“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.”
--Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How
Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made
Us Who We Are (2024)
Origin
The creation of the moon is a classic instance of
destruction as a creative force. Four
and half billion years ago, the earth and moon were a single planet. Then a
mars-sized body called Theia (Greek mother of the moon Selene), collided with
earth at 20,000 miles per hour, breaking both planets apart. From the residue of dust and gas, gravity
made our moon as well as our earth, meaning that our satellite’s composition and
motion can tell us about the earth’s origins, too.
The philosopher Immanual Kant called such chaos the source
of creation. This is the giant-impact
hypothesis, based on geochemistry that also explains the moon’s composition. A giant spinning ring of vaporized rock and
metal heated to four to six thousand degrees Fahrenheit formed from the earth-moon
collision, called a “synestia,” “two homes,” a new type of planetary object, named
for Hestia, goddess of hearth and home (Stewart and Lock, 2017). Eventually it cooled, and the earth emerged—after
the moon formed.
Time cognition
Science writer Rebecca Boyle recently turned her sights on
the moon, or the earth-sun-moon system, for its interest not just to science—which
is quite considerable—but to culture and the making of civilizations. She
begins by explaining how the moon was once part of earth. From there she points to the sophistication
of prehistoric groups, who by “using the celestial bodies, learned how to grasp
time, and how to control its use.” This
endeavor was initiated by the moon-mound calendar at Warren Field in northern
Scotland in 3,800 BCE, nearly six thousand years ago.
This Neolithic monument “marks the first time humans learned
to orient ourselves in time, a major leap in cognition.” Humanity would go on to “use the moon to
create religion and consolidate power through it, erecting the foundations of
modern society.”
In prehistoric human minds, the
moon started out as a fertility symbol, a time counter, and a form of
notation. It soon progressed to a new
role as a time reckoner, enabling people to orient themselves in time,
imagining the future as well as recalling the past (p. 120)
Plato even asserted that the
succession of days and nights, lit by the sun and moon, taught us how to
count—and how to think (p. 17).
This analysis shows how a single artifact or element of the wide
world can be mobilized to derive multiples levels of meaning to reveal the
history and workings of culture. The
moon as cultural artifact is one of many we live with every day and barely ever
consider a serious cultural subject.
Along with the sun, fire, water, ice, and air, these are elements of
life on and off earth with deep implications for the way we think, act,
organize, and imagine. They are part of
our prehistoric and protohistoric cultural heritage yet to be thoroughly analyzed
to explore even our most basic operating assumptions.
Timekeeping
As the Neolithic age began twelve thousand years ago, the
moon’s timepiece enabled agriculture with its seasonal monthly calendar to
replace hunting and gathering. Barley was first domesticated in Jerico. The beginnings of history as a written record,
starting in Egypt in 3200 BCE, cultivated the ability to predict as well as
recall. Writing had its start in Sumer
(now southern Iraq) around 3400, with cuneiform wedges on clay tablets, as well
as the base-60 numeric system of 60 minutes, 60 seconds, and 360 degrees. Uruk (now Warka) in Sumer had 80,000
residents at its height, making it among the first major literate civilizations
in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE and the largest urban settlement in
the world.
With the launch of writing, timekeeping, land cultivation, trade,
and the law emerged as coevolving disciplines. The moon had already become a
source of spiritual energy through moon gods and sky worship as the practice of
religion; now those religions became the hierarchical order for empires. Close observation of lunar movements laid the
groundwork for observational science grafted from religious ritual. Moon devotion and watching taught both a “new
means of control and a new form of thinking.”
As interest in the moon’s keys to understanding developed, that
knowledge had applications to widening horizons down on earth. Big cities with
thousands of residents dominated the ancient world. The first coins were minted and exchanged in
7th century BCE; the first paper money was created in 130 BCE. In Sixth Century Greece presocratic philosophy
was born from a curiosity about the natural world and the nature of the cosmos. Meanwhile, the Persians were making advanced
calculations, building on the astrological tables of the conquered Babylonians after
Cyrus’s victory in BC 539. China’s Han
Dynasty opened trade with the Roman Empire in 130 BCE (the same year as paper
money). The Silk Road was actually a web
of trade routes, land and sea, that connected Asia, Africa, and Europe for
nearly 1500 years. Down its many
expansive routes streamed a global civilized culture through cultural exchange
between distant groups. They all viewed
the moon and its phases from various positions on earth.
