Mankind's quest to land on the moon dates back to 125 AD!!!
By Joel Davis
Discover
Magazine Blog, June 7, 2019
A 1902 iconic film
“A Trip to the Moon” showed the fabled Man in the Moon embedded with a massive,
bullet-like spacecraft that was launched from Earth by a giant cannon.
It’s been 50
years since humans first landed on the Moon. But for how long have we rehearsed
those first steps in our imaginations? This we do know: We’ve been telling each
other tales about our Moon-landing dreams for nearly 2,000 years.
The earliest
known written story about people traveling to the Moon was by Lucian of
Samosata, a Syrian-Greek writer born around 125 AD. His travels throughout the
Mediterranean world were the basis for the fictional tales in his True Stories,
an often bawdy satire of Homer’s revered epic the Odyssey.
One such story
tells of the journey Lucian and 50 companions take on a boat carried to the
Moon by a giant waterspout. When they arrive on the lunar surface, they’re
greeted by a race of three-headed vultures and soon find themselves in the
middle of a war with another species. Eventually they make their way back to
Earth and experience more fantastic adventures. Lucian’s lunar tale is the
earliest known piece of fiction that depicts space travel, a Moon landing,
aliens, and interplanetary war.
Some 15
centuries later, three people changed our view of our place in the universe
forever. Nicolas Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the universe,
which replaced the Earth with the Sun at the center of the solar system;
Galileo Galilei spotted sunspots, the phases of Venus, and moons circling
Jupiter; and Johannes Kepler showed us that the planets circle the Sun in
ellipses.
But Kepler also
wrote a novel about landing on the Moon. Entitled Somnium (A Dream), he began
writing it when he was still a teenager. Although it took him about two decades
to complete, he eventually finished it in 1608. However, it wasn’t published
until 1634 — four years after his death.
The story is
framed as Kepler’s dream. The main character, the young son of an Icelandic
woman who might be a witch, is fascinated by astronomy and serves as a stand-in
for Kepler himself. Much of the book is a riveting (and in some ways accurate)
account of the boy’s journey through space to the Moon, including whom he
encounters and what he observes.
In the tale,
there exists an omnipresent aether that fills the void between Earth and the
Moon. It’s very cold, so humans must rely on summoned demons to keep them warm.
The human travelers must also plug their noses with damp sponges to help them
breathe. The trip is so stressful that they must be put in suspended animation.
Kepler’s descriptions of how the Earth would look from the Moon are
surprisingly accurate, even by today’s standards. Overall, the science in
Somnium is remarkable for its time.
Most subsequent
stories about lunar journeys were satires, like George Tucker’s 1827 work: A
Voyage to the Moon. But writers also began treating tales of lunar voyages a
bit more seriously. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 story, “The Unparalleled Adventure
of One Hans Pfaall,” was a mix of satire and serious speculative fiction. The
imaginative breakthrough came three decades later from the pen of French writer
Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), followed by Around the Moon
(1870).
In Verne’s
work, members of the post-Civil War Baltimore Gun Club use an arguably
scientific method — a giant cannon — to shoot their travelers around the Moon.
But they don’t land. Instead, they experience a series of misadventures while
in orbit around the Moon before eventually making their way back to Earth.
On the other
hand, the two protagonists of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon
use a “hand-waving science” method of travel. But they actually land on the
Moon, explore it, and return. In the story, an eccentric physicist named Cavor
plans to land on the Moon in a ship of his own design powered by a metal he
invented with antigravity properties called “cavorite.” After enlisting the
reluctant help of an English businessman named Bedford, they build a steel
sphere with glass windows and sliding cavorite shutters. Sliding these open and
closed allows them to “steer” the ship to the Moon.
Off they go,
weightlessness on the way. They land safely on the Moon (which has a breathable
atmosphere) and explore its surface. They then drunkenly enter the Moon’s
underground caverns, where they are promptly captured by insectoid
extraterrestrials called Selenites. After more harrowing experiences, the two
men escape and make their way back to the lunar surface. They split up, looking
for their ship, but Cavor is injured. Bedford reluctantly leaves the Moon,
alone. Later, home and safe, Bedford learns that scientists are receiving radio
transmissions from Cavor, who is still alive and still trapped in the Moon.
For nearly two
millennia, storytellers have devised some ingenious methods to get their
characters to the Moon. Here are just a few highlights:
• Giant waterspout: True History, Lucian of
Samosata, ca. 2nd century AD
• A “shadow bridge”: Somnium, Johannes
Kepler, 1634
• Multi-stage rocket*: Histoire Comique de
la Lune, Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657
• Lunarium**: A Voyage to the Moon, George
Tucker, 1827
• Balloon: “The Unparalleled Adventure of
One Hans Pfall,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1835
• Giant Cannon: From the Earth to the Moon,
Jules Verne, 1865
• Antigravity metal: First Men in the Moon,
H.G. Wells, 1901
*This is the
first mention of a multi-stage rocket in literature.
**A metal that
is only partially antigravitational: it is repelled by the Earth but attracted
by the Moon.
Approaching the
Apollo Era
Films had been
around in one form or another since the 1880s, but public screenings where
people paid admission fees first started in 1895. In 1902, French filmmaker
Georges Méliès made his landmark 21-minute film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip
to the Moon). In it, the spaceship is a bullet-like projectile a la Verne, but
the plot is based on the Wells novel. Le Voyage dans la Lune is often regarded
as the first science-fiction film.
By the 1920s,
the art of filmmaking had advanced far beyond Méliès. In 1929, Austrian
director Fritz Lang released his follow-up to his futuristic flick Metropolis
(1927). Entitled Woman in the Moon, it’s about six people (five men and a
women) who travel to the Moon in search of gold. The plotline and acting
resemble a TV soap opera, and the Moon has normal gravity and a breathable
atmosphere on its far side. But the special effects are remarkable. Especially
impressive are the rocket launch and the scenes as the ship slips around behind
the Moon.
From the 1930’s
through the end of World War II, sci-fi stories with lunar themes were mostly
about exploration, aliens, and the Moon’s desolate environment, not about first
landings. That began to change at the end of the war. One story that stands out
is the 1950 Robert A. Heinlein novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
Heinlein’s tale
is about a wealthy American businessman named D.D. Harriman who is obsessed
with being the first man to set foot on the Moon. At a time when neither the
technology nor public interest exists for a Moon landing, Harriman has the
money, the PR savvy, and the con-man sensibilities to make it happen. And he
does. The science is well-crafted, the characters are believable, and the
ending? Ah, the ending. Harriman’s billionaire buddy backers won’t let him in
the spaceship to become the first man to set foot on the Moon; he’s too
valuable as the front-man selling the dream of spaceflight-for-all back on
Earth.
Heinlein also
played a role in another first Moon landing story. Except this one was a movie
— and also a classic. Produced by George Pal and Irving Pichel, Destination
Moon was released in 1950. Heinlein was approached to help write the script. He
drew in part on the plot of his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, but he also
clearly incorporated plot lines from “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
The movie
itself is a well-plotted, reasonably well-acted story of corporations rather
than governments providing the money and know-how to put a man on the Moon.
There’s drama a-plenty, with dangerous situations solved by smart use of
science and engineering. The movie accurately depicts weightlessness, the
landing itself, and the lunar environment. The “cold equations” climax — where
one of the crew must be left behind in order for the rest to make it home — is
solved as only engineers could.
Many more
imagined Moon landings appeared in both print and film before those first
“small steps” in July 1969 turned imagination into reality. And they remain as
reminders of how wide and deep we dream, and of how fierce our desire is to
explore what waits out there beyond Earth’s thin atmosphere.
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