Rebecca Boyle > Quotes

“Our moon exists for us on the Earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites,” Kepler wrote to Galileo,[25] using the word “satellite” for what may be the first time. The word is rooted in the Latin satelles, meaning “attendant.” Other worlds were also served by their satellites. They were worlds accompanied by worlds. This is obvious now, but it was an extraordinary insight considering the time in which these people lived.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Imagine: You walk toward the sea, on a shoreline made of freshly baked rock—there is no sand yet, because there is no life, much less life as complex as the seashells that form most white sand. It is hot. Really hot. No ozone protects you from the Sun’s radiation; instead it pours through the sulfurous atmosphere, which stinks of rotten eggs. Foamy waves roll in and you look down, noticing a gap in the rocks where a tide pool has formed. It’s full of turbid brownish fluid. You dip in a finger and taste it. It tastes like soy sauce—that rounded, bitter, earthy, sour umami tang. This is the flavor of amino acids, like lysine, glycine, and glutamate. We now know that these compounds, the so-called building blocks of life, are present throughout the solar system, even permeating the tails of icy comets. But as far as we can tell, only once have they been pressed into service as life’s raw materials.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The Moon is moving away, and the rate of Earth’s spin is slowing down, just as George Darwin figured out. This happens slowly, just 1.8 milliseconds every century, but over geologic time that adds up to a lot. The Moon has changed the length of our day by twelve hours since primitive life emerged on Earth. Fossil corals show that in the Silurian period about 430 million years ago, when the first bony fish evolved, Earth rotated on its axis every twenty-one hours, for a twenty-one-hour day. That means the planet spun 420 times for every revolution around the Sun. By the Devonian period between 419 and 359 million years ago—the time when fish developed lungs and learned to walk on land—the day was a couple hours longer. In another 200 million years, a day will last twenty-five hours, more like a day on Mars, and a solar year will last only 350 days.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“After a few hundred million more spins around the Sun, bipedal mammals descended from these fish chipped some of their bones out of rock exposed on Canada’s frigid Ellesmere Island, near the Arctic Circle. The humans named one of these fish Tiktaalik and saw, in its fossilized remains, echoes of themselves and a link to our aquatic history. Tiktaalik, the first fish with a neck and a primitive wrist, likely had both lungs and gills. Fish like Tiktaalik and their relatives ushered in the tetrapods, the first four-legged beasts to walk on land. The descendants of the first fortunate walking fish, stranded by the tides, became the common ancestors of the dinosaurs, and the birds, and the reptiles, and the mammals, and me, and you.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Start out when the Moon is new. Find the crescent hanging low in the sky at dusk, before it’s dark outside. The Moon will follow the Sun down, sinking on the western horizon before night fully falls. The next night, look again. The Moon is thicker now, and a little higher in the sky when you first spot it. Keep watching, and within a few days, the Moon is half illuminated—a pie sliced in two, with the visible side facing the early-evening Sun. The Moon is full when the Sun is setting, and in the following days, the Moon shrinks again. By last quarter, you can see it just ahead of the Sun in the early-morning sky, once again with its luminous half facing our nearest star. The Sun lights the Moon. It’s obvious, once you see the pattern often enough.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“After capturing the gibbous Earth, something went wrong with Zond 5’s camera, and the spacecraft wasn’t able to bring home photos of the Moon’s surface. But it did bring back the tortoises. They might have achieved some level of reptilian notoriety had they been given names, but the Soviets just referred to them, rather coldly, as “the experimental animals.” Though they were deprived of food and drink, they flew with all the trappings of a meal and the scent of home: seeds of peas, carrots, and tomatoes, wildflowers and pine; and some samples of humanity’s most important crops, wheat and barley, so scientists could study how the seeds fared in space. The Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi would have been proud. They circled the Moon on September 18, 1968 c.e., and on September 21, their capsule splashed down in the Indian Ocean with incredible force. U.S. intelligence later reported that the capsule careened through the atmosphere with the speed and energy of a meteorite, a violent journey that would have killed a human. But the tortoises survived. Then they traveled back to Moscow, where scientists cut them open and examined every inch of their starved, desiccated bodies.