The Moon
Over the past two years, many a watering hole favored by locals shuttered in the wake of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. The mom & pop coffeehouse down the street that stood strong for fifty five years suddenly found itself unable to make ends meet when all its customers were gone, so it closed its doors. The homemade pasta shop on the corner by the train station could no longer operate without the foot traffic that it relied upon so heavily to fill up its balance sheets, and it closed its doors too. This sudden retail turnover has an odd effect on the residents of the neighborhood who are forced to confront the changing times with their rapidly evolving surroundings. Stores that they once assigned a sense of permanence to now no longer exist. Their favorite weekend sandwich spot that they frequented for a good part of ten years now hangs a notice saying that it’s going to be serving its special sandwich one last time before it closes its doors for good.
This isn’t new, by any means. Products, brands, and tastes evolve over time. A band whose music you loved twenty years ago might announce that they’re breaking up, and you would almost immediately feel the emotions swelling. It mentally teleports you a simpler time in your life when hours would pass as the tracks looped till dawn. Hearing the news of their breakup solidifies the unconfirmed feeling you always had that you’d never hear new music from them again. It feels like another shard being ripped apart from the crystal of permanence, which is now exposing its fragility for the world to see. Companies come and go, new startups usurp industry titans, and novel technologies speedily escort old products to their nearest landfill. Change is constant, and yet we tend to assign a sense of permanence to everything around us just because those things happened to be there for our formative years where we were getting to know the built environment around us through our nearly-fully-developed frontal lobes. But as we know, things we take for granted today as existing forever will likely completely disappear in a hundred years, just as the many things we know were in use a hundred years ago are now just vintage artifacts mostly living in obscure Wikipedia articles.
There is one thing though, that has always had a truly real sense of permanence throughout all of human history, and for most of life on Earth. That is of course, the Moon, the white shape-shifting orb that illuminates the night sky and has constantly fascinated us with its pimpled surface since we first set eyes on it. The Moon is one of the only physical objects that we know for sure that our early ancestors gazed upon that we too are now seeing. Tools change, animals go extinct, trees die out, and entire landscapes are often wiped away by natural phenomenon. But in the dark of night, looking up at the sky and seeing the Moon bathe the world in an ethereal light is an experience that we know both the first and last member of our species will likely share.
Humanity’s early fascination with the Moon and other celestial bodies was primarily due to necessity. Sundials were a convenient way of keeping track of time during the day, but they weren’t very useful in keeping track of longer time periods beyond a day. The Moon proved to be extremely useful here, as it changed shape in a consistent and predictable pattern every night. Some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, the nomadic lifestyle of ancient Paleolithic humans forced them to roam far and wide in search of food and water. They needed a reliable way of knowing how many days they had traveled, and there is strong evidence that they used the phases of the Moon to keep track of the days with a makeshift lunar calendar where they carved 14 or 28 dots onto bones to count the days as they passed. These early lunar timekeeping methods had even more practical uses. Humans could plan a hunt on the night that a full moon would land, giving them a very real visual advantage over their animal counterparts by weaponizing moonlight in their arsenal. There is also early evidence that women used the phases of the Moon to keep track of their menstrual cycles — which roughly aligned to a lunar cycle — to plan pregnancies, giving humans a reproductive edge over their competition.
The Moon was our first and favorite calendar because it didn’t require any special instruments. You didn’t need anything but your two trustworthy eyes to gaze upon the Moon and observe its waxing or waning phase, which made Earth’s own satellite its built-in timekeeping device. In the agricultural world, Chinese farmers and peasants were seeking to keep track of time well beyond the length of a typical lunar cycle. They didn’t want to predict when the the full moon would land for the purposes of hunting, but instead wanted to use it to predict the seasons so that they could harvest their crops more efficiently. It didn’t take long for them to realize that it took 12 lunar cycles (of 29.5 days each) to rotate through all four seasons, so 12 x 29.5 = 354 days in total (not far off from how long it takes the Earth to complete one full revolution around the Sun). This prototypical “lunar calendar” underwent several iterations by the Shang dynasty, the Qin dynasty, and ultimately the Han dynasty until it landed in its current iteration of the lunar calendar with the “lunar new year” beginning on the second new moon after the winter solstice. The ease with which anyone could observe the Moon directly led to creation of our calendar system that, with enough time and human intermingling, evolved into the Gregorian calendar still in use today.
