Moon Book Summary - Moon Book explained in key points

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Moon summary

Name: Moon
Rating: 4.4 (67 reviews)
Author: Ben Moore

Ben Moore

Past, Present and Future

4.4 (67 ratings)

25 mins

Topics

Space

Table of Contents

Moon
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Explore the moon’s past, present and future.

The moon landing seems like a long time ago now. That grainy image of Neil Armstrong taking his “one small step” from the lunar landing unit has been absorbed so deeply into our culture that it barely registers today. So, why get excited about the moon? After all, we’ve been there, done that.

Except, we haven’t. Even after the first Apollo mission all those years ago, we’re still not certain how the moon even formed in the first place. After the moon landings had been accomplished, both funding for research and interest in the moon began to dry up.

Today, however, there’s a renewed focus on lunar exploration. Private companies are planning moon vacations. The Chinese government is interested in lunar mining. In the scientific community, there’s talk of a permanent moon base. So it’s a great time to brush up on Earth’s mysterious satellite, from its mineral formation to its role in human cultures past and present.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the truth about the space race between the USA and USSR;
what the view was like for Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong; and
what moondust really smells like.

The ancient world abounded with supernatural myths about the moon, but the Greeks saw things differently.

From the moment that human beings began to gaze up at the night sky, the moon captured their imaginations. From the Eurasian steppes to the African plains, it shone brilliantly over the vast, dark Earth.

The longer they gazed at the moon’s pale face, the more these ancient people sought an explanation for it. Lacking advanced maths and physics, they assumed for millennia that the spectacle above them was the work of powerful spirits and gods.

For example, the Mahabharata, a fourth century BC Indian epic, explained eclipses with a story. Gods and demons, it says, once agreed to work together to produce an elixir of immortality. However, the gods betrayed the demons and stole the elixir. During the ensuing quarrel, the demon Rahu snuck into the gods’ camp and tried to steal it back. But the Sun and Moon warned the god Vishnu, who woke and beheaded Rahu. Rahu’s headless body and bodiless head were then fated for eternity to chase the Sun and Moon angrily through the night sky. An eclipse happens when Rahu’s head catches one of his betrayers and swallows it, causing a darkening of the sky. However, because he’s only a severed head, the Moon or Sun slips back out through his disconnected neck!

The first attempts to move away from supernatural explanations for the mysteries in the sky began around the sixth century BC in ancient Greece, a time when human ingenuity and thought flourished. Most importantly, the Greeks were the first to break from the idea that gods controlled the cosmos and events on Earth. Instead, they perceived a world of material objects acting under strict laws.

There were many important thinkers, but a few stand out. Pythagoras of Samos, who lived around 570-495 BC, determined that the earth was spherical by observing the way that light reflects on the moon. This was a vital step in understanding the cosmos. Then, in the fifth century BC, Parmenides discovered that the Moon reflects light from the sun. Later on, in the third century BC, Aristarchus correctly identified our place in the solar system, and attempted to gauge the moon’s distance from Earth. Using a system of geometry that measured the time it took for the moon to cross a shadow, he arrived at some fairly accurate estimates, that would be refined and improved upon by later astronomers.

However, with the Romans, superstition and mythology crept back. The early light of Greek science was extinguished for many centuries.

Science fiction went from fantastical visions of lunar travel to factual predictions.

The invention of the telescope at the beginning of the seventeenth century inspired many fanciful stories about the moon. With people able to see the moon’s surface reasonably well for the first time, it was as if a new world had been discovered. Authors speculated about lunar life forms, rivers and oceans, mountains and plains.

Some of the stories were wildly fantastical. Seventeenth century historian, writer, and bishop Frances Godwin wrote The Man in the Moone, a story about a man named Domingo Gonsales who hitches a vehicle to a breed of swans that migrate to the moon. Once there, he discovers an inhabited world with oceans and a race of tall Christian people living in a lunar paradise.

The space race between the USA and the Soviet Union was a driving factor behind twentieth century lunar exploration.