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“With Cyrus’s unqualified victory over Babylon, the power center of civilization moved eastward. The plains between the two rivers were now ruled by the Persians, a neighboring empire from the mountains. The final fall of the Moon God would not take place for another thousand years, until a messenger of God named Muhammad would destroy his likeness inside another temple, called the Kaaba. But the golden age of Mesopotamia was over. And the defeat of Belshazzar and Nabonidus signified a major cultural shift: the first major defeat of the nature gods.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“We don’t often pause to think about how strange the whole thing was, how strange to send a bunch of strapping young men to the Moon just because. How utterly odd that sentient pieces of Earth—because that’s all we are, really, bits of the planet remolded by time and sunlight—made a choice to send some of their brethren away from it. What a weird thing to do, just for the purpose of seeing what it was like, and saying that it had been done. Just to do it, because it’s hard, because we think we can, because we think someone we don’t like might do it before us.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“He correctly speculates on the nature of earthshine, which people had for centuries named “the ashen glow,” the phenomenon that lets you view the dusky figure of the dark sector of the Moon. This is visible when the Moon is a crescent. It happens because sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface is bright enough to partially light the Moon, too, like a mirror shining back at you. In a scientific echo of Enheduanna’s paean to the Moon 3,860 years earlier, “Your shining horns are…holy and lustrous,” Galileo wrote that “this light is seen most clearly when the horns are the thinnest.”[”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Cave art found throughout the Dordogne region of France punctuates this point. The Venus of Laussel, a carving in relief, is thought to represent a connection between human fertility and the lunar cycle. The figure, carved around twenty-seven thousand years ago, depicts a voluptuous woman with long hair. Her left hand rests on her abdomen and her right arm is raised, clutching a bison horn that has been etched with thirteen notches. Her face appears to be turned toward the horn. The horn could represent the number of sidereal months, or lunar cycles, in a solar year—which happens to be approximately the same number of menstrual cycles in a solar year.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Earth spins 365 times before it comes back to the same position relative to the Sun, which makes a tropical year. Westerners mark the beginning of this journey on January 1, but the tropical year technically stretches from equinox to equinox, the days twice a year when Earth’s axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the Sun, resulting in day and night of nearly equal length. Astronomers—and everyone on Earth before the modern era—also measure the “sidereal” year, which marks the time it takes for certain stars to return to the exact same spot in the sky.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“About two billion years from now, when humans will likely no longer exist, the Moon will be too far away to stabilize Earth’s tilt. Earth’s axis will tip toward the Sun, and the unstable hellworld Laskar predicted will come to pass. Earth’s climate will experience regular, possibly violent, shifts. Its tides will falter, and so will its rock tides—the Moon-related stress and strain in the planet’s very innards. If life in any form is still here, the slow retreat of the Moon will very likely pose an existential threat.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“For example, the spring equinox of the ideal year takes place on the fifteenth day of the month called Nisannu. This is the first month of the Old Babylonian year, like our modern January 1, but Nisannu was comparable to March or April. If a star or constellation is first visible when expected, then nothing needs to change. But if the star arrives a month later than called for on the ideal calendar template, then that year should be a leap year. “If the Fish [the constellation Pisces] and the Old Man [the constellation Perseus] become visible on the 15th of Adarru, the year is normal. If the Fish and the Old Man become visible on the 15th of Nisannu, this year is a leap year,” the text reads, in one example.[3] The MUL.APIN’s second scheme for calibrating the calendar, and the more relevant for the Nebra sky disk, tracks when the Moon is in conjunction with the Pleiades. On the ideal calendar, this should happen on the first day of Nisannu.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The Moon is not powerful enough to change the shape of Earth’s orbit. But it does change the season when Earth experiences perihelion and aphelion. In the 2020s, Earth is at its closest point to the Sun in January every year, but ten thousand years ago, perihelion occurred in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. Rains deluged the Sahara during this time, known as the African Humid Period. The end of the rains shifted migration patterns in northern Africa, planting the first seeds of civilization.