It took ten
years to create...and another four billion before Man visited
it. But, as a new book reveals, it took an Elizabethan Englishman
to put it all into focus.
The eighth continent is
almost exactly the same size as Africa. Like Africa, it is a land
of vast plains and jagged mountains, ancient volcanoes and spectacular
Sunsets. Like Africa it was only recently charted and explored.
But unlike Africa, the eighth continent is - save for six brief
episodes around 30 years ago - completely lifeless.
No animals trample its
plains, no grasses grow on its mountain slopes. The 'eighth continent'
is the Moon, Earth's satellite and a world of fascination and
beauty. Like Africa, the Moon will some day make a few people
an awful lot of money, and like Africa will be home to a unique
breed of colonists.
But until that day dawns,
mankind's intimate memories of the Moon live on only in the minds
of a handful of old men, the Moonwalkers, men in their prime in
those far-off days when the Beatles and the Stones still dominated
the charts, and when our species seemed to be on the verge of
conquering the cosmos.
The exploration of the
Moon began at 9.00pm on July 26, 1609 - 360 years before Edwin
Aldrin and Neil Armstrong guided the Eagle gently down onto the
dusty lunar surface. Every schoolchild learns (and most text books
of astronomy claim) that the first person to look at the Moon
close-up was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, using his
newly invented telescope.
The books are wrong. Galileo
did not invent the telescope (to his credit, he never claimed
he did, citing the Dutch spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey as the
inventor), nor was he the first person to gaze upon the lunar
mountains and canyons through a spyglass.
But a new book by science
writer David Whitehouse claims that honour belongs instead to
an Englishman, Thomas Harriot. Harriot was a brilliant mathematician,
and although not a nobleman by birth he was as well-connected
as anyone in Elizabethan society; a good friend of Christopher
Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, he almost certainly knew William
Shakespeare.
But after the death of
the Queen in 1603, things took a turn for the worse for Harriot.
He was an intellectual and an atheist, and in 1604 he was arrested
and sent to the Tower of London as part of the general round up
of suspicious characters following the failed gunpowder plot to
assassinate James I.
In the court of the new
King, the old, Elizabethan chattering classes fell out of favour.
Harriott's friend Raleigh was hanged, and his patron Lord Henry
Percy was thrown in the Tower - the two men even managed to conduct
some astronomical observations from their prison cell.
Eventually, Harriot was
released unharmed because there was no evidence linking him with
Guy Fawkes' band, and he returned to full-time stargazing (Percy
was not so lucky, spending another 17 years in prison). Six months
before Galileo looked up to the skies in late 1609, Harriot managed
to fabricate a crude telescope which gave him a six-times magnified
view of the heavens.
He had heard about the
new 'spyglasses' that were becoming widely available at the craft
markets of Europe (the telescope began life as a child's toy rather
than as a serious astronomical tool). Harriott grasped the principle,
and built his own. He turned his spyglass on the Moon and was
astonished by what he saw. He made a few sketches, but, being
an Englishman, was typically loathe to publicize his achievements
and did not rush into print.
Galileo, on the other hand,
was not so reticent. He had the backing of the Venetian Senate,
and was an eloquent writer and a gifted artist. His book The Celestial
Messenger contained detailed descriptions of the Moon, as well
as the Moons of Jupiter - perhaps his greatest discovery.
Galilieo's tome became
a bestseller - the first book on science to catch the popular
imagination - and within a year the Italian genius became the
Stephen Hawking of the 17th century, a feted intellectual and
subject of popular discussion. But when it came to the Moon, Harriott
got there first. He was not as gifted a writer as Galileo (and
his artistry was poor), but his bemused description of the lunar
surface has a certain poetry...... 'In the full, she appears like
a tarte that my cook made me in the last weeke. Here a vaine of
bright stuff, and there of darke, and so confusedlie al over.'
So, the first description
of the Moon likened it to a cake, but for the next century a race
was on to produce the most accurate maps of the lunar surface,
using telescopic observations. In the 18th century, the Moon entered
common consciousness as a planet, just like the Earth. Ben Johnson
wrote a little-known play called Newes From The New World Discover'd
In The Moone, in which the Moon is both inhabited and covered
with cities replete with lunare alehouses and inns.
