became more concrete when Apollo landed on it in 1969 in a moment of scientific and political triumph. And both engineering and politics promise to shape our relationship with it in the near future. Scientists advocate for a return to the moon to do research; governments and billionaires want to return to turn a profit from its mineral resources. Who gets to decide how we use a celestial body that, Boyle argues, belongs to everyone and no one? How can we learn to protect this beautiful, spectral thing that we all share?"-- Leseprobe Chapter One A World Apart The Moon is different. It is like nowhere on Earth, which is a watery bubble improbably bursting with life in a universe of emptiness. The Moon is barren and has been throughout the four-and-a-half-billion-year eternity of its companionship with this planet. The Moon is silent. It plays host to no cricket chorus, coyote calls, or night wind sailing through pines. It is dry, at least on the outside. There are no waves lapping on shores, no soft rains, no snow. It is a crater-pocked wasteland that smells of doused firecrackers. The Moon is scorching hot during its long day, and freezing cold during its long night. The lunar landscape is grayscale, but flecked with shades of tan, chocolate, beach sand, chalk, gold, spicy-mustard ochre, and, in the words of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, a cheery rose hue. Sunlight on the airless Moon plays tricks on human eyesight, warping a moonwalker's sense of crater depths and hillside angles, making tiny slopes look like vertiginous peaks. All is monotony. There is no blue, and there is no green. No sunlight scatters through a watery atmosphere. No lichens splotch the Moon's rocks. No bacteria grow in its dirt to help plants flourish. Certainly, there are no birds overhead, ants underfoot, or any other kind of animal anywhere. On the Moon there is nothing and no one. Until the Apollo landings, no creatures ever looked up at the Moon's black sky and wondered about their place in it all. No one ever stared up at the crescent Earth and thought about visiting. There is no culture, except the one we brought. The Moon says nothing for itself, but it says plenty about us. We project our dreams and our fervor onto its mottled surface and it serves as a mirror, both figuratively and literally. It reflects sunlight and even Earth's own light, ashen earthshine, back to us. We can see this phenomenon when the Moon is a crescent, and yet its full disk is just barely perceptible. The Moon is Earth in inverse, a desolate rock whose scars whisper of our world's violent past and underscore its riotous gardens of color and life. The Moon contains only what we imagine it to contain. It harbors only what we berth in its seas. Since the beginning of time, the Moon has controlled life on Earth and shepherded the human mind through a spectacular journey of thought, wonder, power, knowledge, and myth. But this frenzied, multifarious, Earthly history disguises the truth of the Moon. As vivid and lively as our history with it has been, the M...

Auteur

Rebecca Boyle

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“A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

Many of us know that the Moon pulls on our oceans, driving the tides, but did you know that it smells like gunpowder? Or that it was essential to the development of science and religion? Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes readers on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution. 

Our Moon’s gravity stabilized Earth’s orbit—and its climate. It drew nutrients to the surface of the primordial ocean, where they fostered the evolution of complex life. The Moon continues to influence animal migration and reproduction, plants’ movements, and, possibly, the flow of the very blood in our veins. 

While the Sun helped prehistoric hunters and gatherers mark daily time, early civilizations used the phases of the Moon to count months and years, allowing them to plan farther ahead. Mesopotamian priests recorded the Moon’s position in order to make predictions, and, in the process, created the earliest known empirical, scientific observations. In Our Moon, Boyle introduces us to ancient astronomers and major figures of the scientific revolution, including Johannes Kepler and his influential lunar science fiction.

Our relationship to the Moon changed when Apollo astronauts landed on it in 1969, and it’s about to change again. As governments and billionaires aim to turn a profit from its resources, Rebecca Boyle shows us that the Moon belongs to everybody, and nobody at all.

Résumé
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Many of us know that the Moon pulls on our oceans, driving the tides, but did you know that it smells like gunpowder? Or that it was essential to the development of science and religion? Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes readers on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution. 

Our Moon’s gravity stabilized Earth’s orbit—and its climate. It drew nutrients to the surface of the primordial ocean, where they fostered the evolution of complex life. The Moon continues to influence animal migration and reproduction, plants’ movements, and, possibly, the flow of the very blood in our veins. 

While the Sun helped prehistoric hunters and gatherers mark daily time, early civilizations used the phases of the Moon to count months and years, allowing them to plan farther ahead. Mesopotamian priests recorded the Moon’s position in order to make predictions, and, in the process, created the earliest known empirical, scientific observations. In Our Moon, Boyle introduces us to ancient astronomers and major figures of the scientific revolution, including Johannes Kepler and his influential lunar science fiction.

Our relationship to the Moon changed when Apollo astronauts landed on it in 1969, and it’s about to change again. As governments and billionaires aim to turn a profit from its resources, Rebecca Boyle shows us that the Moon belongs to everybody, and nobody at all.