Friday, August 12, 2016

The moon

I don't think I saw the first moon landing back in 1969, but I do remember hearing a lot about it.  And I remember the Apollo 13 crisis in 1970.  Our schoolteacher took us to her apartment so we could see on her TV the spacemen being rescued from their capsule at sea.

The moon landings were something of a dead end.  The real future of space exploration is unmanned missions!  But I've been wondering what life would be like for people on the moon.  I suppose they'd live as troglodytes, spending most of their time at lower levels while growing their plants under skylights at the surface.  There'd always be a danger of a meteor crashing into a skylight and letting the air get sucked out, because there'd be no friction to slow them down.  A lunar eclipse on earth would mean a solar eclipse for people on the moon.

As for getting to the moon, I'm not astronaut material.  When I think about being weightless, it scares me.  Imagine being in a world with no up or down!  Yet I've dreamed about being on the moon quite a bit.

Archimedes knew that the earth is spherical because during a lunar eclipse its shadow on the moon stays equally round at all angles! (And seafarers have always known it because when you approach a mountainous coast the mountaintops appear over the horizon first and the lower parts appear gradually, which can only be explained by the sea forming a convex curve.)

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