Back then, of course, maps
were all very well. But, if humans were ever to be able to make
use of them, several massive leaps in technology would be required.
That leap came in the 20th century, with the liquid-fuelled rocket.
By the time Man had the technology to contemplate a trip to the
Moon, much more was known about Earth's celestial companion. The
surface was covered with craters, which were widely assumed to
have been created by volcanoes.
Scientists knew that the
atmosphere of the Moon had to be either extremely tenuous or non-existent;
a thick atmosphere would be clearly visible from Earth. By the
late sixties, the race was well and truly on to get a man to the
Moon.
Both the Russians and the
Americans thought they could do it; the Soviets put faith in a
new rocket, the giant N1, which would have been the most powerful
machine ever to have flown. Unfortunately it didn't work - every
one they tried to fly either crashed or shook itself to bits on
the launch pad.
The Americans, on the other
hand, had the almost equally big Saturn V, designed by the ex-Nazi
rocketeer Wernher
von Braun. The Saturn V was a triumph of German-American technology,
and apparently a joy to fly. The second man on the Moon, Buzz
Aldrin, described the ride as 'awesome', and in July 1969 the
'beast', as some astronauts referred to it, safely deposited him
and Armstrong on the surface.
Even in the age of spaceflight,
the Moon still manages to generate as many myths as it has ever
done. Early man thought of it as a deity, and French cave paintings
dating back tens of thousands of years seem to show that the ancients
had a detailed knowledge of its phases and orbit.
Astrologers think that
the Moon must have a profound influence on our lives - a claim
that has been dismissed by David Whitehouse, who has calculated
that, gravitationally, the Moon exerts less influence on our bodies
than, say, a mosquito at arms length. Finally, and most recently,
there are those strange individuals who think that the whole space
programme was a fake, that mankind never actually got to the Moon.
They point to 'suspicious'
photographs and 'anomalies' in the Apollo data that 'prove' the
whole thing was cooked up in a Hollywood film studio. If the Moon
landings were faked, Nasa did a good job in brainwashing the astronauts.
'Well, I certainly went somewhere,' a laughing Buzz Aldrin told
me a couple of years ago. 'Looked like the Moon, felt like the
Moon. Was the Moon.'
After six more Apollos
(one, Apollo 13 was a near disaster and never landed on the Moon),
mankind abandoned Earth's satellite. It was felt that there was
little on the Moon to keep public interest alive. Which was a
shame, to put it mildly. Apollo wasn't just about beating the
Russians (although that was its primary aim) : it was about science.
Nearly a third of a ton
of rocks were brought back by the 12 Moonwalkers, which have been
subject to scrutiny in the lab ever since. A few years ago, these
rocks answered one of the oldest mysteries of astronomy - what
was the origin of the Moon? It turned out, to everyone's surprise,
that one of the older theories - that the Moon was scooped out
of the Earth after our planet collided with a giant asteroid -
is more or less correct.
More than four billion
years ago, the young Earth, then rather smaller than it is today,
was hit by another planet about the size of Mars. The impact must
have been one of the most colossal explosions ever seen in the
solar system, and resulted in the two planets coagulating in a
seething molten mass that took centuries to cool down.
One by-product was that
a huge glob of material was thrown off into space; this became
the Moon. It has been calculated that just ten years after, the
most dramatic event in Earth's history, a recognizably spherical
Moon rose for the first time over the horizon. There are no definite
plans to revisit the Moon. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are
old men, and they may be dead before the new generation of Moonwalkers
follows in their footsteps.
But many within Nasa, and
in Russia, Europe and Japan, think that one day we will live on
the Moon. Its crust is rich in valuable minerals, and water ice
has been discovered near the Moon's south pole, making lunar habitation
much more a possibility. The Moon is the ideal place to build
telescopes, with no atmosphere to distort the images. It is also
perfectly positioned to strike out and explore the other planets;
its gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth, so launching a long-distance
space mission is much easier. Opening up the Dark Continent of
Africa took two centuries and cost many lives. Opening up the
Moon will take much longer, and will be far more costly. But the
rewards will be unimaginable.
Michael Hanlon / The Daily
Mail (UK) : 5th July 2001.
