February 6, 2024 • 34 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, science journalist and author Rebecca Boyle discusses her new book “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet.”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Plant. In this episode of the podcast,
I'm going to be chatting with science journalist and author
Rebecca Boyle about her new book, Our Moon, How Earth's
Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet. It's such a good read,
highly recommend it, as I'll touch on later in the
(00:33):
interview itself. This is a great week to read a
book about the moon, because of course we're getting into
celebrations of lunar New Year. So without further ado, let's
get right to that interview. Hi, Rebecca, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
So the new book is Our Moon, How Earth's Celestial
Companion Transformed the Planet, out now in physical, ebook and
audio formats. Can you tell us what inspired you to
write book.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I remember being a kid and sitting on the floor
of my elementary school library, probably in fifth grade, and
listening to a vinyl record of the Apollo Transcript or
the the Apollo Recordings, and just being blown away and
like I couldn't believe that they were actually up there.
And I would look at the moon at night and
(01:22):
it felt so far away but also so close and
so much a part of my life that this sort
of just it blew my mind the idea of people
walking around up there, and I think I never lost
that connection, you know. I write about astronomy a lot
right now, and often the moon is sort of like
it gets short shrifts, it's kind of annoying for astronomers,
(01:43):
like it's really bright, it's up all the time. If
you're trying to study distant galaxies and quasars and things
like that, it's actually an obstacle. So I often find
myself kind of defending it and like, no, the moon
is really special and the moon is cool, you know.
And I think that's sort of how I first approached this,
was like I want this to be an appreciation of
the moon, and then as I started writing it, it
(02:05):
became more like, no, the moon is really actually super
important for everything that's ever happened here, and the book
turned into more of an argument about that, like the
moon is central to our existence and it's not just
this beautiful thing that we should care about. It's like
it's the reason we're here.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
In your first chapter, you discuss the environment of the moon,
and I guess some of this we perhaps get from
just by being familiar with the famous footage of lunar
landings and sort of general mainstream understanding of the moon.
But what details of the lunar environment do you feel
are most often lacking from sort of mainstream understanding of
(02:43):
this environment.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
I think the thing that I go back to is
the sharpness, and I mean sharp in terms of the light,
like the contrast between light and dark. There's no atmosphere
to refract the light at all and soften the sun's
glare or to kind of bring light into the sh shadows.
It's all literally black or white, like there's either complete
sunlight or complete darkness and sharpness just physically, the rocks
(03:09):
themselves are really jagged and blocky, and you know, crystalline sharp.
Literally the dust itself is sharp. Dust on Earth is soft,
and it's mostly from life. I mean most dust is
from like human skin and pet dander and pollen and
sort of the discards of living things. And it's always
sort of rounded and kind of you know, softened by
(03:32):
life and by by Earth itself, by wind and rain
and erosion. And there's nothing like that on the Moon.
So even the dust is like little knives, And I
don't think people think about that, you know, when we
imagine being back up there. It was really annoying for
the Apollo astronauts. They would breathe it in and they'd
go inside the Lunar lander and take their helmets off,
(03:53):
and they would all reported this like stuffy nose congestion.
It was like itchy and they would be coughing. You know,
was really irritating, and it's because it was really abrasive.
It's really terrible to breathe it in and to have
it on you, and it's also really staticky, like it's
really difficult to get off because you know, again there's
(04:13):
no water, there's no atmosphere, there's no moisture at all
to sort of take the edge off, and so it
sticks to everything with static electricity and it's really difficult
to remove. So the dust is going to be a
huge obstacle I think for people going back up there.
But I don't think we think about just like the
sharpness of the moon, it's not like Earth.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Now. One of the things that I love about the book,
and I think our listeners are going to really get
into as well, is that, of course you discuss the
history as we understand it of the moon. You get
into the human and also the human history of our
understanding of it, and both scientific and folklore, mythological, etc.
What did the ancient Sumerians seemingly get right about the
(04:57):
creation of Earth's moon?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Yeah, I love that. This was something I found just
researching the book. I got really into Samerian history and
Babylonian history and a Syrian you know, all these different
cultures that spanned the area what's now Iraq and parts
of Syria and Iran, and this is sort of the
first literate civilizations on Earth. The first written records come
from Sumerian culture, and some of the oldest creation stories
(05:23):
are from Sumerian age, and one of them is this,
they're the creation tablets, which are these literally like tablets
like you imagine, you know, Moses holding these clay tablets
that were handed down and it's the same that literally
is the same thing. This is how people were keeping
written records at the time on clay tablets that would
harden in the sun. And the Sumerian creation tales have
(05:47):
these whole long stories of how the Earth and the
moon and the oceans came to be and the story
is that there were these two kind of god monsters
and they were separate deities, but then they got married,
you know, they united, and their union gave birth to
(06:07):
all the other lesser gods, and then these gods kind
of started conspiring, you know, as many mythologies hold these
sorts of stories. People were arguing about, you know, who
was in charge, who was more powerful, And these are
like spirit deities but also human, you know, human form.
(06:27):
There were two main gods, Apsu and Tiamat. And I'm
probably butchering the pronunciation. So Tiamat is salty water, which
is the oceans, Apsu is fresh water. And after they
you know, are united in this sacred marriage, Tiamat gives
(06:50):
birth to all the other gods of creation. And there
are a few different translations of this story, and the
one that I liked is Stephanie Dolly translation missed from Mesopotamia.
And in this version, the younger gods and newer gods
are like loud and annoying and braddy and disrespectful and so,
(07:12):
and Apsu can't sleep, so he decides to destroy them.
Tiamat is upset about this and wants to protect her
young so she alerts the older son Anki, who's the
god of wisdom, and Enki kills Apsu, and it's this
great battle, and in the battle, you know, the gods
are destroyed and torn apart. Tiamat herself doesn't survive, and
(07:32):
she's rendered in two and one half of her becomes
the heavens and the other half becomes the Earth. And
I just enjoyed reading about this mythology as I was
reading about the Sumerians, because I was trying to connect
the oldest written languages to our understanding of the moon.
But it turned out to be a really useful metaphor
for the formation of the moon, because a very similar
(07:56):
thing happens. You know, this sort of other being of
their planet arrives in Earth's orbit and destroys Earth, and
one half becomes the Earth and one half becomes the Moon.
And I felt like it was a helpful way for
me to imagine this event, and it just seemed like
a useful metaphor for what actually.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Happened now, which is the most widely accepted moon formation
theory today.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So this is still a pretty active area of debate,
which I find is super interesting because I mean, it's
the moon like shouldn't we know, Like don't you think
we should have a better idea of what happened. But
there are some really interesting things about the Moon, and
one is that it's very unique in the Solar System.
There's nothing else like this. It's huge relative to Earth.