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Since the beginning of evolutionary time, the Moon has sculpted life on this planet. The Moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt toward the Sun, making the Moon the captain of our seasons. The consistency of this tilt over millennia stabilizes our climate in turn. Life in all its endless forms, from corals to plants to humans, responds to the Moon’s cues. Oxygen exhaled by these breathing organisms streams out of our planet’s atmosphere, flies with the solar wind, and pools on the Moon as proof that we are here.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“In Aristotle’s cosmology, De Caelo, the heavens originated at the Moon, which he considered the boundary of the realm of perfection. To Aristotle, perfection did not mean the divine or a deity, the way Plato or religious people thought about it. Perfection to Aristotle meant the perfect ideal of something. Everything below the Moon was in the realm of change, corruption, and imperfection. The Moon and beyond were perfect. He explained away the Moon’s mottled appearance by arguing that it was contaminated by Earth.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The rocks were so obviously not from around here. Most Earth rocks have a weariness, no matter where they are found. They are molded by beach waves and rain, smoothed by wind and time, covered in lichen, surrounded by trees or grass. The Moon rocks are nothing like Earth rocks. They are jagged, blocky, crystalline. Some are inky black and others are chalky, sparkling white. They look exactly like what they are, pieces of the shimmering Moon brought down to Earth.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The first creatures to assist in humanity’s collective disorientation were not humans but tortoises, packed alongside a bunch of seeds into a Russian spacecraft called Zond 5. Twelve days before their launch in September 1968, the tortoises were strapped in the rocket capsule and deprived of food and water, so scientists would be able to study any changes in their bodies without being confused by the activity of their metabolisms. The tortoises had no Earthly idea what was happening, but if they felt any sort of humanlike emotions, surely one of them was confusion. How strange, to be immobilized without anything to eat or drink for two weeks, to then be launched off the world. At least the humans who followed the tortoises knew where they were going, and had some idea of why.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The lunar cycle is also known to affect sleep, through both light and an apparent gravitational effect that scientists are still unsure how to explain. In a major 2013 study, researchers studied volunteers in a sleep lab where they were isolated from artificial light at night. The volunteers were not told that the study would be looking for any Moon-related effects. The researchers found that around the full Moon, deep-sleep-related brain activity diminished by 30 percent, total sleep dropped by twenty minutes, and it took people an average of five minutes longer to fall asleep in the first place. The study was the first reliable lab evidence that the Moon can modulate sleep in humans, even apart from its light.[”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“For hunters and gatherers, the Moon was literally a guide, allowing people to see at night and to plan their lives. When people got good at growing food and taming animals and built the world’s first cities, they continued using the Moon for practical reasons. It shone upon the fields and the city streets. You could watch your grains and your sheep, and you could walk down the road at night to your home or shop. This obvious benefit eventually evolved into a more spiritual connection to the sky and its forces. Maybe the holy Moon was a vestigial reminder of the first farmers’ hunter-gatherer heritage; maybe the original stories morphed into myths, and the Moon’s light became evidence of beneficence or intentional aid.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Its influence goes back to the sulfurous origins of this planet and everything that crawls, flaps, swims, or strains skyward on its surface. The Moon guides all of us from its vaulted position above us. But it’s not apart from us, not least because it is actually a part of Earth. It was sheared from Earth when the planet was still freshly baked. And its elliptical orbit does not technically circle Earth, at least not in the way you might think. Instead, Earth and the Moon orbit each other, pivoting around a combined center of gravity that guides them both and that shapes their shared history.