What’s even more fascinating is that the very Moon that helped farmers keep track of time was unknowingly imbued with ill-omened spirituality by the same kinds of humans. Solar eclipses in particular were a fascinating theater of human-Moon dramas. The Ancient Chinese believed that during a solar eclipse, a dragon was devouring the Sun, and that locals should loudly bang drums and pots to drive away the celestial Sun-devouring dragon (a tradition that is still performed in some Chinese villages during eclipses today). The Chinese word for the eclipse “chih” literally means “to eat,” and the vivid imagery of a partial solar eclipse literally looking like a bite being taken out of the Sun probably helped in popularizing this myth. As a result, eclipses were heralded as a prophetic event that foretold the fate of the Emperor. Predicting eclipses soon became a political affair that was of great importance to the regime, with some rulers even taking the lives of astrologers who failed to predict the coming solar eclipse. The irony of it all is that this “dragon” devouring the Sun is actually the Moon covering the Sun, the very same Moon that helped the empire keep track of the days and seasons in its humble agrarian beginnings.
Eclipses are a really interesting exploration of our ancestors’ relationships with our celestial bodies because every ancient civilization had a unique explanation for the surreal and seemingly absurd phenomenon of day turning into night during a solar eclipse. We take it for granted today that it’s simply the Moon perfectly lining up in between the Sun and the Earth, and we accept that it happens very rarely. But these civilizations infused every aspect of their mythology and beliefs to explain the unexplainable.
The Ancient Babylonians, for example, got extremely adept at keeping track of eclipses, so much so that they started being able to predict lunar and solar eclipses by realizing that the eclipses would repeat after every 18 years and 11.3 days. Babylon was uniquely positioned in an extremely favorable spot for viewing eclipses, and their astronomers certainly took advantage of it. The twist here is that the Babylons considered lunar eclipses to be a punishment from God directed towards their currently appointed King, and so they executed their King. The frequency of lunar eclipses meant that the state’s policies would continually be in a state of flux as different Kings came and went, but when they harnessed the power of predicting eclipses, they found a unique workaround to this. On the day of the eclipse, they brought a prisoner up from the cells and crowned them as temporary King for a day. This unwilling King-for-a-day would then bear the wrath of the eclipse and then be sacrificed after the eclipse had passed, with the former King being reinstated immediately after. This King-swapping prisoner sacrifice ritual ensured a stable political agenda for a much longer period of time and strangely served to promote the legitimacy of the superstition even further by resulting in more prosperous policies that were beneficial over the long term, falsely attributing it to the King never being exposed to the evils of an eclipse.
In Norse mythology, the Moon is depicted as being literally preyed upon by a mythological wolf. Both the Sun and the Moon are continually being chased by Sköll and Hati, two wolves who are in eternal pursuit of the celestial bodies. At Ragnarok, the downfall of the cosmos, they finally catch their prey as the sky darkens and the Earth collapses. Ancient Norse text refers to one (or both) of the wolves literally swallowing the Moon, yet another example of a magical beast “eating” the Sun. This wasn’t uncommon. The Ancient Vietnamese believed a frog was the Sun-devouring beast during an eclipse, the Ancient Siberians thought it was a vampire, and the Ancient Yugoslavians believed it was a werewolf eating the Sun. The Moon pulled the greatest prank of all, tricking an entire species into believing that it was one of many Sun-eating demons that was robbing them of daylight by casting its shadow onto Earth while simply passing by the Sun.