It's really far away from Earth, and you know, it
has this sort of density that's lighter than Earth, but
(08:47):
yet it's materials. It's like down to the atoms in
the rocks of the Moon, it's almost identical to Earth.
In some cases it is identical to Earth. So there's
all these sort of weird characteristics. And this is a
difficult story to disentangle. You know, we think, and we've
learned in Apollo that probably would happen was this giant impact.
(09:07):
And this is just called the giant impact theory, so
that at some point early in Earth's history, another planet
was moving around the same orbit as Earth collided with
our early planet and both this impact are Thea, which
is the Greek god that's the mother of the moon
Seline in Greek mythology, So we name this planet THEA
(09:27):
crashes into Earth. Earth and Thea are totally destroyed, and
somehow in the cloud of debris that follows Earth and
the Moon both coalesce, and this is one way of
describing how they can look so alike but yet be
so different and distinct worlds. But the particulars of this
are still really hotly debated, actually, and we're not really
(09:48):
sure how this went down. And some of it is
because we know that the Moon is there, we know
its size, we know its speed relative to Earth, how
far it's moving away from us, how quickly it's leaving us,
and all its rotation speed, our rotation speed, all these
factors have to come into play, like there are some
just physical facts that we have to explain, and yet
(10:11):
some of the other physical evidence doesn't really seem to
match up with our models of how this could be.
So there's a lot of people working on this and
trying to figure out exactly how this could have happened.
And it's interesting to me for a few reasons. And
one is just I mean, like I said, it's the Moon,
like we should know.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Don't you want to know?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Like is it?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Wouldn't it be amazing to know how the Moon got
here and how we all got here and how those
things are related. And I think it's also just really
interesting because it has implications for the history of evolution
on Earth. You know, if this is a really unique system,
if there's no other place like Earth and our moon
in the Solar system, which that's the case, maybe that's
(10:48):
the case for other Solar systems, you know, maybe other
stars that have rocky planets in the habitable zones, maybe
those need a large moon sort of sculpting their existence
for life to be able to take hold. And I
think if we can come to understand a little bit
more about how our moon got here, that will give
us some insight into how unique we are maybe in
(11:11):
the whole broader universe.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Based on your research, and you get into this quite
a bit in the book, do you think life would
have been possible on Earth without our moon and or
what might life have looked like without the moon's influence?
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I mean, we
don't know, you know, how life arose here. We don't
know exactly when, we don't know exactly where. We have
some good ideas we think probably it was in the oceans,
either in deep ocean events on these mid ocean ridges
where Earth's crust sort of has these rifts in it,
or somewhere closer to the surface in tidal pools, and
(11:50):
these sort of like cycles of hydration and dehydration where
the tide comes in, it moistens the rocks, it flows
in more fresh water, and then the tide recedes and
the water dries up, and you know, it sort of
becomes thicker and murkier, and some interesting chemical reactions can
happen in that sort of cycle of ebb and flow,
(12:13):
And you know, I think the Moon is really responsible
for both of those effects. If life evolved in tidal pools,
if it originated there, then we can thank the moon
for that flux of water. If life originated in the
deep ocean, the Moon's probably what dragged it up and
mixed the entire ocean and stirred it, you know, like
(12:34):
a ladle stirring a pot of soup. Like imagine spinning
your spoon around in a big stock pot and all
of the onions kind of like flow up to the surface.
You know, that's what the moon does through its tide.
And so either way, I think the Moon played a
huge role in fostering the evolution of life, if it
didn't spark it into being in the first place, and
(12:55):
maybe that also happened. We never We're never gonna know,
but I do think the Moon's role in early evolution
has probably been overlooked.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I like the soup analogy though, because, yeah, you can
imagine like a soup that has never stirred as ingredients
are added. So even as I guess, as you have
increasingly more complex forms of life, right, they're not going
to necessarily be moved around the entire planet, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
They're not going to be able to move round. They're
not going to be able to access the nutrients they
need to feed themselves. You know, even if it's not
just the life forms themselves, but the nutrients in the
ocean and just material from runoff from the land into
the water and how those things mix, those would have
all sunk to the bottom and just been silt and
(13:38):
couldn't have been used by the chain of life. And
I think, you know, the Moon's tide has a huge
influence on the movement of water from the deep ocean
up to the surface. And we know that that's true,
and we know that was true when it was much
closer earlier in Earth history, and it was probably having
an even bigger effect on all that material in the water.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
You mentioned just how familiar we are with the moon.
It's easy to sort of take it for granted. One
of the interesting things about the moon that you point
out in the book of this of that, of course,
the moon is roughly the same size as our Sun
as visible from the earth, like making things like a
solar eclipse possible. How do you think that you cover
(14:30):
multiple ancient and traditional interpretations of the moon in your book,
how do you think the general flavor of global traditions
might have differed if the Sun and the Moon were
not roughly the same size in the sky.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
That's a good question. I mean, this is a fun
thing to think about because I think it makes so
much sense to people that they were sort of opposites
because of the fact that they look the same. You know,
occasionally the moon blocks the Sun. People for a long
time had no idea that was happening physically, like people
guessed at it in antiquity, but a until you know,
the earliest sort of written literate cultures, people had no
(15:04):
way of understanding what was happening. And even the ancient
Greeks didn't really understand what was happening. They didn't know
what the moon was and I think because they're roughly
the same size. I mean, they look the same size
in the sky. It's sort of an obvious, you know.
The idea of opposite yin and yang is one of
the Chinese traditions, you know, coming and going, black and white,
(15:27):
male and female, all these sort of dualities that people have,
death and life and death and resurrection. The moon is
an interesting way to represent those ideas. And the moon
and the sun together there's one that lights the day
and one that lights the night. I mean, that's in Genesis.
It's one of the first lines of the Old Testament
that you know, on the seventh day, you know, Earth
(15:48):
is created, but he gives us the sun to light
the day and the moon to light the night, and
the second light is the moon. So I think it's
just a natural way of imagining the cosmos, like, of
course there is one in the day, and of course
there's one at night. Like why wouldn't that be, you know,
And so if the moon was very different, or if
it was small, or if it was maybe like the
(16:10):
moons of Mars, these like dinky little asteroid crumbs, you know,
maybe we wouldn't have had that mythic grasp on opposites
the way that we do because of this lunar symbolism.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Now dipping into a current and future lunar exploration. Did
you think there's a substantial scientific advantage to sending human
beings back to the Moon and as opposed to sticking
strictly with probes and so forth.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yes, I definitely do, And I think there's a few
reasons why. You know, there's no substitute for human eyes,
and no substitute for human judgment, and a human pilot,
you know, I mean, one of them, maybe lesser known
now but more well known examples from Apollo is Neil
Armstrong's landing. Like he's. They were pretty off their target
(16:57):
when they first arrived, and the eagles descending toward the
lunar's surface, they missed their landing spot by a few miles,
and you know, they're running out of fuel. He has
to land, and he has to make a decision really
quickly and set down without dipping over. Not on the
rim of a crater, but in a pretty flat area,
not on one leg on a boulder, but like in
(17:18):
a pretty clear field, so that the whole thing is
standing upright. So they can get home, and you know,
he pulls it off. And I think, if we didn't
have a human pilot, an exceptional human pilot in Neil Armstrong,
we've seen what happens. I mean, japan just landed on
the Moon a few weeks ago in January, and it
flipped over and it sent telemetry. This lander, slim Is
(17:40):
its acronym, is still there and they're hoping that sunlight
on the panels will continue to let it wake up.
