The Moon might not have air, but it smells. Its acrid scent reminded Neil Armstrong of wet ashes; to Buzz Aldrin it was “the smell after a firecracker has gone off”.
The fine-grained grey stuff clung to astronauts’ suits and boots and was carried back into the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle, where it floated about annoyingly. The men noticed the smell after they took their helmets off. “[It made] the astronauts’ eyes watery and itchy, and their throats scratchy and sore,” reports Rebecca Boyle in her wonderful, sweeping biography of the Moon. They found it so irritating, they put their helmets back on to get to sleep, she says. Which wasn’t easy. The two men had to curl up on the floor of the tiny module. Armstrong slept under the Eagle’s telescope.
“Earth was shining right through the telescope into my eye,” he complained later. “It was like a lightbulb.” And so, “The first human being to step on a world outside Earth blocked his home planet’s light with a rock-collecting bag,” writes Boyle.
Boyle, an accomplished US science writer – this is her first book – has a journalist’s eye for amusing detail. In Armstrong’s first moments outside the module, he “was the only man on the surface of the Moon for about 18 minutes”. As he walked around getting his bearings, he managed to trample over his own first boot-prints. “He’d meant to take a photo of those.”
How many science writers are as sardonic as this? “Americans went from embarrassing space-race losers to the nation that sent human beings to the surface of the Moon, where they drove cars and hit golf balls.”
Although Boyle can be funny, she is also poetic, elegant, sobering and rigorous. Her Moon-love dates to childhood – she listened to the Apollo 11 landing recordings when she was 10, and still considers them some of the most important records in human history. The adventures of Armstrong and Aldrin, though, make up a single chapter in her account of the Moon.
We learn about the theories surrounding its birth; its effect on the tides and the evolution of life; biology’s ancient circadian rhythms; the development of human mythologies, culture and science; the first calendars, astrology, astronomy and mathematics; and its future, as a place to “build, to extract, to maybe get rich or die trying”. In this telling, the Moon goes through quite the narrative arc, from divine being to a potential dump for dirty manufacturing.
Earth’s companion may not be a goddess like the ancient Greek’s Selene, with a chariot pulled by long-maned celestial steeds, but the Moon has played a profoundly creative role in the life of our planet, says Boyle.
Four billion years ago, it was much closer to Earth. Although there was nothing alive to see, it would have appeared nearly three times larger in the sky than it does now. One day lasted six hours, and the tides rolled in at a “frenetic pace”. For millennia, the Moon’s tides swirled a soup of silt and nutrients, which became more complex.
“After life diversified into endless forms of bacteria, plants and animals, the tides ensured that nothing remained at rest, constantly flowing, sinking, rising, mixing, evolving,” Boyle writes.
She suggests the tides led to the formation of the earliest microbes and also flushed our first gulping, lobe-finned ancestors on to a barren land. “As far as we know, fish only left the water once, to evolve into every vertebrate that has ever walked on Earth, from dinosaurs to elephants to us. Those fish probably came in on the tide, meaning that it was the Moon that dragged our piscine progenitors ashore.”
Boyle has a gift for evocative similes. Earth is “a watery bubble improbably bursting with life in a universe of emptiness”. She is a writer of great explanatory power and imagination – she doesn’t stop at telling us that Julius Caesar reformed the old lunisolar calendar, but takes us into the life of a harried Roman: “Imagine showing up for a holiday dinner after an arduous journey, on horseback if you were lucky, and being told you missed it because it happened six weeks ago.”
Every chapter is littered with delightful, unexpected factoids: Humans “need to feel about 15% of Earth’s gravitational force to sense which way is up”. Had you ever thought of time perception as a sense? No? “Typically, you don’t notice time the way you notice scent or touch, but time perception is a sense all the same, and it pulsates through every cell in your body, and every cell in everything else that lives.” You’ve heard of tides? How about “rock tides” – a term for the “Moon-related” stresses within the bowels of Earth.
Boyle resuscitates remarkable ancient figures, such as the Babylonian museum curator Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, High Priestess of the Moon God, and the unsung Anaxagoras (c500–428BC), one of the first to suggest that celestial bodies are not gods at all but rocks.
While we might question the lack of attention paid to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Battānī – Boyle’s line “Islamic Arabs … carried the light of consciousness through the Dark Ages” does a lot of heavy lifting – she doesn’t downplay their significance.
The scientific, historic and cultural legacy of the Moon, after all, is an almost impossibly vast subject, and this is one of the themes of the book. “Everything has changed, but I could think only of what has not,” Boyle writes. “There is nothing new under the Moon. So many ways of thinking, so many traditions, have remained as constant as the heavens, for thousands and thousands of years.”
Our Moon: A Human History by Rebecca Boyle (Hachette, $39.99) is out now.