Science
The fifth-century BCE Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras
went beyond astrological wisdom to seek globe-spanning universals, and was
first to explain eclipses, and the moon as “earthy” rather than light or vapor.
His work drew away from the supernatural imagination and toward a colleagueship
of rational thinking and observation, with the moon as his object of
study. Thales of Miletus is reported to
have predicted the first solar eclipse, in 585 BCE; how he accomplished this,
though, is unknown. He might have deduced
the pattern that solar and lunar eclipses come in pairs about two weeks apart.
The high concept of creating knowledge and making it work as
a wealth of opportunity in its own right would power the Enlightenment 20
centuries later. Driven by Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galileo, the next great revolution would begin by breaking with the
geo-centric universe. Enter Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 BCE), who determined
that the sun is much larger and therefore far more distant than the moon. Given these distances and sizes, earth must
revolve around the sun, not the other way.
This revelation, now seemingly one so obvious, took many centuries (into
modernity) to establish, by means of telescopic instruments. How enduring misassumptions can rule until
reliable tests are devised to question them, and then how credible alternatives
are proposed and proven, is the history of the scientific revolution.
By the 17th century the sun-centered scheme of Nicolas
Copernicus could be proven scientifically, setting the stage for a new
investigation of truth based not on faith or conviction but on observable evidence.
This was not taken lightly by The Vatican who famously persecuted Galileo for
promoting the Copernican theory of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun. They
eventually saw the light, building their own Vatican Observatory in 1580 and Pope
John Paul II apologized for the “Galileo Case” on October 31, 1992. This was a
mere (in historical church time) 359 years after the event, but he did say the
church was sorry about being a little hasty in their judgment in that case.
The moon was central to proving a solar-centric order, based
on mathematics, the telescopic lens, gravity, and motion. The moon orbit and gravity are critical to
Einstein’s key assumptions for General Relativity. The geo-centric bias was
certainly the greatest barrier to thinking about the universe and our place in
it. Its lifting has liberated all kinds
of parallel thought once that barrier was broken, for example, just in
considering the earth and moon not two distinct systems but a single dynamic. “Did Copernicus really understand that his
certainty about the ‘chief world systems,’ as Galileo called the heliocentric
and geocentric models, would upend society as he knew it?” (p. 190). As Copernicus was over sixty when he made his
late-blooming discovery, perhaps he therefore foresaw less to care about; his
major work was published the year of his death, in 1543.
Inspiration
The Apollo astronauts who went to the moon, the first to transcend
earth’s boundaries, have often borne witness to the journey’s transformative
impact. This effect has come to outshine
the more famous courage and farsightedness required to undertake such a momentous
trip.
“Many report feeling an overwhelming sense of clarity and
unity, a heart-swelling state of heightened awareness and togetherness that is
common enough to have its own name: the “overview effect…the sense of
boundaries evaporating ….” The missions
even brought about a new awakening, in this case new knowledge and a different
way of thinking about humanity’s home and our shared experience” (Boyle, p. 235).
In July 1969 the Apollo team placed a pocket-novel-size reflector
on the moon’s surface that allows accurate measurement by laser of the distance
to earth of up to a few millimeters, a measurement never before possible. This new capacity is part of the moon’s bounteous
potential as an information package. Notes Boyle, “The moon still gives us
everything it has ever given us. It
reflects what we want it to reflect in our particular culture, in our
particular time” (p. 245).
This includes information, such as the moon’s core is at
least partially fluid. And a further revelation: the earth and moon are slowly
but surely drifting apart at about an inch and a half a year, with eventual
outcomes in the increasing length of the earth’s day and night rotation. This will take billions of years in which
there will be decreasing tides, and from a smaller disc in the night sky, less
moonlight for night predators to hunt in.
Eventually the moon will stop retreating to take up a stationary place
in the sky, visible from only one earth side, our own version of the dark side
of the moon.