As the Moon or wits the Earth and the Sun
and the angle of light changes, it brings more sunlight
onto its solar panels. But it landed belly up, essentially.
And you know, this was a very complicated and very
detailed so built by the Japanese Space Agency, which just
(18:02):
had an incredibly success landing on asteroids, you know and
other planets like Jack say's one of the best space
agencies in terms of successes, and they still had issues
and they crashed a few months prior to that in
a different lunar attempt, and so you know, I think
there's even just getting there physically. There's no substitute for
(18:22):
a really well trained and equipped pilot. And then you know,
when they were on the Moon. The astronauts have spent
a lot of time doing geology training in Hawaii and Arizona,
just sort of being able to understand how rocks looked
different from one another and what that might mean. And
Neil Armstrong grabbed the first samples and within a few
minutes of touching down and there still some of the
(18:44):
best samples we got because he knew what he was
looking for. And successive missions too had really detailed astronaut training.
The last Apaullo mission, A Paulo seventeen had a geologist,
Jack Schmidt, was a trained field geologist, and he had
some specific things he wanted and he knew what to
look for him and these are really important samples to
this day. So I think, you know, having people up
(19:06):
there walking around making judgment calls, snap decisions the way
humans can do. There's even with the most advanced technology
we have, robots are no substitute, I think for human brains.
And I think there's something more sort of just fundamental
about it. I don't think I think that humans being
up there and connecting the rest of humanity to the
(19:29):
Moon through their presence is just an irreplaceable phenomenon like
a robot being up there is not quite as impressive,
and their robots are awesome, you know. We've landed cars
on Mars and helicopter on Mars, you know, and these
are incredible pieces of technology that are our extensions of
our ideas and our ingenuity. But I still think humans
(19:52):
being able to walk up there and transcend that boundary
is just irreplaceable.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Now, human spacecraft first reached the Mids in nineteen fifty nine,
and humans landed on the Moon for the first time
in nineteen sixty nine. What might we expect to happen
on the Moon with humans and or probes between now
and twenty fifty nine and twenty sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I mean, it depends on how you ask. I think
there are a lot of people who are really excited
about people being up there permanently, and that the beginning
of that will be happening here pretty soon. In twenty
twenty four, NASA's Artemis program intends to land the first woman,
the first person of color on the Moon, become you know,
the first to go back to the Moon since we
left it in nineteen seventy two, And there's a lot
(20:39):
of momentum for that, and I think you know, we'll see,
we'll see how quickly it happens. At NASA's goal is
to land by no earlier than September of twenty twenty
six as of right now, but that could change and
probably will change, because they have a lot of reasons
to be thlowing things down, because some of the companies
building equipment to get there are having issues or taking
(21:02):
a long time to finish their tasks. So these things
take time. And I think, you know, no one's really
expecting it to happen overnight, but I think by twenty
fifty nine, by twenty sixty nine, you know, a century
after the first lunar landings, I think it's very likely
that we'll have permanent human habitation up there in some
sort of modest settlement, you know, with with really austere conditions,
(21:26):
and you know, people who are really well trained and
well equipped to be able to live there for chunks
of time. I don't think it's going to be, you know,
a city. I don't envision it being this permanent, like
you know. I one analogy I think of sometimes looking
at moon exploration in the future is sort of Western
expansion in the US, and I think this is sometimes
(21:47):
problematic because some of that language is still very much,
you know, wrapped up in colonial mindsets and sort of
trampling over land and people who got here first. And
you know, there are no cultures on the Moon, there
are no indigenous peoples on the Moon who will be oppressed.
But I still think that, you know, the ideas that
(22:08):
carried us into western expansion in the United States are
very similar to how people feel about settling the Moon,
and I hope that we step back a little bit
and think about that and consider why we want to
be there and what we want to do. So I
don't know if I think it's going to be like,
you know, a company town, a railroad town, kind of
(22:29):
like depot, but I do think there will be experiments
up there happening, you know, repeatedly. I think there's likely
to be some kind of observatory on the fire side
doing astronomy that isn't you know, difficult or impossible from Earth.
I think there will be companies taking people and supplies
and scientists up there back and forth for research purposes.
(22:52):
And because that will be happening, I think there will
be sort of a secondary economy enabling those things, and
providing services, and that's one of the goals that NASA has.
I mean, this is the entire purpose of their Commercial
Learnar Payload Services program, which is to encourage startups and
small companies and big companies to develop technology that will
take people, even and supplies and material to the Moon
(23:17):
alongside NASA, where like NASA is now just a ride
share partner as opposed to the primary reason that we go.
And I think that's probably going to happen. It just
might take longer than people think.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Now internationally that there is interest in mining on the Moon. Correct,
what are they looking to? Mind? What are the main objects?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There are a few things that might be of value,
and I mean mostly it's per material that would be
used up there. So there's not much that's really valuable
on the Moon that we don't have on Earth. There
are a few things, but you know, it's still way
easier to mine for rare earth metals on this planet
than it is to go to the Moon and get
them and come back. But there are things like helium
(23:58):
three is a potential resource. This is like a volatile
form of helium that could be used to power nuclear reactors. Potentially,
there's a lot of water, and it's not like lakes
you know, or aquifers like we imagine on Earth, but
it's probably locked up in hydrated minerals more like you know,
the oil sands, or maybe in ices, you know, flat
(24:21):
fields of ice at the bottoms of permanently shadowed craters,
and that could be used either for just human use
or more likely for rocket fuel. If you can split
up the hydrogen and oxygen bonds and water, then you
have hydrogen and you have oxygen, and those can be
refined into rocket fuel. And if that would be really
nice to have if you're going to go back home
to Earth you don't need to bring as much with you,
(24:44):
or if you want to go on somewhere else further
afield to Mars or asteroids or who knows, it would
be nice to have a fuel depot at the Moon
where you don't need to take as much fuel off
Earth with you as you leave.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Now, in terms of conservation on the Moon, which you've
touched on already, is it how much do we have
actually ironed out in terms of like international cooperation regarding that, Like,
I mean, we have there's so little on the Moon
that we have put there. But if all this goes
according to plan, that will change. Are there any like
(25:22):
do we have any agreements in place to protect the
Moon to any degree kind of?
