Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [73]
*The eruption of a nearby submarine volcano and the rapid construction of a new island in 197 B.C. are described by Strabo in the epigraph to this chapter.
*Even with its mountains and submarine trenches, our planet is astonishingly smooth. If the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, the largest protuberances would be less than a tenth of a millimeter in size—on the threshold of being too small to see or feel.
*The age of the Venus surface, as determined by Magellan radar imagery, puts an additional nail in the coffin of the thesis of Immanuel Velikovsky—who around 1950 proposed, to surprising media acclaim, that 3,500 years ago Jupiter spat out a giant “comet” which made several grazing collisions with the Earth, causing various events chronicled in the ancient books of many peoples (such as the Sun standing still on Joshua’s command), and then transformed itself into the planet Venus. There are still people who take these notions seriously.
*Io’s volcanos are also the copious source of electrically charged atoms such as oxygen and sulfur that populate a ghostly, doughnut-shaped tube of matter that surrounds Jupiter.
CHAPTER 13
THE GIFT OF APOLLO
The gates of Heaven are open wide;
Off I ride …
—CH’U TZ’U (ATTRIBUTED TO CH’Ü YÜAN),
“THE NINE SONGS,” SONG V, “THE GREAT LORD OF LIVES”
(CHINA, CA. THIRD CENTURY B.C.)
It’s a sultry night in July. You’ve fallen asleep in the armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented. The television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to understand what you’re seeing. Two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky. They make strange little skipping motions, which propel them upward amid barely perceptible clouds of dust. But something is wrong. They take too long to come down. Encumbered as they are, they seem to be flying—a little. You rub your eyes, but the dreamlike tableau persists.
Of all the events surrounding Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is its unreal quality. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin shuffled along the gray, dusty lunar surface, the Earth looming large in their sky, while Michael Collins, now the Moon’s own moon, orbited above them in lonely vigil. Yes, it was an astonishing technological achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, the astronauts displayed death-defying courage. Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted, this was a historic step for the human species. But if you turned off the byplay between Mission Control and the Sea of Tranquility, with its deliberately mundane and routine chatter, and stared into that black-and-white television monitor, you could glimpse that we humans had entered the realm of myth and legend.
We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth. Folklore and popular songs celebrate a mysterious connection between the Moon and love. The word “month” and the second day of the week are both named after the Moon. Its waxing and waning—from crescent to full to crescent to new—was widely understood as a celestial metaphor of death and rebirth. It was connected with the ovulation cycle of women, which has nearly the same period—as the word “menstruation” (Latin mensis = month, from the word “to measure”) reminds us. Those who sleep in moonlight go mad; the connection is preserved in the English word “lunatic.” In the old Persian story, a vizier renowned for his wisdom is asked which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon. “The Moon,