Throughout history, the human tendency to inscribe strange and unexplainable phenomenon to the Moon has had a ripple effect on how we think of it in the popular imagination. In folklore, werewolves transforming when exposed to the light from a full moon paints the Moon as a cursed affliction to avoid. People have also theorized for centuries that the full moon causes men to go insane and engage in bizarre, unexplainable behavior that can send them into fits of mania and frenzy, leading to terms like “lunatic” and “lunacy” casually being thrown around without consent from the Moon. There’s not much in the way of scientific evidence to back those claims, but there has been a link established in manic behavior during a full moon for those with bipolar disorder.
There are, however, less menacing beliefs that paint the Moon in a somewhat positive light. In the Hindu festival of Karva Chauth, women fast throughout the day and wait until they can spot the Moon at night to break their fast. The women offer water to Chandra, the Hindu lunar deity, to secure its blessings. The woman’s husband (if married) then offers the water back to the woman, who breaks her fast by sipping on the holy, Moon God-blessed water. It is believed that this ritual strengthens the spirit of the wife and grants the husband a long and prosperous life. Perhaps there’s no better summation of our modern capitalist existence than to see Chevrolet advertising a vehicle geared towards the Indian market where a husband opens the car’s moonroof so that his wife can spot the Moon and break her fast.
The Moon’s gravity controls the intensity of the tides on all of our oceans, which sailors and navigators undoubtedly found extremely useful to know as they charted their course across the seas during the Age of Exploration. Tidal force from the Moon pulls at our oceans, determining how high the waves go and how far into the coast they crash. Entire ecosystems and food chains have formed around the world’s coastlines based on this tidal cycle controlled by the Moon’s gravitational pull. From 250,000 miles away, the Moon has been influencing the evolution of species and life on Earth simply by tugging on the oceans.
The most spectacular example of the Moon directly interfering in Earth’s evolutionary ongoings can be seen in the Great Barrier Reef. On a bright full moon with a clear sky, hundreds of corals in the reef simultaneously release their sperm and eggs to maximize the likelihood of fertilization and reproduction. There’s a range of environmental factors like temperature, water salinity, and the nutrition available in the reef that contribute to it, but it’s nevertheless a fascinating mass-spawning event induced directly by the Moon. Another example from the marine world is sea turtles waiting for a full moon so that they can catch a ride on the highest waves during high tide and get dropped off far up on the beach to lay their eggs where they won’t get washed back into the ocean.
Noctural animals have also toyed with moonlight as they’ve evolved. Eagle owls have white throat feathers that they use to communicate with other birds at night, and they tend to be especially chatty on full moon nights, because their throat feathers are more visible in the reflected moonlight. Their prey, on the other hand, tends to retreat into their introverted hermit selves to avoid getting eaten on a full moon when the partying Eagle owls are out. Tiny sand hoppers, coastal crustaceans that are essential to their ecosystem for breaking down nutrients from algae, use moonlight to guide their nightly excursions. They evolved to adapt to the differing light levels throughout the lunar cycle and have figured out where to go to find algae through a million years of evolution. But with light pollution creating an artificial skyglow on the outskirts of most populated cities, the movements of these sand hoppers now seem to be more random and less focused. Humanity’s exterior night lights are wrecking havoc on diverse and complex ecosystems that have adapted to thriving under moonlight for thousands of years, and it’s uncertain how they’ll adapt to it in the future (if at all).
The Moon is, of course, tidally locked to Earth — it takes the same amount of time to rotate in one full cycle as it does to complete one full orbit around the Earth. This means that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, which was incredibly useful in the telescopic observations of the Moon made in the Age of Enlightenment. The non-visible side of the Moon has served as a fascinating backdrop for eerie science fiction, with many alluding to the far side of the Moon playing host to aliens, lost astronauts, odd structures, and a whole host of conspiracy theories. As much as Pink Floyd would like you to believe it, there is no “dark side” of the Moon (as it does indeed get bathed in sunlight when transiting the Sun), instead just a “far side” that we on Earth never get to see.