Speaker 3 (25:27):
So there's I mean, there's not really an international agreement
that everybody has signed on to. There is a nineteen
sixty seven Outer Space Treaty, which is you know, dates
to the Apollo Ara and the Space Race. And there
are new Artemis Accords, which is set up by NASA
but has a bunch of signatories. I think Belgium just
(25:47):
became the forty fourth country to sign on to the
Artemis Accords. And this is sort of a multilateral international agreement.
It's not binding, it's not through the UN even. It's
sort of just all the spacefaring countries coming together to
agree to a few certain things. And mostly it's things
like interoperability of equipment, so like, if you're going to
(26:09):
go up there and put up capsule and have people
in there, let's make sure that it can dock with
you know, this other guy's Space agency equipment, so you
can help each other out if you need to. There
are provisions that protect lunar heritage sites, so like they
would ask you to not land like on top of
the Apollo eleven landing site, you know, and disturb that.
(26:32):
There are things like, you know, let's make sure that
if we extract material, that you know, we're not trampling
on someone else's ability to extract material. Some of those
provisions I think are interesting because they inherently give people
a claim. So there's there's a clause in the Artemis
Accords that says you can't disturb anybody else's equipment or
(26:55):
site or you know, resource material or prospecting ability. And
because there's no atmosphere and there's no water, there's no
any there's nothing on the Moon to sort of soften
your landing. Every landing and every takeoff will throw up
enormous amounts of lunar dust that will sometimes go into
(27:16):
orbit and take a long time to settle, and it
will be really abrasive. And so if we all have
to agree that we're not going to disturb somebody else's
landing site, then a landing site becomes that country's or
that companies or that you know, whoever, whatever entity can
land up there is sort of staking a claim to
(27:38):
that location under the Artemisic Coords. And this is not official.
It's not like they've all said like, this is mine,
my flag's there, it's my spot. But if you're all
agreeing to not disturb one on another's locations, and that's
sort of inherent, you know that these are you're staking
a claim in a way. And not every country is
this signatory to the artomistic course, not every country is
(27:59):
a signatory to the space treating. So there's there's not
really an international agreement that everyone has agreed upon that
will protect the moon or the people going up there,
or the robots going up there. So it's going to
be very interesting to see how this all shakes out.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Now, to come back to our appreciation of the moon
on Earth and our experiences of the moon on Earth,
I was reading an article you'd written for Adams Obscura
on this topic, so I thought i'd ask this for
our listeners. What is a strawberry moon and why is
it your favorite?
Speaker 3 (28:35):
So a strawberry moon is one of the names for
the twelve moons of the year. They each have different
names depending on which indigenous tradition they're used, you know,
or just history in whatever culture, whatever part of Earth
you're on. Most moons have a seasonal aspect to them.
In February, we have the wolf moon, there's the cold moon.
(29:00):
There's a bunch of other names for different There's the
harvest moon, and probably is the most famous example. But
the strawberry moon is in early June, and I love
this moon because it sort of brings summer along with it.
It's called the strawberry moon because that's the time of
year that strawberries are getting ripe and they're able to
be picked, and so this has the seasonal aspect. But
(29:23):
it sometimes even looks pink as it's rising, you know,
in a full moon on a summer night, through a
hazy atmosphere with humidity in the air because it's warm
in the Northern Hemisphere, I should say, but you know
in the US and Europe and northern northern Hemisphere areas,
it's this beginning of summer. It's right before the summer solstice.
It's the longest nights of the year, or the longest
(29:45):
days of the year, sorry, the shortest nights. So you
have a lot of sun and a lot of you know,
warmth in the evenings to sort of extend your day outside.
And the moon at this time of year is right
kind of in your window it's lower on the horizon.
And I don't know if people really notice this, but
if you pay attention to the location of the Sun
and the moon throughout the year, they do this sort
(30:06):
of flip like almost like double Dutch jump ropes kind
of crisscrossing in the sky. So the summer moon is
in the same general area of the sky as the
winter sun, and so in the winter the moon is
high overhead, and in the summer again in the northern
hemisphere the moon is. In the winter, the moon is
(30:29):
high overhead, and in the summer the moon is sort
of low on the southern horizon, so it feels more present.
I guess, like you really can't miss it if you're
walking around outside. It's so dominant on the landscape. It
looks bigger, it looks more just with you. And the
(30:51):
Strawberry Moon is the first really like low hanging bright
moon of the summer. So it's just my.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Favorite now with the lunar New Year celebrates happening this week,
you know, first of all, it's a great time to
pick up this terrific book on our Moon. I think
a great, great read for this time of year. But
I was wondering is there anything you might encourage new
Lunar New Year celebrators to remember or keep in mind
about Earth's moon in addition to you know, their their their,
(31:19):
their heritage and culture.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I think if there's one thing I want people to
take away from this book, it's that the moon is
so much more powerful and more potent even in our
lives today than people might realize. It's so much more
than this beautiful nighttime companion, and it's so much more
than our ability to tell time and orient ourselves in time.
(31:42):
You know, the lunar New Year is a lunar solar calendar,
which is one of the few you know remaining on
Earth in current use. I mean, most of the Western
world and the civil calendar use the Gregorian calendar, which
is a version of the calendar that Julius us are
introduced forty four BC, and it's the first one in
the world that divorced the moon from time. And that's
(32:05):
how most people use time anymore. You know, even if
you're celebrating in a New Year as part of a
tradition in Asia, it's still not the way that you know,
global economics and global trade sort of mark time. It's
more of a tradition than it is a literal tool anymore.
But I think it's so much more than that. It's
(32:26):
so much more powerful over our lives than people might
think anymore. We have artificial light at night, we live
in a twenty four hour news cycle, we live in
a twenty four hour economic cycle, and it's easy to
sort of lose track of the Moon's importance. But I
hope people think about it in a new way after
(32:47):
reading this book, and that they understand how it's been
involved in literally everything that has happened here, in ways
that are much deeper and much more profound than I
realized before I wrote the book.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Well, Rebecca, thanks for taking time out of your day
to come on the show and chat with me here.
The book again, is Our Moon, How earth Celestial companion
Transformed the planet. It's out now. If folks want to
follow you online, where would you like them to go?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Well, in our very fractured online landscape. Now, I'm still
on Twitter x, but not it's active there anymore. Mostly
active on Instagram on zed by Rebecca Boyle, and I'm
also on like Threads and Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Thanks again to Rebecca Boil for taking time out of
her day to chat with me here on the podcast
again Our Moon, How Earth Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet
out now in I think every format you could ask for,
so again highly recommend it. Go go check it out.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is, of course primarily a
(33:52):
science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Mondays we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays we
do a short form episode of about three different flavors,
and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
the show, and if you would like to reach out
(34:13):
via email, well you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Plant. In this episode of the podcast,
I'm going to be chatting with science journalist and author
Rebecca Boyle about her new book, Our Moon, How Earth's
Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet. It's such a good read,
highly recommend it, as I'll touch on later in the
(00:33):
interview itself. This is a great week to read a
book about the moon, because of course we're getting into
celebrations of lunar New Year. So without further ado, let's
get right to that interview. Hi, Rebecca, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
So the new book is Our Moon, How Earth's Celestial
Companion Transformed the Planet, out now in physical, ebook and
audio formats. Can you tell us what inspired you to
write book.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
I remember being a kid and sitting on the floor
of my elementary school library, probably in fifth grade, and
listening to a vinyl record of the Apollo Transcript or
the the Apollo Recordings, and just being blown away and
like I couldn't believe that they were actually up there.
And I would look at the moon at night and
(01:22):
it felt so far away but also so close and
so much a part of my life that this sort
of just it blew my mind the idea of people
walking around up there, and I think I never lost
that connection, you know. I write about astronomy a lot
right now, and often the moon is sort of like
it gets short shrifts, it's kind of annoying for astronomers,
(01:43):
like it's really bright, it's up all the time. If
you're trying to study distant galaxies and quasars and things
like that, it's actually an obstacle. So I often find
myself kind of defending it and like, no, the moon
is really special and the moon is cool, you know.
And I think that's sort of how I first approached this,
was like I want this to be an appreciation of
the moon, and then as I started writing it, it
(02:05):
became more like, no, the moon is really actually super
important for everything that's ever happened here, and the book
turned into more of an argument about that, like the
moon is central to our existence and it's not just
this beautiful thing that we should care about. It's like
it's the reason we're here.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
In your first chapter, you discuss the environment of the moon,
and I guess some of this we perhaps get from
just by being familiar with the famous footage of lunar
landings and sort of general mainstream understanding of the moon.
But what details of the lunar environment do you feel
are most often lacking from sort of mainstream understanding of
(02:43):
this environment.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
I think the thing that I go back to is
the sharpness, and I mean sharp in terms of the light,
like the contrast between light and dark. There's no atmosphere
to refract the light at all and soften the sun's
glare or to kind of bring light into the sh shadows.
It's all literally black or white, like there's either complete
sunlight or complete darkness and sharpness just physically, the rocks
(03:09):
themselves are really jagged and blocky, and you know, crystalline sharp.
Literally the dust itself is sharp. Dust on Earth is soft,
and it's mostly from life. I mean most dust is
from like human skin and pet dander and pollen and
sort of the discards of living things. And it's always
sort of rounded and kind of you know, softened by
(03:32):
life and by by Earth itself, by wind and rain
and erosion. And there's nothing like that on the Moon.
So even the dust is like little knives, And I
don't think people think about that, you know, when we
imagine being back up there. It was really annoying for
the Apollo astronauts. They would breathe it in and they'd
go inside the Lunar lander and take their helmets off,
(03:53):
and they would all reported this like stuffy nose congestion.
It was like itchy and they would be coughing. You know,
was really irritating, and it's because it was really abrasive.
It's really terrible to breathe it in and to have
it on you, and it's also really staticky, like it's
really difficult to get off because you know, again there's
(04:13):
no water, there's no atmosphere, there's no moisture at all
to sort of take the edge off, and so it
sticks to everything with static electricity and it's really difficult
to remove. So the dust is going to be a
huge obstacle I think for people going back up there.
But I don't think we think about just like the
sharpness of the moon, it's not like Earth.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Now. One of the things that I love about the book,
and I think our listeners are going to really get
into as well, is that, of course you discuss the
history as we understand it of the moon. You get
into the human and also the human history of our
understanding of it, and both scientific and folklore, mythological, etc.
What did the ancient Sumerians seemingly get right about the
(04:57):
creation of Earth's moon?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Yeah, I love that. This was something I found just
researching the book. I got really into Samerian history and
Babylonian history and a Syrian you know, all these different
cultures that spanned the area what's now Iraq and parts
of Syria and Iran, and this is sort of the
first literate civilizations on Earth. The first written records come
from Sumerian culture, and some of the oldest creation stories
(05:23):
are from Sumerian age, and one of them is this,
they're the creation tablets, which are these literally like tablets
like you imagine, you know, Moses holding these clay tablets
that were handed down and it's the same that literally
is the same thing. This is how people were keeping
written records at the time on clay tablets that would
harden in the sun. And the Sumerian creation tales have
(05:47):
these whole long stories of how the Earth and the
moon and the oceans came to be and the story
is that there were these two kind of god monsters
and they were separate deities, but then they got married,
you know, they united, and their union gave birth to
(06:07):
all the other lesser gods, and then these gods kind
of started conspiring, you know, as many mythologies hold these
sorts of stories. People were arguing about, you know, who
was in charge, who was more powerful, And these are
like spirit deities but also human, you know, human form.
(06:27):
There were two main gods, Apsu and Tiamat. And I'm
probably butchering the pronunciation. So Tiamat is salty water, which
is the oceans, Apsu is fresh water. And after they
you know, are united in this sacred marriage, Tiamat gives
(06:50):
birth to all the other gods of creation. And there
are a few different translations of this story, and the
one that I liked is Stephanie Dolly translation missed from Mesopotamia.
And in this version, the younger gods and newer gods
are like loud and annoying and braddy and disrespectful and so,
(07:12):
and Apsu can't sleep, so he decides to destroy them.
Tiamat is upset about this and wants to protect her
young so she alerts the older son Anki, who's the
god of wisdom, and Enki kills Apsu, and it's this
great battle, and in the battle, you know, the gods
are destroyed and torn apart. Tiamat herself doesn't survive, and
(07:32):
she's rendered in two and one half of her becomes
the heavens and the other half becomes the Earth. And
I just enjoyed reading about this mythology as I was
reading about the Sumerians, because I was trying to connect
the oldest written languages to our understanding of the moon.
But it turned out to be a really useful metaphor
for the formation of the moon, because a very similar
(07:56):
thing happens. You know, this sort of other being of
their planet arrives in Earth's orbit and destroys Earth, and
one half becomes the Earth and one half becomes the Moon.
And I felt like it was a helpful way for
me to imagine this event, and it just seemed like
a useful metaphor for what actually.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Happened now, which is the most widely accepted moon formation
theory today.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So this is still a pretty active area of debate,
which I find is super interesting because I mean, it's
the moon like shouldn't we know, Like don't you think
we should have a better idea of what happened. But
there are some really interesting things about the Moon, and
one is that it's very unique in the Solar System.
There's nothing else like this. It's huge relative to Earth.
It's really far away from Earth, and you know, it
has this sort of density that's lighter than Earth, but
(08:47):
yet it's materials. It's like down to the atoms in
the rocks of the Moon, it's almost identical to Earth.