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“It was a dramatic improvement for timekeeping, but it was a tragedy for our relationship to the Moon. For the first time in the history of our species, the Moon was separated from time. The days slowly slipped out of sync with the Moon’s cycles. The Ides were reduced to signify a numerical meaning, the fifteenth day of a month, rather than the mark of the full Moon.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“We don’t need to build a human settlement on the Moon. We don’t need to do anything at all to the Moon. The Moon cannot speak for itself. We have to speak for it. And no one person, no single culture, can speak for everyone who shares the sky. The Moon belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The closure of an Atlantic ancestor called the Rheic Ocean created the largest mountain-forming event in the Paleozoic. We call the result the Appalachian Mountains.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“But Jupiter and Saturn stretch Earth’s orbit so that it is sometimes almost circular and sometimes quite elliptical. Right now, Earth’s orbit is near its most circular trajectory and due to become more oblong, on a cycle that spans about one hundred thousand years.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Put another way, if you were standing on the Moon, it would take a full Earth month for the Sun to rise, set, and rise again. This also means daylight lasts for two weeks—and so does the night.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Apollo was a planetary-scale boast, a giant risk with high reward, a daring gamble for a youthful nation. It was propaganda at its finest. Its astronauts were upstanding white Protestant men who had traditional families and wore casual pants and drank whiskey from highball glasses. They were red-blooded American heroes who cooked homemade pizzas and played baseball with their kids, then put on spacesuits and did the impossible. They were Manifest Destiny incarnate, bursting with promise and American masculinity, their legacy rising like the phallic rockets that launched them.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The tide ebbs and flows because of the Moon’s gravity and, to a lesser extent, the Sun’s. As the Moon moves around Earth, the two bodies tug on each other. The side of Earth that is closest to the Moon feels the tug a little more strongly, and the Moon pulls water toward itself, creating two bulges[*1] in the world’s oceans. The bulges create the high tide, which originates in the ocean and progresses toward the coasts. Twice a month, the Sun adds some tidal heft, as well. When it is lined up with the Moon, causing either a full Moon or an invisible new Moon, the Sun’s gravity amplifies the bulging effect. This forms what are known as spring tides, and these bring higher high tides and lower low tides.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“The day Theia came down to Earth 1.0, Theia did not just shear away part of our world. Both worlds were completely torn apart. The devastation was complete, and in its aftermath, there was no ring. There were no naked planet cores floating in space. There was no planet and no moon. Instead, both Earth 1.0 and Theia were blasted apart into a superheated cloud of dust. Their vaporized remains swirled into a fast-spinning, bagel-shaped bulging disk, a short-lived structure previously untheorized in planetary science. The Promethean hellscape of this structure defies our previous understanding. The cloud spun so quickly that its outer edge reached a point called the corotation limit, which essentially means it went into orbit. The thing is too big and diffuse to rotate like a normal planet; instead, at the outer edge of the cloud, the vaporized rock spun so fast that it took on a new structure, with the disk circling a hot inner region. But the disk is not separated from the central region like Saturn’s rings, or like anything else any scientist had ever imagined. Every region of the cloud formed molten-rock raindrops, which Stewart and Lock initially called a continuous mantle-atmosphere-disk structure—a MAD structure. Earth 2.0 and the Moon cooled and coalesced in this cloud, like eggs poached in a pot of boiling water. The seed of the eventual Moon would have formed within just a year, and the two bodies would have remained in hell-cloud form for just a century before settling into the paired worlds we recognize today, according to Lock.”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

“Some anthropologists think the animals and their accompanying notations may be intended to represent seasons. In Europe, bovines calve in the spring, and horses both foal and mate in late spring. The deer rut takes place in early autumn, and ibex, a type of wild goat, mate around the winter solstice. Some archaeologists believe that in Lascaux, the thirteen dots depict the full Moons of the lunar cycle, and the twenty-six dots may represent a sidereal month, roughly the time it takes the Moon to orbit Earth with respect to the stars. Taken together, the animals and the dots may represent the first steps toward a primitive calendaring system, perhaps to convey seasonal information about game.[”
― Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are