After World War II, to the chagrin of the United States, the Soviet Union made rapid progress in space exploration. Both countries had taken many of the best rocket scientists from postwar Germany, putting them to work in advancing the cause of space travel. But the Soviets diverted substantial resources into new experiments and quickly took the lead in the space race.

On October 4, 1957, they successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into space. This little sphere with its four long antennae circled the Earth, transmitting a repeating series of bleeps. It was an astonishing achievement, one that Time magazine described as the Soviets “blowing a raspberry” at the United States. Then, the following month, the Soviets shocked the world again by launching a dog named Laika into space.

When astronauts landed on the moon, they experienced a dramatically different environment from that on Earth.

As Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon on July 20, 1969, he simply said: “Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.” This was a world unlike anything he’d ever seen. So, what did he find?

First of all, the view from the moon is very different from that of Earth, no matter where you look. The Apollo 11 landing took place during the long lunar days, when the surface of the moon is lit up by the sun, so Aldrin was surrounded by dazzling light most of the time. Also, the moon is smaller than Earth, which means that the curve of the horizon is visible to the naked eye only about two and a half kilometers away.

The data brought home by the Apollo missions is crucial to our modern understanding of the moon.

The two astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission spent 21 hours trudging across the sloping, boulder-strewn landscape near the moon’s equator, collecting samples of dust and rocks. When examined back on Earth, these samples put an end to centuries of speculation about just what the surface of the moon was like.

The crust, which the astronauts walked on, is composed of the igneous rocks, anorthosite and basalt, both of which occur on Earth. The dusty surface is called the regolith – this is the lunar soil, made of fine-grained surface rock. When they opened vats of this back on Earth, it smelled like damp gunpowder or ashes. It also caused one researcher, who accidentally inhaled some of it, to suffer from a type of “lunar hayfever”, with watery eyes and coughing.

The moon’s origin is still shrouded in mystery, but we have a well-informed conjecture.

One important fact that we learned from the Apollo program’s findings is that rocks on the moon and the earth are virtually identical, which means that both bodies are made up of pretty much the same material. This discovery led to a theory about the moon’s origin that scientists have been arguing about ever since: the Impact Model.

In 1974, just after the Apollo program ended, Cornell University hosted a conference on planetary satellites. There, the astronomers William Hartman and Donald Davis presented this new model of the moon’s origins.

The moon determines life on earth in extraordinary ways, but not human behavior.

Nearly all life on earth is attuned to the circadian clock – the rhythmic cycle of days and nights. Through the circadian clock, night and day affect certain biological processes like metabolism, growth, and feeding behavior.

Some organisms, on the other hand, become attuned to the lunar cycle – those that live in the ocean, for example. All sea life is attuned to circalunar rhythms, because the tides rise and fall due to the gravitational pull of the moon.

A base on the moon would be highly beneficial for science.

At the beginning of the space race, both the USA and Soviet Union had plans for a lunar base. But when the Apollo program ended and interest in moon exploration faded, these dropped out of sight. In recent years, though, a lunar base has returned as a topic of discussion in the international scientific community. But what would be the benefits?

To start with, a lunar base would be enormously useful for scientific exploration, offering perfect conditions for astronomers. Without light pollution, the moon’s night sky is truly dark. Without an atmosphere, light doesn’t diffract and cause stars to twinkle, which limits the resolution of telescopes on Earth.

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What is Moon about?

Moon (2019) is a biography of the moon. It traces our relationship with our nearest interstellar neighbor – from early lunar rituals and mythology to the stunning revelations of the ancient Greeks; from the science fiction reveries of the nineteenth century all the way to the Apollo landing in 1969.

Best quote from Moon

I did not sense any great invitation on the part of the Moon … I sensed that it was almost a hostile place, a scary place. – Michael Collins

—Ben Moore

Who should read Moon?

Budding astronauts and astronomers
Buffs of human history and its relation to the moon
Anyone who has gazed in wonder at the night sky

About the Author

Ben Moore is the director of the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Zurich. His research is focused on cosmology, gravity, astroparticle physics, and planet formation. He’s also a musician, releasing electronic music under his artist name Professor Moore and with the electro-rock band Milk67.

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