In some cases it is identical to Earth. So there's
all these sort of weird characteristics. And this is a
difficult story to disentangle. You know, we think, and we've
learned in Apollo that probably would happen was this giant impact.
(09:07):
And this is just called the giant impact theory, so
that at some point early in Earth's history, another planet
was moving around the same orbit as Earth collided with
our early planet and both this impact are Thea, which
is the Greek god that's the mother of the moon
Seline in Greek mythology, So we name this planet THEA
(09:27):
crashes into Earth. Earth and Thea are totally destroyed, and
somehow in the cloud of debris that follows Earth and
the Moon both coalesce, and this is one way of
describing how they can look so alike but yet be
so different and distinct worlds. But the particulars of this
are still really hotly debated, actually, and we're not really
(09:48):
sure how this went down. And some of it is
because we know that the Moon is there, we know
its size, we know its speed relative to Earth, how
far it's moving away from us, how quickly it's leaving us,
and all its rotation speed, our rotation speed, all these
factors have to come into play, like there are some
just physical facts that we have to explain, and yet
(10:11):
some of the other physical evidence doesn't really seem to
match up with our models of how this could be.
So there's a lot of people working on this and
trying to figure out exactly how this could have happened.
And it's interesting to me for a few reasons. And
one is just I mean, like I said, it's the Moon,
like we should know.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Don't you want to know?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Like is it?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Wouldn't it be amazing to know how the Moon got
here and how we all got here and how those
things are related. And I think it's also just really
interesting because it has implications for the history of evolution
on Earth. You know, if this is a really unique system,
if there's no other place like Earth and our moon
in the Solar system, which that's the case, maybe that's
(10:48):
the case for other Solar systems, you know, maybe other
stars that have rocky planets in the habitable zones, maybe
those need a large moon sort of sculpting their existence
for life to be able to take hold. And I
think if we can come to understand a little bit
more about how our moon got here, that will give
us some insight into how unique we are maybe in
(11:11):
the whole broader universe.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Based on your research, and you get into this quite
a bit in the book, do you think life would
have been possible on Earth without our moon and or
what might life have looked like without the moon's influence?
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I mean, we
don't know, you know, how life arose here. We don't
know exactly when, we don't know exactly where. We have
some good ideas we think probably it was in the oceans,
either in deep ocean events on these mid ocean ridges
where Earth's crust sort of has these rifts in it,
or somewhere closer to the surface in tidal pools, and
(11:50):
these sort of like cycles of hydration and dehydration where
the tide comes in, it moistens the rocks, it flows
in more fresh water, and then the tide recedes and
the water dries up, and you know, it sort of
becomes thicker and murkier, and some interesting chemical reactions can
happen in that sort of cycle of ebb and flow,
(12:13):
And you know, I think the Moon is really responsible
for both of those effects. If life evolved in tidal pools,
if it originated there, then we can thank the moon
for that flux of water. If life originated in the
deep ocean, the Moon's probably what dragged it up and
mixed the entire ocean and stirred it, you know, like
(12:34):
a ladle stirring a pot of soup. Like imagine spinning
your spoon around in a big stock pot and all
of the onions kind of like flow up to the surface.
You know, that's what the moon does through its tide.
And so either way, I think the Moon played a
huge role in fostering the evolution of life, if it
didn't spark it into being in the first place, and
(12:55):
maybe that also happened. We never We're never gonna know,
but I do think the Moon's role in early evolution
has probably been overlooked.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I like the soup analogy though, because, yeah, you can
imagine like a soup that has never stirred as ingredients
are added. So even as I guess, as you have
increasingly more complex forms of life, right, they're not going
to necessarily be moved around the entire planet, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
They're not going to be able to move round. They're
not going to be able to access the nutrients they
need to feed themselves. You know, even if it's not
just the life forms themselves, but the nutrients in the
ocean and just material from runoff from the land into
the water and how those things mix, those would have
all sunk to the bottom and just been silt and
(13:38):
couldn't have been used by the chain of life. And
I think, you know, the Moon's tide has a huge
influence on the movement of water from the deep ocean
up to the surface. And we know that that's true,
and we know that was true when it was much
closer earlier in Earth history, and it was probably having
an even bigger effect on all that material in the water.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
You mentioned just how familiar we are with the moon.
It's easy to sort of take it for granted. One
of the interesting things about the moon that you point
out in the book of this of that, of course,
the moon is roughly the same size as our Sun
as visible from the earth, like making things like a
solar eclipse possible. How do you think that you cover
(14:30):
multiple ancient and traditional interpretations of the moon in your book,
how do you think the general flavor of global traditions
might have differed if the Sun and the Moon were
not roughly the same size in the sky.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
That's a good question. I mean, this is a fun
thing to think about because I think it makes so
much sense to people that they were sort of opposites
because of the fact that they look the same. You know,
occasionally the moon blocks the Sun. People for a long
time had no idea that was happening physically, like people
guessed at it in antiquity, but a until you know,
the earliest sort of written literate cultures, people had no
(15:04):
way of understanding what was happening. And even the ancient
Greeks didn't really understand what was happening. They didn't know
what the moon was and I think because they're roughly
the same size. I mean, they look the same size
in the sky. It's sort of an obvious, you know.
The idea of opposite yin and yang is one of
the Chinese traditions, you know, coming and going, black and white,
(15:27):
male and female, all these sort of dualities that people have,
death and life and death and resurrection. The moon is
an interesting way to represent those ideas. And the moon
and the sun together there's one that lights the day
and one that lights the night. I mean, that's in Genesis.
It's one of the first lines of the Old Testament
that you know, on the seventh day, you know, Earth
(15:48):
is created, but he gives us the sun to light
the day and the moon to light the night, and
the second light is the moon. So I think it's
just a natural way of imagining the cosmos, like, of
course there is one in the day, and of course
there's one at night. Like why wouldn't that be, you know,
And so if the moon was very different, or if
it was small, or if it was maybe like the
(16:10):
moons of Mars, these like dinky little asteroid crumbs, you know,
maybe we wouldn't have had that mythic grasp on opposites
the way that we do because of this lunar symbolism.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Now dipping into a current and future lunar exploration. Did
you think there's a substantial scientific advantage to sending human
beings back to the Moon and as opposed to sticking
strictly with probes and so forth.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yes, I definitely do, And I think there's a few
reasons why. You know, there's no substitute for human eyes,
and no substitute for human judgment, and a human pilot,
you know, I mean, one of them, maybe lesser known
now but more well known examples from Apollo is Neil
Armstrong's landing. Like he's. They were pretty off their target
(16:57):
when they first arrived, and the eagles descending toward the
lunar's surface, they missed their landing spot by a few miles,
and you know, they're running out of fuel. He has
to land, and he has to make a decision really
quickly and set down without dipping over. Not on the
rim of a crater, but in a pretty flat area,
not on one leg on a boulder, but like in
(17:18):
a pretty clear field, so that the whole thing is
standing upright. So they can get home, and you know,
he pulls it off. And I think, if we didn't
have a human pilot, an exceptional human pilot in Neil Armstrong,
we've seen what happens. I mean, japan just landed on
the Moon a few weeks ago in January, and it
flipped over and it sent telemetry. This lander, slim Is
(17:40):
its acronym, is still there and they're hoping that sunlight
on the panels will continue to let it wake up.
