Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How Our Moon Shaped the Course of Human History and Humankind w/ Rebecca Boyle (#404)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on Into the Impossible, we're joined by the renowned cosmic journalist Rebecca Boyle. Rebecca is a contributing editor at Scientific American. She's also a contributing writer at Quantum Magazine and The Atlantic. And she's a frequent contributor to the New York Times, popular science, and many other publications. As a lifelong lunar enthusiast, Rebecca has extensively studied how the moon has shaped Earth's history, influenced our climate, and enabled life on Earth to evolve. how early civilizations used the lunar phases to measure time leading to scientific observations by Mesopotamian priests, and how our relationship with the moon is changing from the Apollo

Starting point is 00:00:39 landings to the current commercial interest to the upcoming Artemis missions, which will feature past guest Jessica Maier as an astronaut and possibly the first woman to ever walk on the moon's surface. Rebecca has compiled all of our findings into a wonderful book, aptly titled Our Moon. And today, she's here to share them with us. So without further ado, let's dive deep into this pure, lunacy. One of my favorite topics of all, the Earth's Moon. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Rebecca, welcome to the Inde Impossible Podcast. Thanks for having me. The book came out a couple months ago. I've been reading it. I listened to it. Your publisher was nice enough to send it in audio and hard-covered.

Starting point is 00:01:32 form or soft cover form. This is soft cover, but it was still a delightful read. And as you know, we love to do what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. But for people that aren't familiar with you and your work, what else do we have to go on? So we're going to ask you to take us through this book, the cover of the book, rather, and describe the title, the subtitle, and this mysterious image of some creatures braying at the moon. The title and the subtitle were tricky, as they always are, I think. for a nonfiction book because you want to describe how much the book encompasses but not be like overwhelming. But yet I think my sub title is a little bit long. My UK subtitle is just,

Starting point is 00:02:13 it's just our moon, a human history, which is kind of like, that's it. But the US version is a little bit wordier. And it's how Earth's celestial companion transform the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. And that really is like everything the book is doing. It had to have the word moon in the title somewhere, even though there's been like a lot of books about the moon, really more about Apollo and our exploration of the moon. And this is not that Apollo is part of this, because it's sort of inseparable from any book about the moon, but this is not really an Apollo book. So it had to have the word moon, but I really did not want like a rocket or an astronaut or like a spacewalker or something, you know, but I wanted it to imply humanity and imply life.

Starting point is 00:02:56 and we went back and forth on a few different designs, but I kept coming back to this basic structure, which is like, this is actually based on a tarot card. So it's the moon card is, I think, the 13th card in a tarot deck or 18th. I don't remember. I'm not a cosmetologist. I'm not an astrologer. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:03:16 I don't practice tarot, but I do think tarot cards are beautiful and really interesting to look at. And this is actually a Portuguese art studios version of the moon card in a tarot deck. And they all have the same. kind of elements that are important in a tarot deck, including the moon, moonlight, sort of falling on life. There are versions of it that have wolves howling at the moon. There are versions that have other animals. There's usually a lobster somewhere down here, which like signifies something in astrology that I don't know. But I love this image because it's just so evocative of a lot of the

Starting point is 00:03:49 things I want the book to convey. And it really shows the moon itself, but the light of the moon is hitting these dogs. And they're definitely dogs, not wolves, because this is like, I don't know, maybe a German short-haired pointer. It looks like to me, this is my dog, a golden retriever. Her name is Sunshine. And the light is like hitting them. They're wearing collars, which you also can tell their dogs because their collars are there visible. There's like a little dog tag like right there. And I love that because it implies us. It implies that they are pets, that they are kept, you know, and cared for by humans, even though there are no people in the image. And behind them is a landscape of trees, maybe a river back here, and then like a wall of stone wall, which also

Starting point is 00:04:39 implies humanity and human presence, even though there are no actual human figures in the scene. And I love that because it really just conveys all the things that are within the book. It's, It's really a story about us. It's a story about the moon and our history with the moon. But because it's a history, it's inherently a human story. And so I think that's, it sort of evokes humanity on the cover, even if it's not just like a moonwalking astronaut, which is an image I did not want. That's the cover. Very good.