This tidal locking of the Moon to Earth is also responsible for some domestic disputes in the orbits between these longtime partners. The force with which the Moon is pulling on the Earth along with the Earth’s delayed response in its tidal movements is slowing Earth’s rotation, which means our days are getting longer (very slowly — Earth’s orbital period is increasing by 2 milliseconds every 100 years). To correct for this, we’ve been introducing “leap seconds” every now and then, which of course comes with its fair share of sleepless nights for software developers trying to fix leap second related bugs in code built on Unix architecture. It’s a funny thought to imagine one of these programmers rudely yanked out of their slumber in the middle of the night to fix a critical leap second issue in code, all while they can see the culprit continue to shine brightly in the night sky above them.
While the Moon has fascinated astronomers and physicists for centuries, the general population of Earth didn’t think much of it for a long, long time. Scientists across cultures and continents had hypothesized for a long time that the Moon was spherical, which was later accepted as fact. They also knew that the Moon was likely reflecting sunlight and that the phases of the Moon appear that way simply because a portion of the Moon is in shadow. Many thought that the surface of the Moon was smooth, until Galileo made several observations of the lunar surface with his telescope that revealed craters and mountains, but Galileo also had the misfortune of existing during and inside of a very theocratic world power that didn’t quite prioritize or fund scientific discovery in the way he would’ve hoped. So the Moon continued to sort of just hang about in the night sky, floating around suspended from nothing, waxing and waning to the occasional look of appreciation. It stayed like that for a long time, until the late twentieth century when Russia landed the Luna 2 probe on the Moon in 1959. Having gone through two major world conflicts in the century already, the west was already fearing that Russia’s investment in space exploration and conquering the Moon reeked of a grander plot involving missile guidance and nuclear weapons. The United States also landed its Ranger probes on the Moon shortly after and in 1961, the American President John F. Kennedy committed NASA to have humans on the Moon by the end of the decade in his now-famous speech.
NASA got to work, ushering in a flurry of scientific expeditions and research into the Moon to figure out how they could pull this off in such a short timeframe. This was perhaps the first time the Moon was thrust into the international spotlight as the two world superpowers declared it as the next frontier to conquer. A lot of research was done to figure out landing sites and the high-resolution photos from the Ranger probes were analyzed in detail, which led to increase our understanding of hypervelocity impacts that form craters. These studies confirmed that the Earth, too, was bombarded heavily with craters around the same time as the Moon was, but the evidence of the impacts has been wiped away on Earth due to long-term geological changes. It also directly contributed to the now-leading theory that the dinosaurs went extinct due to a hypervelocity meteorite impact in the Yucatan Peninsula, and even confirmed space rocks impacting the Earth at high speeds were the trigger for many other extinction events. In a strange, roundabout way, studying the Moon helped us learn more about past life and loss on Earth.
Throughout the 1960s, NASA sent many unmanned and manned probes to lunar orbit as part of the Apollo program. At the end of the decade, the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, just as promised by the President who didn’t live to see it. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were the first humans to walk on the Moon, and Armstrong uttered the understatement of our lifetimes — “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” It genuinely was, and still is, humankind’s greatest achievement. After millions of years, countless ice ages, and no shortage of life on Earth, one species decided to journey to the white sphere in the sky that others were content to just gaze at, and they walked on it. The significance wasn’t lost on prominent science fiction writers of the time, with some wanting to mark the momentous occasion by bifurcating our entire system of counting years into “Before” and “After” the moon landing by re-setting our year to zero on July 20, 1969, which we can assume didn’t go over well with the Christians.
It was later revealed that Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface was a truly harrowing one, with several critical systems on the craft malfunctioning, but the crew decided to land anyway. The follow-up Apollo missions continued and even more humans landed on the Moon after, but the public soon lost interest. Kennedy’s mission had been accomplished and the space race had been all but won. With rising inflation, domestic issues, and expensive wars demanding attention in the 1970s and 1980s, funding for the Apollo program soon lost traction. We did the most significant thing in human history, and then just stopped. Ultimately, landing humans on the Moon was not fueled by scientific ambition and curiosity, but instead by calculated geopolitical risks and indirect displays of technological prowess.