As the Moon or wits the Earth and the Sun
and the angle of light changes, it brings more sunlight
onto its solar panels. But it landed belly up, essentially.
And you know, this was a very complicated and very
detailed so built by the Japanese Space Agency, which just
(18:02):
had an incredibly success landing on asteroids, you know and
other planets like Jack say's one of the best space
agencies in terms of successes, and they still had issues
and they crashed a few months prior to that in
a different lunar attempt, and so you know, I think
there's even just getting there physically. There's no substitute for
(18:22):
a really well trained and equipped pilot. And then you know,
when they were on the Moon. The astronauts have spent
a lot of time doing geology training in Hawaii and Arizona,
just sort of being able to understand how rocks looked
different from one another and what that might mean. And
Neil Armstrong grabbed the first samples and within a few
minutes of touching down and there still some of the
(18:44):
best samples we got because he knew what he was
looking for. And successive missions too had really detailed astronaut training.
The last Apaullo mission, A Paulo seventeen had a geologist,
Jack Schmidt, was a trained field geologist, and he had
some specific things he wanted and he knew what to
look for him and these are really important samples to
this day. So I think, you know, having people up
(19:06):
there walking around making judgment calls, snap decisions the way
humans can do. There's even with the most advanced technology
we have, robots are no substitute, I think for human brains.
And I think there's something more sort of just fundamental
about it. I don't think I think that humans being
up there and connecting the rest of humanity to the
(19:29):
Moon through their presence is just an irreplaceable phenomenon like
a robot being up there is not quite as impressive,
and their robots are awesome, you know. We've landed cars
on Mars and helicopter on Mars, you know, and these
are incredible pieces of technology that are our extensions of
our ideas and our ingenuity. But I still think humans
(19:52):
being able to walk up there and transcend that boundary
is just irreplaceable.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Now, human spacecraft first reached the Mids in nineteen fifty nine,
and humans landed on the Moon for the first time
in nineteen sixty nine. What might we expect to happen
on the Moon with humans and or probes between now
and twenty fifty nine and twenty sixty nine.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
I mean, it depends on how you ask. I think
there are a lot of people who are really excited
about people being up there permanently, and that the beginning
of that will be happening here pretty soon. In twenty
twenty four, NASA's Artemis program intends to land the first woman,
the first person of color on the Moon, become you know,
the first to go back to the Moon since we
left it in nineteen seventy two, And there's a lot
(20:39):
of momentum for that, and I think you know, we'll see,
we'll see how quickly it happens. At NASA's goal is
to land by no earlier than September of twenty twenty
six as of right now, but that could change and
probably will change, because they have a lot of reasons
to be thlowing things down, because some of the companies
building equipment to get there are having issues or taking
(21:02):
a long time to finish their tasks. So these things
take time. And I think, you know, no one's really
expecting it to happen overnight, but I think by twenty
fifty nine, by twenty sixty nine, you know, a century
after the first lunar landings, I think it's very likely
that we'll have permanent human habitation up there in some
sort of modest settlement, you know, with with really austere conditions,
(21:26):
and you know, people who are really well trained and
well equipped to be able to live there for chunks
of time. I don't think it's going to be, you know,
a city. I don't envision it being this permanent, like
you know. I one analogy I think of sometimes looking
at moon exploration in the future is sort of Western
expansion in the US, and I think this is sometimes
(21:47):
problematic because some of that language is still very much,
you know, wrapped up in colonial mindsets and sort of
trampling over land and people who got here first. And
you know, there are no cultures on the Moon, there
are no indigenous peoples on the Moon who will be oppressed.
But I still think that, you know, the ideas that
(22:08):
carried us into western expansion in the United States are
very similar to how people feel about settling the Moon,
and I hope that we step back a little bit
and think about that and consider why we want to
be there and what we want to do. So I
don't know if I think it's going to be like,
you know, a company town, a railroad town, kind of
(22:29):
like depot, but I do think there will be experiments
up there happening, you know, repeatedly. I think there's likely
to be some kind of observatory on the fire side
doing astronomy that isn't you know, difficult or impossible from Earth.
I think there will be companies taking people and supplies
and scientists up there back and forth for research purposes.
(22:52):
And because that will be happening, I think there will
be sort of a secondary economy enabling those things, and
providing services, and that's one of the goals that NASA has.
I mean, this is the entire purpose of their Commercial
Learnar Payload Services program, which is to encourage startups and
small companies and big companies to develop technology that will
take people, even and supplies and material to the Moon
(23:17):
alongside NASA, where like NASA is now just a ride
share partner as opposed to the primary reason that we go.
And I think that's probably going to happen. It just
might take longer than people think.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Now internationally that there is interest in mining on the Moon. Correct,
what are they looking to? Mind? What are the main objects?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There are a few things that might be of value,
and I mean mostly it's per material that would be
used up there. So there's not much that's really valuable
on the Moon that we don't have on Earth. There
are a few things, but you know, it's still way
easier to mine for rare earth metals on this planet
than it is to go to the Moon and get
them and come back. But there are things like helium
(23:58):
three is a potential resource. This is like a volatile
form of helium that could be used to power nuclear reactors. Potentially,
there's a lot of water, and it's not like lakes
you know, or aquifers like we imagine on Earth, but
it's probably locked up in hydrated minerals more like you know,
the oil sands, or maybe in ices, you know, flat
(24:21):
fields of ice at the bottoms of permanently shadowed craters,
and that could be used either for just human use
or more likely for rocket fuel. If you can split
up the hydrogen and oxygen bonds and water, then you
have hydrogen and you have oxygen, and those can be
refined into rocket fuel. And if that would be really
nice to have if you're going to go back home
to Earth you don't need to bring as much with you,
(24:44):
or if you want to go on somewhere else further
afield to Mars or asteroids or who knows, it would
be nice to have a fuel depot at the Moon
where you don't need to take as much fuel off
Earth with you as you leave.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Now, in terms of conservation on the Moon, which you've
touched on already, is it how much do we have
actually ironed out in terms of like international cooperation regarding that, Like,
I mean, we have there's so little on the Moon
that we have put there. But if all this goes
according to plan, that will change. Are there any like
(25:22):
do we have any agreements in place to protect the
Moon to any degree kind of?
