Soon after, Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth at around 252,000 stadia (c.29,000 miles, only 5,000 miles off the real value). In the third century BC, Aristarchus estimated the moon to be at a remove of 20 x the radius of the earth. Greek mathematicians undertook speculative calculations about the size of heavenly bodies and their distance from the earth. Second, when we plan journeys, we want some idea of how far we will go. In their oddness, the moon people serve as a foil to think about the stranger features of human biology and culture.Īn illustration of Icaromenippus from the frontispiece of a book called A Voyage in Space by an astronomy professor called Herbert Hall Turner, who adapted it from some lectures he delivered at Christmas 1913. There are extensive descriptions of the moon people and their way of life: they are all male but reproduce through a hermaphroditic process, they have removable eyes, and they sweat milk. In True Stories, Lucian and his shipmates are recruited into a war between the inhabitants of the moon and the inhabitants of the sun. In Icaromenippus, the protagonist Menippus flies to the moon and looks down on the earth, contemplating his previous life from a distance. In the early second century AD the satirist Lucian expanded on the theme of lunar travel in two of his works, Icaromenippus and True Stories. Alongside its connotations of untouched beauty, it can also mean ‘sterile’. As Karen ní Mheallaigh points out in her recent book about the moon in Greek thought, the word for ‘pure’, καθαρός, is double-edged. Diogenes describes the moon as a ‘pure world’ ( γῆν καθαρωτάτην). It describes the narrator’s journey to the ultimate northern reaches of the earth, and then, beyond, briefly, to the moon. It is Antonius Diogenes’ The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, a complex faux-memoir by an unnamed narrator. The earliest surviving Greco-Roman text about travel to the moon was written in the second century BC. It is perhaps for this reason-its plausible placeness-that the moon has been the subject of stories about space travel for much longer. Asaph Hall’s observation of the Martian moons and Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observations of Mars’ canals sparked a great interest in Mars not just as an object, but as a place. Such observations became possible in the late nineteenth century. Why did Mars become the most interesting planet to travel to? One possible reason is that with a good telescope, Mars can be seen quite clearly. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) has ensured that Mars has remained the primary focus of pop-cultural imagination about space travel. Although these works involve all the planets, by the late nineteenth century, Mars and Martians had begun to occupy a disproportionately prominent place in fiction the huge popularity of H.G. Two of the best-known early works which involve space travel are Athanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s The Earths in Our Solar System (1758). It is not intuitive, in a world before space travel, that we would think of space, or even of the planets, as places in their own right. Two themes emerge clearly from interviews with Shatner about the experience: first, that travel away from the earth provides a new perspective on it second, more subtly, that space is no longer a rarely-crossed frontier for scientific investigation, but a place, to which leisure travel is not only possible but becoming commercially realistic (if only for the super-rich). William Shatner has recently attracted widespread criticism for undertaking a 10-minute space flight with Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin.
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