Starting point is 00:05:09 And I understand, you know, from reading the book. I hate it when, you know, when I was an author invited on podcast and asked to describe the whole contents of the books and you don't have to read the book. But I did love it, and I especially love the beginning in the end. But let's start with the beginning. You have a personal connection to the moon that maybe perhaps you might not have been here. I don't know the exact timing of your parents' birth. But tell me about your private first class, John J. Corkeren, who is involved in the Battle of Tarawa. And that's a very gripping story that opens the book.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Would you have been here, if not for the moon's influence? So, yeah, this is my grandfather. He was a Marine at World War II. And he was in the Battle of Tarawa, which is one of the worst battles in the history of the Marine Corps. Actually, the worst in terms of the number of casualties. And I knew that growing up. I heard stories about this as a kid. And he didn't like to talk about it.

Starting point is 00:06:07 Like a lot of veterans of that generation, it was sort of these vague stories. But he didn't come home with like big war tales. He wanted to forget about that chapter of his life. He was only 17 when he enlisted in the Marines. And his father had to sign a permission. slip because he was still technically a minor and he came of age while in training camp. And I knew that Tarawa was this like horrendous battle in which Marines were, you know, trying to take this island. So Tarawa is a coral atoll in the South Pacific, which now is part of the nation of Kiribati.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And at the time, it was important because it had an airstrip. And it was a strategically located air strip in this part of the Pacific. And the Allies wanted it to be able to kind of march toward Japan for an eventual invasion of Japan. So they wanted to get this airfield. And they planned this invasion in November of 1943 on a rising tide. That was the plan was that the tide was becoming in in the morning. They would have cleared a path, would have bombed the island that morning. And my grandfather was the one who equipped the planes with bombs. That was his job in the Marines. And then land forces would be invading in about midday, like as the tide was reaching its crest around 11 in the morning. And the problem was that the battle planners did not have good tide charts or any

Starting point is 00:07:27 really tide charts for this particular atoll. And we just kind of had to guess using tide charts from as far away as Chile, which is like thousands of miles away, or tide charts from the age of maritime exploration in the 1800s. So it was really not accurate, but it was really important because we needed a tide to come up high enough to float these flat-bottomed boats called Higgins boats over the reef that surrounds this island. And it did not, it did not rise high enough. So they had to get out. The Marines had to get out of their boats and kind of struggle ashore and holding their rifles over their heads while Japanese soldiers are just shooting at them. So about 3,000 Marines died in this battle. And we didn't know until the modern age that it was because of the moon, that the tide,

Starting point is 00:08:16 I mean, obviously the moon is because of the tide, but the location of the moon and the phase of the moon were really crucial in this dodging tide, is what they called it. And it's because the moon was far away. It was the opposite of a supermoon. So it was a micro moon. So it's more distant in its orbit around the earth. And that causes just a weaker tidal pull because the moon's further away. So its gravity is not as strong. And no one knew this at the time. And no one knew how to plan for that. So it was because of the moon that this event took place that my grandfather was part of. And he never knew this. I never knew this until I worked in this book. And to me, it just shows that we all have some kind of story to tell about the moon and our relationship with it. And it's

Starting point is 00:09:02 sort of spoke to that for me. And also, as I understood it, and also from reading the book, it played a role in D-Day invasion as well. You want to mention briefly that, how the moon is so, was so, and maybe less so in the age of smart weapons and the ability to fight at night and all sorts of things. But what was the role of the moon during D-Day? Yeah, so, I mean, D-Day is only a few months after the Tarawa goes really badly. And again, the Allies knew we had to use the Tide to help forces reach land. So they planned D-Day for the full moon in June, the strawberry moon, partly because they needed its light. They were floating gliders over the English channel, and they needed to have enough moonlight to see because there were no instruments, there were no

Starting point is 00:09:47 lights, there were no anything at all, because they didn't want the Nazis to be able to detect these gliders. So they had no instruments flying blind basically over the English channel in the middle of the night. They needed a full moon to fly by. And also because of the high tide, again, they knew that a full moon would bring in a higher high tide than it would if it was like at last quarter, which is what happened during the Tarawa invasion. So there were only a couple days a month that they could do it. And Churchill writes about this in his memoirs that, you know, we needed to have a full moon or we had to wait two more weeks, you know, for the new moon, for the same kind of effect where the moon and the sun and the earth