It is for precisely this reason that scientists and astronomers were dissatisfied with the dissolution of the Apollo program. We did the most dramatic thing humankind had ever done, and then stopped caring. The scientific community saw the Moon landing as a launchpad that would fuel a new era of space exploration, but it didn’t quite happen. All eyes were set on Mars as the next frontier to conquer after the Moon, but the complexities involved with a journey that long were extremely overwhelming to grapple with. The Moon is 250,000 miles away from Earth, but Mars, at its closest approach, is 225,000,000 miles away from Earth. Given that we haven’t quite cracked the lightspeed travel nut just yet, there were simply too many things — jet propulsion, fuel sources, habitability of spacecraft, the lack of studies on long-term spaceflight, an unclear objective for a manned mission — that limited us in setting sail to Mars in the last few decades of the twentieth century.
However, it is this desire to get to Mars that has renewed our interest in going back to the Moon. It’s too expensive and inefficient to launch a ship from Earth to Mars, but there are several benefits of using the Moon as a base to jet set off to Mars. We can constantly keep a Moon base resupplied from Earth easily, and shoot off supplies towards Mars from the simplified orbital trajectories and lower required escape velocity to leave the Moon’s gravitational pull. There’s also a lot of research being done into mining the abundant Helium-3 resources on the far side of the Moon to be used as nuclear fuel in a self-sustaining Mars base. This is exactly the goal of NASA’s Artemis program, to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. It’s been a lopsided, back-and-forth, circular journey to get back to the Moon — not unlike the required flight path to get to the Moon — but it looks like we’re finally heading back to the Moon, this time to stay there for good. NASA launched the first of many missions its Artemis program in the last month, and there’s a lot more to come in the years ahead.
The Apple TV drama For All Mankind opens with a dramatic shot on a cosmonaut landing on the Moon. The show portrays an alternate history where Russia beat the United States to the Moon, and the Space Race never quite ended. The two superpowers kept one-upping each other over the decades, with fierce competition leading to groundbreaking new technologies. The threat of letting the other superpower win kept the cash flowing into NASA’s budget, and they even accomplish the daunting task of setting up a successful lunar base that they use for an expedition to Mars. The show dramatizes personal stories and hardships of the astronauts, but they don’t sidestep the politics, constantly reinforcing to the audience that the missions are government-funded and that no matter how aspirational NASA wants to be in the pursuit of scientific discovery, the ultimate goal is to simply be one step ahead of Russia.
The cult classic video game Bloodborne takes place over the course of one night in a fictional Victorian-esque city called Yharnam. It starts off as a sinister mystery about addictive blood magic experiments turning humans into beastly forms with some religious involvement, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. Halfway through the game, the Moon transforms the sky into a paleblood hue, shifting the game into a strange realm of cosmic horror. Aliens and otherworldly beings mingle with lunar prophecies and dark secrets, culminating in a final boss fight with an entity called the Moon Presence. The Moon is continually visible throughout the game, eternally foreshadowing coming events and getting larger and redder as the main plot of the game intensifies. Bloodborne uses the familiar innocence of the Moon to introduce Eldritch horrors and cosmic nightmares with such grace that you’d almost believe it’s nautral, lending credibility to every occult full moon lunacy theory out there.
In the 2022 film Moonfall, the Moon literally breaks apart into a million tiny pieces and comes crashing into the Earth. The Moon disintegrates in the film due to nefarious intent involving extraterrestrial life and thousands of Moon shards rain down on Earth in a fiery storm. Even the tiniest harmless Moon rock can turn into a devastating, home-shattering weapon when it’s traveling at such high speeds. When lunar orbit shifts in the film, the Moon draws close to the Earth and the oceans start getting sucked up into the sky. Of course, the seas would not actually rise up like that but would instead create large tsunamis that will crash into the landmasses. Suffice to say, the Moon colliding into the Earth would be disastrous for everyone involved. It is a little frightening, however, to learn that that the easiest way for an alien species to end life on Earth if they wished to is not to blow us up with a mega missile, but instead just mess with the Moon’s orbit or slightly manipulate its velocity so that it spirals into the Earth causing all sorts of havoc. No air defense system on Earth is equipped to deal with that. Our ever-permanent natural satellite also possesses the power to come crashing down on us all and wipe us out for good, which is both a humbling yet terrifying realization to grapple with
In most media, humans can’t stop obsessing over imagined futures in a permanent lunar settlement. We’ve conquered all the land on Earth, so most sci-fi settings look to entertain the possibility of humanity living the Moon. What kinds of problems would arise? What type of government and laws would exist? How would the Moon-born citizens identify? How would nations on Earth lay claim to parts of the Moon? It’s a fascinating thought experiment to which any answer is going to be wildly off from the reality of the situation when it does end up happening. The Arctic Monkeys track Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino takes this to the far extreme, where not only has a moon base been established, but it has gone through several generations of decay, revitalization, colonization, and gentrification. The band fictionalizes themselves as the local band playing at the Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, glamorizing the downfall of technological progress and corporate capitalism extending its sickly reach into space. The absurdist space-pop songwriting paints a pessimistic existence on the Moon, with the track Four Stars out of Five satirizing the desire for belonging, nostalgia for Earth, and economic upheaval on the Moon in its lyrics — “You could meet someone you like during the meteor strike / Lunar surface on a Saturday night, dressed up in silver and white / Cute new places keep on popping up, around Clavius, it’s all getting gentrified”.
When two lovers are separated by a great geographic distance, they can both look up at the same night sky and see the very same Moon. They’re two people in completely different places on Earth, perhaps even in entirely different cultures or ways of life, but their eyes lock on to the same Moon. The Moon could greet one of them on one side of the Earth and pass on the love letter to their partner the following evening. The Moon is the one permanent object in our everyday lives that anchors us to Earth, no matter where we are on it.
Unlike the Sun, the Moon wants to be looked at. It’s not shy and showcases itself brightly in the dark of night. It’s got a complex relationship with the Sun, as it can’t shine at the same time as the Sun does on the same spot on Earth, but it does need sunlight to reflect moonlight. The Moon also occasionally takes a bite of the Sun during solar eclipses, confusing all manner of lifeforms on Earth and throwing civilizations into chaos. Rarely, in total solar eclipses, the Moon calls attention onto itself, blocking out all light and entertaining our imaginations that demonize the Moon in all kinds of monstrosities.
The permanence of the Moon has no doubt inspired many to achieve the impossible, with many inventors going for “moonshots” to try and accomplish something that was once deemed unachievable. The Apollo program changed our relationship to the Moon for good, transforming it from some abstract sphere in the night sky to a solid object that we can walk on with our feet. Our current efforts to establish a lunar base as a home for more space exploration is perhaps taking the Moon for granted, with this once-aspirational celestial sphere now just being used as a launchpad for the more interesting things that lie beyond. It’s not difficult to imagine a corporate mining company profiteering off of the Helium-3 from the Moon and robbing it of all its resources like we did on Earth with fossil fuels, with that eventually leading to humans ravaging through every object in the Solar System and consuming all that they have to offer. The same humans who once deemed the Moon to be one of many Sun-devouring beasts are now poised to be become the monsters themselves, finding and using any source of fuel they get their hands on within the Sun’s reach.
When my partner and I got a puppy last year, we named him Moon. We liked the name, we liked how unique it was, and how easy it was to say. Many people in our families also share the name of some cosmic object, so it felt appropriate. Deep down inside, maybe there was something more at play. Perhaps it was our way of assigning a sense of permanence to our cherished little puppy without wanting to think about the dreaded day that will inevitably come someday. Sometimes, on a quiet night, Moon will gaze out into the night and make direct eye contact with the Moon, and it almost feels like he knows something. It feels like he’s contemplating his relationship to this strange, mystical orb in the sky. If it was moving fast enough, I have no doubt that he’d try to chase after it. These rare moments of Moon-to-Moon appreciation don’t happen nearly enough, and I take it as a lesson to try and appreciate the Moon a bit more whenever I look at it. At the end of the day, I’m glad that these moments at least happen rarely, once in a blue moon.