Speaker 3 (25:27):
So there's I mean, there's not really an international agreement
that everybody has signed on to. There is a nineteen
sixty seven Outer Space Treaty, which is you know, dates
to the Apollo Ara and the Space Race. And there
are new Artemis Accords, which is set up by NASA
but has a bunch of signatories. I think Belgium just
(25:47):
became the forty fourth country to sign on to the
Artemis Accords. And this is sort of a multilateral international agreement.
It's not binding, it's not through the UN even. It's
sort of just all the spacefaring countries coming together to
agree to a few certain things. And mostly it's things
like interoperability of equipment, so like, if you're going to
(26:09):
go up there and put up capsule and have people
in there, let's make sure that it can dock with
you know, this other guy's Space agency equipment, so you
can help each other out if you need to. There
are provisions that protect lunar heritage sites, so like they
would ask you to not land like on top of
the Apollo eleven landing site, you know, and disturb that.
(26:32):
There are things like, you know, let's make sure that
if we extract material, that you know, we're not trampling
on someone else's ability to extract material. Some of those
provisions I think are interesting because they inherently give people
a claim. So there's there's a clause in the Artemis
Accords that says you can't disturb anybody else's equipment or
(26:55):
site or you know, resource material or prospecting ability. And
because there's no atmosphere and there's no water, there's no
any there's nothing on the Moon to sort of soften
your landing. Every landing and every takeoff will throw up
enormous amounts of lunar dust that will sometimes go into
(27:16):
orbit and take a long time to settle, and it
will be really abrasive. And so if we all have
to agree that we're not going to disturb somebody else's
landing site, then a landing site becomes that country's or
that companies or that you know, whoever, whatever entity can
land up there is sort of staking a claim to
(27:38):
that location under the Artemisic Coords. And this is not official.
It's not like they've all said like, this is mine,
my flag's there, it's my spot. But if you're all
agreeing to not disturb one on another's locations, and that's
sort of inherent, you know that these are you're staking
a claim in a way. And not every country is
this signatory to the artomistic course, not every country is
(27:59):
a signatory to the space treating. So there's there's not
really an international agreement that everyone has agreed upon that
will protect the moon or the people going up there,
or the robots going up there. So it's going to
be very interesting to see how this all shakes out.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Now, to come back to our appreciation of the moon
on Earth and our experiences of the moon on Earth,
I was reading an article you'd written for Adams Obscura
on this topic, so I thought i'd ask this for
our listeners. What is a strawberry moon and why is
it your favorite?
Speaker 3 (28:35):
So a strawberry moon is one of the names for
the twelve moons of the year. They each have different
names depending on which indigenous tradition they're used, you know,
or just history in whatever culture, whatever part of Earth
you're on. Most moons have a seasonal aspect to them.
In February, we have the wolf moon, there's the cold moon.
(29:00):
There's a bunch of other names for different There's the
harvest moon, and probably is the most famous example. But
the strawberry moon is in early June, and I love
this moon because it sort of brings summer along with it.
It's called the strawberry moon because that's the time of
year that strawberries are getting ripe and they're able to
be picked, and so this has the seasonal aspect. But
(29:23):
it sometimes even looks pink as it's rising, you know,
in a full moon on a summer night, through a
hazy atmosphere with humidity in the air because it's warm
in the Northern Hemisphere, I should say, but you know
in the US and Europe and northern northern Hemisphere areas,
it's this beginning of summer. It's right before the summer solstice.
It's the longest nights of the year, or the longest
(29:45):
days of the year, sorry, the shortest nights. So you
have a lot of sun and a lot of you know,
warmth in the evenings to sort of extend your day outside.
And the moon at this time of year is right
kind of in your window it's lower on the horizon.
And I don't know if people really notice this, but
if you pay attention to the location of the Sun
and the moon throughout the year, they do this sort
(30:06):
of flip like almost like double Dutch jump ropes kind
of crisscrossing in the sky. So the summer moon is
in the same general area of the sky as the
winter sun, and so in the winter the moon is
high overhead, and in the summer again in the northern
hemisphere the moon is. In the winter, the moon is
(30:29):
high overhead, and in the summer the moon is sort
of low on the southern horizon, so it feels more present.
I guess, like you really can't miss it if you're
walking around outside. It's so dominant on the landscape. It
looks bigger, it looks more just with you. And the
(30:51):
Strawberry Moon is the first really like low hanging bright
moon of the summer. So it's just my.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Favorite now with the lunar New Year celebrates happening this week,
you know, first of all, it's a great time to
pick up this terrific book on our Moon. I think
a great, great read for this time of year. But
I was wondering is there anything you might encourage new
Lunar New Year celebrators to remember or keep in mind
about Earth's moon in addition to you know, their their their,
(31:19):
their heritage and culture.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I think if there's one thing I want people to
take away from this book, it's that the moon is
so much more powerful and more potent even in our
lives today than people might realize. It's so much more
than this beautiful nighttime companion, and it's so much more
than our ability to tell time and orient ourselves in time.
(31:42):
You know, the lunar New Year is a lunar solar calendar,
which is one of the few you know remaining on
Earth in current use. I mean, most of the Western
world and the civil calendar use the Gregorian calendar, which
is a version of the calendar that Julius us are
introduced forty four BC, and it's the first one in
the world that divorced the moon from time. And that's
(32:05):
how most people use time anymore. You know, even if
you're celebrating in a New Year as part of a
tradition in Asia, it's still not the way that you know,
global economics and global trade sort of mark time. It's
more of a tradition than it is a literal tool anymore.
But I think it's so much more than that. It's
(32:26):
so much more powerful over our lives than people might
think anymore. We have artificial light at night, we live
in a twenty four hour news cycle, we live in
a twenty four hour economic cycle, and it's easy to
sort of lose track of the Moon's importance. But I
hope people think about it in a new way after
(32:47):
reading this book, and that they understand how it's been
involved in literally everything that has happened here, in ways
that are much deeper and much more profound than I
realized before I wrote the book.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Well, Rebecca, thanks for taking time out of your day
to come on the show and chat with me here.
The book again, is Our Moon, How earth Celestial companion
Transformed the planet. It's out now. If folks want to
follow you online, where would you like them to go?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Well, in our very fractured online landscape. Now, I'm still
on Twitter x, but not it's active there anymore. Mostly
active on Instagram on zed by Rebecca Boyle, and I'm
also on like Threads and Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Thanks again to Rebecca Boil for taking time out of
her day to chat with me here on the podcast
again Our Moon, How Earth Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet
out now in I think every format you could ask for,
so again highly recommend it. Go go check it out.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is, of course primarily a
(33:52):
science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Mondays we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays we
do a short form episode of about three different flavors,
and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing
the show, and if you would like to reach out
(34:13):
via email, well you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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