Starting point is 00:10:20 are aligned to amplify the moon's gravity to bring in a higher tide. They wanted to float over those kind of iconic triangle-shaped barricades the Nazis put on Normandy Beach. They wanted to get as close to land as possible to, again, have waves of troops coming ashore to eventually take the beach. And that's what happened. Hey there, I'm thrilled that you joined us for this small step or podcast kind onto the moon's surface with cosmic journalist Rebecca Boyle. Are you enjoying the interview? I hope so. And the way that I ask you to show your gratitude is to subscribe to this podcast, either an audio format wherever you're listening, Apple push the little plus button, Spotify, just

Starting point is 00:10:59 follow it or on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell. It really helps the show a lot. It enables me to get great guests like Rebecca and many, many more that are coming up like Daniel Dennett and the renowned author Paul Halpert. Let's get back to the episode, but please don't forget to subscribe. You talk a lot in the book about the, you know, kind of symbiosis between the moon and the earth and you go over the history throughout early times to now and not the invention of the telescope, but the use of the telescope by Galileo for the first, or maybe second time, at least looking at the moon, measuring its properties, craters, etc. What did you say the moon has a unique position in that it almost is as important in

Starting point is 00:11:41 astrology and kind of the occult as it is in the advent of modern science? I actually feel like those things are way more connected than we think, in part because of the moon's, the evolution of our relationship to the moon through human history. So it starts out like a timekeeper. We use it to be able to mark time for the first time more than just over the course of a day. I think the more important thing is that we use it to orient ourselves in time and like mentally time travel, which as far as we know, we're the only species that does this. You know, some creatures like squirrels can hide nuts and that kind of stuff. But as far as we know, we're the only linguistically advanced enough species. Maybe whales do this. We can't ask them.

Starting point is 00:12:23 Maybe elephants do this. We can't ask them. It's possible. But we use the moon to say, oh, and like the sixth moon of the year, I'm going to go on vacation, you know. And that's a really human trait. And that's so powerful in the development of early societies that I think it ends up transforming into this more intentional feeling of aid of help. The moon is like watching over us. It's lighting your fields at night, that kind of thing. And it becomes a really big focus of the first devotional practices on Earth in the first

Starting point is 00:12:54 literate societies in Mesopotamia. It's now Iraq and parts of Syria and the Levant. And from there, you know, people develop really detailed observations of the moon and the other planets and where they are relative to each other. And when eclipses happen, because they're really important omens for astrology. The rising and setting times of certain stars and planets and the moon are also really important for, like, divining things in early astrology. That ends up creating this record of data, essentially, that Greeks and Babylonians. and the Romans and other later societies use. And it's a body of knowledge that I think people draw from into the Enlightenment.

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Starting point is 00:14:00 GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And obviously, the moon is sort of this both companion and also a record keeper of Earth. And the way that it plays out in the book is starting from, you know, very early times in scientific history, but also in, you know, archaeo astronomy. me, the moon is really depicted in many cultures and used for many purposes. I heard a claim, I won't say who said it, but I did hear a claim that because of the moon and the connection between the female periodic cycles, menstrual cycles, that some people believe that women were actually among the first astronomers, you know, they were kind of noticing the effects of the moon and they couldn't find it to be too decoupled from their own

Starting point is 00:14:51 biological cycles. Have you ever heard that idea? Yeah, and I think it's really compelling. I mean, it's pretty much impossible to prove that now and like modern epidemiological science, you know, with any kind of like peer-reviewable rigor because there are so many other effects on a human menstrual cycle that include things like hormones in the environment, food supply, artificial light at night, you know, microplastics, like we don't even understand what that does to our bodies. There was a study like last week showing that of a bunch of placentas that were studied, human placentas. were investigated in detail to look at what was in the tissue. And this is an organ that a human grows or a mammal grows, placental mammal grows, to feed its baby as it's growing. And every one of the placenta studied in this example had microplastics within it, which I think is super terrible and interesting. And we don't really know what that means. So it's really almost impossible to say that like the moon is why people have a menstrual cycle according to some timeline. But it's,

Starting point is 00:15:53 It's almost the same. And like if you look at a statistical average of the luteal phase, which is the ovulatory phase in which someone is fertile, and then the way that that progresses into a cycle of menstruation to shed the uterine lining across cultures on Earth, it's about the same length as the lunar cycle, which is just interesting. And like, I don't, I don't want to claim that it's because of that, but I think it's very compelling that there's probably some evolutionary connection there. And yeah, it's fun to speculate about. what ancient humans made of that and how they must have noticed and, you know, what they, how they planned as a result. Well, talk about life on the moon a little bit, but I want to first talk about the impact of the moon. And in particular, the Earth-Moon system as a binary planet system effectively and how the moon is kind of shaped or climate and maybe tectonic activities. And we'll get into the implications for life.

Starting point is 00:16:52 But are there specifics that you learned in your research for the impact of the moon's behavior, its distance, it's on the Earth's orbit and understanding climate change on Earth? Yeah, I was really surprised by the importance of its stability of our axial tilt. So, and this is something that you hear about a little bit in astrobiology, where people who are looking for other possibly habitable planets around other stars, talk about the criteria that might be necessary for a planet to host life. one of them is often liquid water or, you know, a watery atmosphere, some kind of the right pressure and temperature and distance from a star to maintain liquid water on the surface is kind of one of the key attributes of a Goldilocks planet. But I didn't think about the stability of that planet's access being important. And when you compare Earth to Mars, it seems like it might be really important. Mars has a very similar tilt to Earth now. It's only a little bit smaller than Earth.

Starting point is 00:17:47 And it has about the same length of day. So it has about the same rotation speed as Earth. So they're pretty similar, but Mars has this very dramatic wobble in the tilt of its axis over time. So like if imagine Earth is 23.5 degrees, which is why we're coming up on the spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere. Mars is about the same. But sometimes Mars is like, you know, maybe 40 degrees or maybe like 90 degrees. Like it has this very kind of extreme eccentricity in the tilt of that axis because of Jupiter. Jupiter plays this gravitational role where it like kind of knocks Mars around. But the moon keeps our axis stable because this gravity kind of maintains the tilt of Earth, which means over millennia, our climate is more stable. It's more predictably serene than Mars, which has these really wild cycles of massive carbon dioxide injections into the atmosphere because its carbon dioxide ice caps will totally melt or sublime.

Starting point is 00:18:48 and vaporize into the atmosphere. And if that happened on Earth, I mean, imagine if we were tilted like 40 degrees. And the equatorial regions are now kind of like polar. And what we think of as the poles, the northern and southern poles are like now pointed at the equator. So lots of sea ice would melt and you'd have major changes on things like the level of seas and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is permafrost melts, releasing methane and CO2.

Starting point is 00:19:16 Like, I don't think we really know what would happen, but it wouldn't be good. And I was lecturing to a very important group of people, my kids at their school yesterday, and I brought with them with me some samples of meteorites, which I have here. And by the way, I give these away to all my viewers that have.edu email addresses when you go to Brian Keating.com slash edu. You'll guarantee to win a meteorite, but others can win it at brightcating.com, just without the doubt. slash edu. And I also brought some moon rocks, and I have those somewhere around here, but we're talking about it. And I, you know, it was really interesting to see their perspectives on everything from

Starting point is 00:19:58 eclipses, which, you know, the, I think this will be out right before the great eclipse. The last great North American solar eclipse occurs in April 8th. Are you going to watch it somewhere? Yes. I'm going to Hot Springs, Arkansas for the Atlas Obscira Ecliptic Festival, where I get to give talks, but also hear some live music, and it's a whole music festival. It'll be cool. So, yeah, I'll be watching it too. But it occurred to me as I was talking that, you know, if not for, you know, three major impacts or classes of impact events, we might not be having this conversation because we might not exist. And those are the formation of the moon from a giant protoplanetary object, impact called the Athea hitting the early Earth,

Starting point is 00:20:44 separating it, fragmenting it into the earth and moon separately, and then also the bombardment of the earth by comets that, you know, is thought to have delivered water. And then lastly, the giant impact crater, you know, in Chixilub crater, the KT event, et cetera, that extinguished the dinosaurs so that small mammals like us could exist. Can you talk about the, you know, kind of low odds of planets having moons like this? I've heard it said that, you know, this is, Earth is the only moon has the Earth and only moon system is the only one in the solar system where you can have a total solar eclipse the way that we have it or you know exactly the same angular size of the Earth and the moon. What other kind of bizarre, interesting curiosities are there about our Earth-Moon system that

Starting point is 00:21:30 kind of might lead us to believe there's something special about our moon and our existence? There are a lot and I think I was surprised by how many when I started writing this book and eclipses are one and might be my favorite just because of the totally wild cosmic coincidence of these, as you mentioned, the angular sizes of the sun and the moon in the sky. Like the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, but it's also 400 times further away. So they line up perfectly. And, you know, it makes sense that people would have ascribed meaning to that. There's the sizes of them in the sky, one to light the day, one to light the night is what they say in Genesis. You know, there's a lot of meaning ascribed to that. And I think,

Starting point is 00:22:10 think even in a science, it's like we think about the anthropic principle. And like, you know, life has arisen here because this planet has the conditions relative, you know, that are necessary for life. And so planets that, you know, might have these conditions might also have life. And we know this is true because we're here to observe it. Like, it's the sort of like recursive logic. You know, the moon is weird in a few ways. And one way is that it's just really big relative to Earth. It's one fourth the width of Earth. And think about the moons of, you know, other planets, Venus has no moons. Mercury has no moons. Mars has these two little captured asteroid dinky little spud like things that are not even round. They don't do anything to Mars. And Jupiter has like 81 moons.

Starting point is 00:22:53 Saturn has a lot. Uranus had we just found a new one around Uranus like last week. There's a lot of them. But they're like crumbs compared to the size of those giant planets. And so they don't really do anything either. But Earth's moon is almost like a binary planet system. Like it's it they both play such a role in each other's evolution and their movements around each other and the whole solar system. It's a really unique system and I don't think people appreciate that sometimes that like it's a very unique thing and it's a very unique planet that we have and I think that the moon might be one reason why. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special by for only

Starting point is 00:23:39 $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Bye. Talk about the influence gravitationally of the moon on the Earth and potential for the generation of primitive life, perhaps, or the implications for primitive life. as have met many people that have worked on these stromatolites, these objects, fossil giant structures that are thought to be some of the oldest things in the world of living or, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:20 composition. And they're in tidal pools, which are obviously influenced by the tide. So talk about, you know, the influence of the moon on early life formation, if you would. We're not totally sure where life originated, you know, there's people who think it was in these little, as Darwin called them, warm little pools and like tidal pools at the water's edge. It's a little bit more popular now to talk about deep middle. ocean ridges where there's lots of mixture of chemicals and heat and minerals in the ocean and maybe life sparked into being there. But I think either way, the moon would have played a

Starting point is 00:24:50 role in both developing that life and fostering its evolution. So either in tidal pools where you have this like cycle of hydration and dehydration or in the bottom of the ocean, but the moon is stirring it up and the moon dredges these things from the seafloor up into the mid-ocean and where it encounters light, encounters the sun, and maybe starts to photosynthesize. You know, we don't know how that all first happened, but I think it's safe to say the moon played a role in that no matter what. And as life becomes more complex and limbed and backboneed, I think the moon played a huge role in bringing the first vertebrates onto land. And this is one of those things that's super intuitive when you think about it because, well, yeah, the tide,

Starting point is 00:25:34 the moon causes the tide. Tide goes out, fish gets stuck. Fish better have to learn how to breathe the air or walk. And that's what happened. But it's only in the last couple of years that paleontologists have pieced this together through the fossil record and through ancient bathymetry records and modeling of what the oceans would have been like in the Devonian period where this took place. So the, you know, kind of a few things involving the moon took place here at UC San Diego and perhaps the warm little pools.

Starting point is 00:26:05 And I didn't actually recall this story about Charles Darwin's son, who was also one of the first to propose some effects of tidal locking and the influence of the Earth-moon system and how it's going to behave. But the Miller-Yuri, both Stanley Miller and Harold Urey,

Starting point is 00:26:22 were professors here, as was James Arnold, who went from the Manhattan Project, basically, to work on the lunar sample returns. Talk about what that meant, the actual return of samples. You know, you could buy a fragment of the moon. I won't tell you where my dealer is.

Starting point is 00:26:36 But you can't, if you touch one that the astronauts brought back, you'll, you know, it's a class two felony and you'll go to jail for a long time. So talk about the value of this quarry that the astronauts returned. And what you think about the potential for getting more of these samples is likely to be in the near future. I mean, I think we're definitely going to get more samples here soon, both from Chinese missions and from American missions, which is amazing. And I don't think you can put a value on that just in terms of the same.

Starting point is 00:27:02 scientific impact. But even the cultural impact, you know, the first time I saw Moon Rock, I was a kid and I was in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, and there's a rock that's just there. It's exposed and you can touch it. And I remember being blown away by this, that like that was from the moon and like someone brought it back here. It still kind of blows my mind that this actually took place. And you can physically touch it with your hand. That's the one they said, like, okay, let the kids, you know, rub their hands on that one. But the rest of them are in basically a bank vault in Houston. And I got to see those as well as part of this book. And I don't think it's possible to overstate how amazing they are and how otherworldly and, I mean,

Starting point is 00:27:44 literally, and just impressive. The lunar samples really are. I think now, you know, be appropriate to talk about the plans to go back to the moon. So first, astronomically speaking, what could it mean for astronomers like me in terms of putting telescopes or, and what would be needed to support such missions on the moon's far side, for example. I love the idea of a far side telescope because it would be the most radio quiet place you could imagine. Like the far side of the moon is shielded from all of our earthly noise and all of our emissions, you know, on our cell phones and our radios and podcasts like this, you know.

Starting point is 00:28:23 And if you're an astronomer studying certain types of wavelengths of light and you want to look at things like the cosmic dawn when the first star is ignited, there's, really no better place to look from than the moon. I think that's a really awesome idea, and I hope that it happens. There's a few NASA projects that are funded that are like early stages looking at this, how it would work, how it could possibly be done. I think it's going to be really interesting to see what happens up there in the next few years because of all the interest in exploring the far side of the moon from China, from the U.S., private companies and NASA and other space-faring countries. We're going to have to be very careful and thoughtful about what we do

Starting point is 00:29:02 on the moon to keep it pristine enough for science and for astronomers like you to be able to use it as an observatory. I think that's something we need to really keep in mind. Pardon the interruption, but I've got an amazing offer that you don't want to miss. As you know and heard about so far, Rebecca and I are inspired and have been from an early age by encounters with space dust, particles of rocks, just like these, meteorites from the early solar system's history. Now, you not only have an opportunity to examine these at a museum. You have a chance each month to win one of these genuine samples of the early solar system. Over four billion-year-old space schmuntz. Just go to Briankeating.com slash list. Or if you have a dot-edu email address, you're guaranteed to win. Go to bryankeeting.com

Starting point is 00:29:48 slash edu for that opportunity. Now, back to the episode. A non-graduate, I can't say, it's awkward to say someone who didn't graduate because they're not an alum, but Andy Weir went to UCSD. Oh, I didn't know. And he, of course, wrote The Martian and many other things. But he wrote Artemis, which is about, you know, colonizing the moon. It's a crime drama as some of his books are want to be. And in that book, he makes a very persuasive case that the real only reason to go to the moon will be for tourism. So I wonder if you can comment on that.

Starting point is 00:30:20 I had Zach Weiner Smith on. He and his wife, Kelly, wrote a book called A City on Mars. They're extremely pessimistic about living on Mars. but almost even more resigned to the fact that the moon is essentially a dead end except for maybe a pit stop on the way somewhere else. So do you agree with these people? I guess maybe is the first question. If not, why? Where are they wrong?

Starting point is 00:30:44 Andy Weir's claim about tourism only and the lack of, I mean, Zach and Kelly say, you know, the only carbon deposits there are the, you know, the excrement and barf that the astronauts left there from the Apollo mission. So tell me, Rebecca, what do you think about the prospects for using the moon beyond just, say, a space, you know, filling station? I hope that's not all we consider it as. I think it's a little sad. I did. I reviewed actually a city on Mars for a scientific American. I really enjoyed it. But I think I don't necessarily agree with Zach and Kelly that it's, you know, a way station. I do think tourism is in the moon's future. And I think the most useful way for me that I found to think about the moon's future is to compare it to Antarctica, where it's like, I'm. I consider it the eighth continent. You know, the moon is part of Earth. It was shorn from Earth sometime in Earth's early history. It is a part of who all of us are. It's really hard to get there.

Starting point is 00:31:38 It's really austere, just like Antarctica. You wouldn't want to, like, put up a city there. It'd be terrible. And no one's really tried that yet, in part because what would be the point? But there is some light tourism. There's lots of science happening in Antarctica. There's lots of international cooperation. Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing place.

Starting point is 00:31:57 to be. And I think we should go there and we should do stuff there. And we should also keep in mind that it's special and that it's different from the rest of Earth. And the moon is that way as well. And I think that's a useful framework for thinking about how to use it. And tourism is fine. Like, that's great. You better be prepared. You better have a lot of money to be able to go, have a good, you know, have the right equipment and training and go right ahead. And the same is true for the use of it for science and exploration purposes, which I think is going to happen on the moon as well. So I'm not as grim as the Weiner Smith's point of view, I think. I'm not as, I wouldn't say pro-capitalist because I don't think that's the Andy Roos message.

Starting point is 00:32:35 But like the idea of tourism being all there is on the moon is a little bit more bleak than my point of view as well. I think there's still a lot of good science to be done up there. But I don't think it's going to be, you know, a huge settlement or some California-sized city or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, the South Pole is where I've been twice. And to get there, you have to go through McMurdo, which is like a ginormous college town. with a strip mining facility kind of overlaid on it with all the camaraderie that you would expect, you know, from the canteen scene in Star Wars, a lot of scallywags and ruffians that work there. But it does take a special type of person to go there.

Starting point is 00:33:14 And I think, you know, their point is to go to the moon is a relatively, you know, it's a three-day trip. You point that out in your book. And yet it seems to harken to different goals and aspirations of humanity. And I actually didn't know the story of the blank on his name, but the gentleman who kind of was the torchbearer for Martin Luther King after he died. Oh, yeah, Abernathy. Yeah, Abernathy. So after Martin Luther King was assassinated in the awful year of 1968, which only saw one bright spot, which one of my siblings was born then. But was the first orbit or our first lunar orbit and pictures from the moon and Apollo 8.

Starting point is 00:33:53 But talk about like the impact in there, you know, Abernathy says something like, you know, we can feed, it costs $12 to feed an astronaut, but it's only $8 to feed a child. You know, I mean, the budget of NASA as a whole, even then, I mean, it was big. It was a few percent of GDP. But not now. It's, you know, a fraction of a percent or about a percent. What do you make of these claims? Oh, we should just devote all that money to food. And I mean, poverty's gone down 90 percent in America. Do you think that people will say the same kind of things about, say, an expedition to go to Mars? do you think people say that about going to Mars being a waste of, you know, capital, both human and monetary. But I don't agree. And I think it's really, it's sort of like an impoverished mindset to me to think that we should only be focused on our worldly problems. I think, you know, Apollo is still transformative. And it's been more than a half century now since we walked on the moon. And we still learn new things from the samples they brought home. We still learn new things about ourselves. And I think that's going to continue. And I don't think, to me, it's, it's just deeply cynical to say that, you know, we should forsake space exploration for the purpose of, you know, spending our money elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:35:04 I mean, it's all kind of made up anyway, money. But, you know, we've learned an incredible amount about this planet from the vantage point of space and from the moon. You mentioned Apollo 8 in that iconic Earthrise image that the astronauts took on Christmas Eve of that year, I really think was totally transformative. And people have said it launched the environmental movement. And I think that's not overstating it. I think that going to another realm into, you know, lunar orbit or into just low Earth orbit can really give us a necessary perspective on the fragility of this planet and the uniqueness of this planet and the time that we live in where we're at this inflection point, where we are transforming it like we've never done before. But we have an unbelievable opportunity to

Starting point is 00:35:50 preserve it too. And that's a huge responsibility. And I think seeing it from space, accessing it from space is totally worthy. And so I will fight anybody who says otherwise. And speaking of Apollo 8, it's a cute thing that this podcast is named in honor of one of Arthur C. Clark's famous phrases that the only way to learn the limits of the impossible is to go beyond them into the impossible. It's the original name. And he commented on how back in 1968, how it was, it's such a, you know, earth-changing moment. It's more that the going to the moon change the earth rather than the moon. And you point that out, I think, in harmony as well. So as we wrap up, I just want to make a point, another UCSD connection in addition to Arthur C. Clark,

Starting point is 00:36:35 to Harold Uri and Stanley Miller, and then it was James Arnold, but also to our alumna, a proud alumna, Jessica Maier, who may be the first woman to walk on the moon, and certainly will be a first Jewish person to go to the moon. That's very exciting for many of us around the world. So I just want to finish up. I have a couple of questions from the audience that are very perspicacious. I have the most brilliant audience in the known universe. And I love soliciting questions. You can always ask me questions on X, formerly Twitter, where you should follow Rebecca Boyle at R. Boyle, 31. And you can always ask me questions, Dr. Brian Keating, so I have two really wonderful questions. And one of them is from Christiard.

Starting point is 00:37:17 Defer 100, the Newsom, is there any way to estimate how many world-altering impacts the moon has saved us from? If you look at the far side, it's pockmarked with craters. The near side has fair share too, but how many, do we have any estimate of how many times Chicksilab has been avoided on Earth thanks to our moon friend? We don't have a good way to estimate that, but I do think it's worth noting that Earth is a lot larger than the moon, and it is more dense. The moon actually is very low density. Just from a gravitational point of view, like, there's more mass here. So Earth is still going to be a bigger magnet for like space rocks. So we're probably still going to get hit more. And there's just more surface. It's just like a statistical issue. Like,

Starting point is 00:38:00 we're just going to get hit more frequently. But we don't know that because Earth recycles itself. Earth consumes its crust over time. And the moon does not. So we can use the moon like a time capsule to get a sense for how much maybe both worlds were pummeled. by asteroids. I think it's safe to say that Moon has taken a fair beating on its own. I don't know that it maybe it's safeguarded us from significant asteroid impacts, but we can look at the Moon and do some statistics and try to understand how much Earth might have suffered to at the same time. Yeah, if you saw one side of it, you'd really be surprised to think about the other side as anything like it does. But there are almost like two different

Starting point is 00:38:43 planets. Oh, a safe. Final question, Rebecca. This comes from my friend, the memes of destruction. What do we know about the history of our moon's magnetic field? If it ever existed in any real state,

Starting point is 00:38:56 like, geodynamically driven state, it was very short-lived. We know that there is some evidence of magnetism on the primordial moon, just from, again, these is precious Apollo rocks, and we can sense that there was some activity early in the moon's history,

Starting point is 00:39:10 but it probably didn't last very long, and it wouldn't have been very strong It wouldn't have created the magnetic field, like force field bubble that Earth has. So it wouldn't have deflected enough cosmic rays or solar radiation to make much of a difference. But it was probably, if it ever really was a fully magnetic field that was global, like around the whole moon, as opposed to localized based on certain tectonic or platonic activities within the early moon, it didn't last very long. Wonderful. Well, Rebecca Boyle, author of Our Moon,

Starting point is 00:39:42 How Earth's Celestial Companion Transform the Planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are, an instant national bestseller, a New York Times book review, editor's choice. Congratulations. This is a phenomenal book. It's very easy to read or listen to or both. I always think you should do all three or, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:01 as many forms as you can consume it in. Don't forget, you can win a sample of something related to a moonrock if you go to Brian Keating.com and visit Rebecca on Twitter and online, and be sure to pick up this book. Thank you, Rebecca. Enjoy the eclipse. I will. You too. Thanks so much. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How Our Moon Shaped the Course of Human History and Humankind w/ Rebecca Boyle (#404)

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