Erik Asphaug

“The military spends just as much on space telescopes as NASA does, but theirs are pointing down.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“From infancy we know the Moon, and we have stared at it and been moved by it, and awed by it. Astrologers say that its presence is carved into our personality, our spirit, and our soul. Millions of years of humans have evolved beneath its constant benevolent presence, giving rise over a million-year time scale to a collective human awareness in which the Moon is anchor of poems, stories, mythologies, astrologies and religions. Humans have understood the Moon in scientific and prescientific ways- the geometers, timekeepers, recorders of tides, and predictors of eclipses. Priests and oracles; architects and planners; farmers and hunters and fishermen. In pursuit of a scientific understanding of the Moon, we cannot hastily unravel all of that. Scientific arguments for its origin and evolution are awash in context. Far beyond any geophysical, astronomical or cosmochemical analysis, the Moon has meaning.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky