Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The power of the lunar sublime

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Should policymakers spend more time looking — really looking — at the Moon? Chris Cokinos thinks so. He is the author of the new book, Still As Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow, which explores the role of our nearest celestial neighbor in culture, art, and our dreams of space exploration over the course of human history. It’s about the power of looking and seeing something beyond what you’d expect. But the conversation goes beyond that. We discuss the role of the sublime in our everyday lives, how to find beauty in the quotidian, the role of language in conveying the beauty and power of space, and even why he thinks landing cremains on the Moon is disrespectful. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/the-moon-still-as-bright-chris-cokinosSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show where we talk about the politics and processes behind space exploration. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. I'm really excited about this month's episode, and we are taking a small step away from the focus on policy to kind of policy, but kind of something, but something more. I'm talking to Chris Kokinos, the poet and also author of a brand new book called Still as Bright, an illuminating history of the moon from antiquity to tomorrow. Now, obviously, there's a lot happening at and around the moon these days. Just this year that I record this, we are seeing the first commercial lunar payload delivery services.

We are seeing multiple new missions going through multiple different countries to the moon for the first time. And of course, NASA's Artemis program is marching along. And very likely next year, we will see humans at least orbit the moon for the first time in my lifetime and a lot of your lifetimes. What's so interesting about this book, which of course talks about the history of the moon as we see it, why it came to be, the physical processes, some of the exploration of it, but it's ultimately a book about looking at the moon and actually seeing it. Chris Kokinos would argue that all of the people that are working to go, from the astronauts to the engineers to the policymakers themselves,

to the engineers, to the policymakers themselves, should pause and spend time just looking at the moon, observing it, watching it, taking it in at a deep level. Not to necessarily change what they're doing, but to understand the place to which they're going. But Chris's book, which is just beautifully written, really captures this interesting tension between something so familiar and quotidian, the moon, right, that we see almost every night or sometimes during the day, just up in the sky, that sometimes we'll remark on it, if it's low or big or particularly beautiful little crescent, but oftentimes just acknowledge that tension between something so familiar, but then once you look at it, something so profoundly alien, to really understand, as the Apollo astronauts did when they were there,

this magnificent desolation, the complete opposite of a fertile planet Earth, is just a few hundred thousand miles away. And I really love this exploration of his process of seeing it. And he's an amateur astronomer, and it talks about his process of seeing and studying the moon at these incredible levels of detail. And something happens in your mind. Something happens in your brain when you really soak in the alien-ness of something so familiar. And this is the idea, I think, of the sublime. familiar. And this is the idea, I think, of the sublime. This strange feeling that's hard to put a name or actual description to, where we become simultaneously smaller, but also we open up to something bigger. And it's a strange feeling. There's some uncertainty in that experience, seeing a gorgeous mountain vista, communing with the night sky, I think is another way to do it,

and seeing the moon giving our brains an opportunity to feel something alien in a world that is ultimately really trying to convince us and grab our attention with the familiar, with the nostalgic, with comfort. And giving us these small hits of dopamine that while satisfying in the moment leave us feeling somewhat empty. So having the moon, as Chris will say, is an opportunity to experience wonder. And we talk about this. We talk about literature. We'll talk about how the moon has been seen by different cultures over time and our evolving relationship with the moon, particularly now as, as a species, we are making a sustained effort to go back. Chris himself just published an article, which will be linked to in the show notes on Space News,

arguing, for example, that we should not allow companies to deposit cremains on its surface. Now, you may agree with Chris or you may not, but he makes an impassioned and thoughtful argument for how we treat this alien world so close to us with his approach of humble respect. I hope you will stick around for that conversation. It was a delight to speak with him and his book, of course, I recommend. It was fun to read. It was obviously inspiring to me and really hit on some ideas that have been flowing around in my brain over the last few years. This show, the Space Policy Edition, is here because of members of the Planetary Society, my organization. We are an independent organization. What we do and how we do it and who we are is not funded by aerospace corporations or government.

We are funded by people just like you, to co-opt a phrase, but members all around the world who enable us to exist. So if you are not a member and you are enjoying this show or Planetary Radio by my colleague Sarah, please consider joining us. You can go to planetary.org slash join. Membership levels start at just four bucks a month. That's not that much. And if you are a member, first, I just want to really thank you. Thank you so much for making this all happen. And if you can, consider increasing your membership level to help us do more work like this, to do all the great advocacy work my colleague Jack does in Washington, D.C., our outreach and our great projects, all of that happens because of membership.

That's at planetary.org slash join. Okay, so we've got that out of the way. Let's talk right now with Chris. Chris, thank you for being on this episode of the Space Policy Edition. Well, thank you for having me. I think I might be the first poet ever to be on the Space Policy Edition, but I'm not sure. Depends what you take for the poetry in written policy for the most time. It's a relatively austere medium. Openly acknowledged poet. No, it's delighted to have you here. I have to just say from the outset, I just truly enjoyed your new book. And obviously, I read a lot of space books, and either because I have to or

because I want to, and this was a nice combination of both. You, I think, because of your background, have a quality to your writing that is just enjoyable to read. And I kept noting and underlining passages, some of which I'll read today, but the quality of your writing was just, a lot of it was just beautiful. And I appreciated that lineage, I think, to what got me into this field of kind of that Sagan-esque, subjective, but also scientific, connective approach of bringing forth the humanity in the process and the enjoyment of literature itself. So, just want to put that right out there that it was nicely done. And I hope you write more of these in the future. I hope to write more of these in the future. It takes me a while, but I really appreciate that, Casey.

I think the moon is important and beautiful, and actually talking about it cuts to a lot of the reasons why those of us who are interested in space exploration and science and potentially settling on the moon or Mars, I think it cuts to all of those things. Exactly. traveling on the moon or mars like i think it cuts to all of those things exactly and i think that the interesting part is that it's the medium itself sometimes about how you share a message and i think again the quality of that the how you wrote this book and the the literative aspect of it i think really again resonated with me as someone who grew up reading say again but also you and i have a mutual appreciation for Lorne Isley, who's not necessarily as well known today as he was back in the 60s and 70s. But he was an anthropologist who had, I think, kind of this wistful, somewhat sad, almost inevitability to his writing about progress, these very kind of mixed feelings of it, but was able to tie that

through language, tie that experience and share that with the reader and evoke something more deep than just look at the scientific results that we're finding, you know, maybe to put it crassly, more than just a left brain communication of ideas, but this more right brained evocation of experience. And I felt that a lot reading your book. And I thought that it had a clear line also to Isley in terms of how you wove your personal experience and the reflections of when you stare to the moon over time. So again, just really nicely done in that sense. And I think that tone was really refreshing for me.

And in this book, I mean, obviously you talk about the moon in a historical context. You speculate in its future. You talk about how it's changed over time. But you personally just spent a lot of time looking at the moon. And I think crucially seeing it in a way yes that most of us haven't so tell us a bit about that and how has your experience of looking at the moon evolved from when you started to study it through your backyard telescope to where you are today on the other side of this book. Sure. And I think that the, the telescope, it's, you know, and I've been joking that it's,

it's the story of a boy and his telescope, you know, and, and it is, I mean, there's this, there is a memoir element to it. And so part of it is, there's a little narrative about rediscovering the telescope my father gave me when I was a child. He's then is dying of cancer and thinking about mortality, which the moon happens to be, you know, wrapped up in a whole lot of cultural symbolism. So it's convenient in that way for blending the individual stories that I do up to, yeah, having this, you know, having a backyard telescope. yeah, having this, you know, having a backyard telescope. And the story is somewhat ironic in that I was a child of Apollo. I am a child of Apollo. So I watched the moon landings. I tape recorded Jules Bergman and Walter Cronkite reporting on these later missions. And that for me was a form of aspiration to listen to those in my little childhood trailer, dark bedroom, wishing I had a different family and wanting to be an astronaut. So that is kind of the basis of it. And yet,

when I started becoming amateur astronomer, stargazer, whatever you want to want to call it, I didn't really pay attention to the moon because it's both really easy. It's always, you know, there it is. It's not hard to find in the sky when it's up, but it's also really confusing. Like when you first look at it through the telescope, it's astonishing. And I love showing kids, especially and adults who become like children when they see the moon through the telescope for the first time. So it took me a while to find the moon and, you know, in that personal sense and to find the stories, the historical, cultural, and scientific stories that would become kind of the lyrical heart of the book. So looking at the moon initially through my backyard telescope was, you know,

there was a night that I clearly remember. I write about it in the opening of the book, where I have this kind of epiphany when I'm sort of in a Lauren Isley-esque melancholy state and decide, okay, well, I haven't looked through my telescope in months. And I'm not going to call it out to, you know, south of Tucson where I was living then. So there's the moon. I'm going to look at the moon. And it was breathtaking, you know, literally. And I felt in the presence of the sublime landscape. And so it all kind of flooded from that moment. And as I tell, you know,

in the book, part of the individual story is just my learning how to navigate this terrain, like treating it as another landscape akin to the American West, which is, I think, interesting because a lot of the initial descriptions of some early lunar photographs reference the Dakotas or they reference the Wasatch in Utah, where I live now. And learning my way around the moon became also the way of learning its stories. So over the years, that's been a huge sort of part of my life. And it's interesting you asked that question too, because I've just had a pretty decent run of looking at the moon here. And as we're recording this last week, there were some clear nights and I was just out there,

just kind of going back to how it was initially, which I'm just, I know the names of a lot of features. I know their stories, I know the science, but I was just sort of settling into looking at it. And I feel like that foundational level of appreciating something outside of yourself is the basis for a sense of wonder and a sense of connection. And so I don't know if that's answering your question. I mean, it really has evolved over the past five or six years. I know more about it, obviously, than I did, but sometimes just being at the past, you know, five or six years, I know more about it, obviously, than than I did. But sometimes just being at the telescope at the eyepiece, that knowledge is, is sort of a substrate, right? It's not in the forefront of my mind. That's interesting, because I mean, what I was getting at in a way with that question was also

and what you touched on is that the moon has this fractal level of information. The closer and deeper you look, the more and more there is to see. Yeah. And, I mean, I have, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I, I mean, I have the iPhone moon wallpaper on it. So, literally every time I look at my phone to unlock it the moon is presented to me but i couldn't name a single i mean i could name some of the very very big ones but i wasn't looking at it and what i like about this book is that it's the story and it's also kind of this quiet lesson in the value of looking and exactly what you're saying, kind of experiencing something that is in some ways so

quotidian. It's right there. We see it all the time. But also, we're not familiar with it anymore. And that's what your book kind of opens with is that this early relationship humans had with the moon would have been profoundly different. It would have dominated their awareness. My amateur astronomy era is like, you're taught to wait for moonless nights, right? The moon is your enemy and you're trying to avoid it. So, I was very moved by the fact that like, oh, what if you just looked at the moon? And again, you have these beautiful descriptions of seeing it. And it was inspiring. And I think maybe the highest praise you can give from reading this book is that I had my binoculars out in a next clear sky,

I'll bring my telescope about to look at the moon. It was very inspiring to do it. But the act of doing it itself is the important part and almost melting into that knowledge and just appreciating what you see is itself, I think, a rare experience, particularly in our modern culture. Yeah, I think so too. And at the end of the book, I sort of bring this sense of wonder, the sort of childlike or childhood, right, sense of wonder. I try to come full circle and I talk about how a number of scholars, astronomers, sociologists,

you know, myself feeling like that's the basis for a certain kind of ethical relationship to others and to place. And because we're going back, right, we're going back to the moon, and it's going to be very different from Apollo. And we can talk about that. But underneath that, I think we all want to know things and we all want to live well. If you're talking about real reasons and acceptable reasons to use the dichotomy from last month with Michael Griffin and a former NASA administrator's famous speech, maybe that's the ultimate real reason that we do anything. We want to live well and we want to know things. And there's the moon. It's the closest world that we can see with our naked eye. We can make out landscape details with our naked eye, with binoculars. If you don't have to have a telescope, you can borrow one from a

library. There are nearly a thousand libraries in this country that have telescopes. And my plea is to just find those moments. And it's difficult. Like, you know, you and your wife are raising a nine-month-old, right? I'm just in retirement. Like, I get, you know, there are questions of privilege and demographics and just who you are and the time you are, right, you know, in your life. And yet we can try to find those pauses and try to craft those pauses in our lives. And maybe it's not the moon. I was reminded of, as I was thinking about the interview, there's a beautiful story about a philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer, who's one of my favorite philosophers. And he's wandering around this park in Dresden. This is in the early 19th

century. And he's just enraptured. It's early spring. The flowers are blooming. And he's wandering around in this kind of fugue state. And a guard or some official comes up to him and says, who are you? What are you doing? And the guard asks him, who are you? And Schopenhauer turns to him and says, I wish you could tell me. Like those moments where we are taken out of ourselves and put in a sort of relation with another being or another material object like the moon are really crucial for our well-being. our well-being. And I think in case of the moon, it's also something that should be foundational for the people who are writing policy, who are doing the engineering studies for the human landing system, who are thinking about space law and safety zones around the Artemis landing sites, all these very technical things that are important or crucial. And we all should be talking about them, those of us who care about it. But I would think especially for them, really getting to know the moon as a world

and as a world that we have had a very long relationship with is important. I think there's a theme in your book about, in a sense, the tension of the moon is both familiar. And regular in our our presence in our lives, but also utterly alien when you do look at it. And I feel like a lot of the experience or part of this thing that will, of the sublime or the experience of wonder that you describe, comes from that tension, that when you do look, it is a strange place. You have a quote here, and if you allow me to read your words back to you, you say here,

The curved moon, a real place made of the real, rock and fact and light and shadow, the steep sides and the shallow dips and the cracks that dance across the crust, so dark and alone and so bright in the dark sky that my contact with the deep past, with my own, dissolves redemption into kinship with its lovely certainty of death. I experienced that. I love that. That's a great line. That emphasis that this is a real place, but we cannot use our experience to understand it. And I think that's the value.

That's why I keep thinking about this, the value of looking at it and kind of what you were saying to the policymakers. There is a value to it. Even if you think you know what it is because you've seen it in the sky, it is not what you maybe intuitively feel like. Yeah, exactly. It's deeply paradoxical in that it is utterly familiar. And of course, you know, it's like, oh, beautiful full moon tonight, you know, we'll notice that. But I think that sort of glancing familiarity and our reliance on abstract language and, frankly, cliches when talking about places, terrestrial or otherwise, those things can put places and lives at risk. There's no indigenous life on the moon. So that's

not a concern here. So I think having the chance and again, crafting your life. So you have occasional moments, occasional chances in this case to look at the moon and maybe to get to know its history a little bit will recalibrate your relationship with it. It's like any other thing. Aldo Leopold, who's a famous conservationist, wrote a book called The Sand County Almanac, which still remains a really important book. He talks about how we reach certain ethical values and certain linguistic capabilities initially just by finding something pretty. Like we look at it, it's like, oh, that's pretty. Well, if we move beyond that, it's foundational and it's necessary, but not sufficient to establish a relationship with what David Abrams has called the more than human world. Well, the moon is part of the more than human world and time has been on the moon longer than we've been around.

So we can look at it and find the strangeness of that landscape. And just to give you an example, one of my favorite objects to landscape features to look at on the moon is Phallus Rata, which is this on the eastern limb of the moon, you could kind of see it, you know, curving across this, you know, this gouge that's curving across the landscape. Well, it's essentially equivalent to the Grand Canyon, but it took seconds, not millennia to form. And so having both that chance to look and the ability to just slow down to the extent you can and perceive something through, again, we're talking mostly through a telescope or, you know, astronomy club telescope or library telescope or your own,

and having just a little bit of information about it, I think really does recalibrate your relationship to the moon. I mean, it's a profoundly interesting world. It's so funny to me. You mentioned, of course, Carl Sagan, and he's so important and so crucial to a lot of us who care about planetary science and exploration, but he's the one who said the moon was boring, right? He was wrong. He was just flat out wrong. And even at the time when the science seemed to suggest that there really wasn't that much to get from the moon, and that's changed radically. Get, I mean, in terms of knowledge, not just, you know, material commodities or what have you. It's endlessly dramatic looking at the change of light and shadow on the moon.

And I'll never get tired of it. Gosh, I want to ask four different things there because of that. Let me say, you talk about this idea, you kind of hinted at this idea of the evolution of romanticism as a cultural movement being able to unlock nature as something finding beauty in nature whereas before prior to that like a mountain range would just be intimidating or irritating or problematic grotesque like you know like a reminder of of satanic you know evil actually right and then we have so we're talking like early you know middle ages to the early 18th century i guess right and then of course i i thought a lot about when you talked about chesley bonestell's painting, the tradition of American sublime landscape,

romantic painting. And, you know, he was born and basically kind of on the tail end of that. And I wonder if he kind of brought that maybe intuitively into his representation of lunar scapes, which you point out are scientifically wrong, but evocative in a way that was probably helpful to the selling of the moon as a destination.

But even going back, you know, to my original point of Sagan's critique, which is, you'll get a heresy in this show for the first person to critique Sagan. No, but the idea that it takes a certain kind of romantic sublime is almost key to unlocking beauty in a desolate, seemingly desolate and hostile environment. And the idea that you almost have to quiet parts of your mind in order to see through that initial reaction to the beauty. And you use the desert in Tucson as an example of that in your personal experience. But I wonder how much of that is the moon being scientifically almost too accessible,

but also maybe visually too accessible that people would just instinctively look past it and assume there wasn't something more there to be seen. I think you're onto something there. And I think that we're essentially talking about an individual's relationship with the environment, right? And the moon is part of our nightly environment when the skies are clear and it's up and so forth. So it might also have to do, you know, in Tucson, I'll talk a little bit about that, because this is a book about place and it's about in part a struggle I have with finding a sense of home in the Sonoran desert and the Southwest versus the time I've had

here and I'm back now in Northern Utah. And my thinking about the moon is inflected through that. I'll definitely want to come back to what you're asking, but it makes me think of these dichotomies of language in which we still hear people talking about colonies on the moon. We don't say a home on the moon or we call it a frontier. What would happen if we called it a heartland? OK, so I'm jumping ahead a little bit. bit. But those kinds of questions, we can answer them better, I think, if we have the ability to sort of step back from our ordinary and daily relationship, whether it's enriching or alienating with the environment that you're in right now. And I think part of the difficulty with experiencing the sublime with casual views of the moon is that you're very much grounded here on earth.

The paradox for me is that that doubling sense actually made it possible for me to feel a sense of wonder and a sense of sublime more because I was thinking about how I felt about, you know, like literally palm trees in Tucson, which still, they still bother me, you know, but, but they're there and they belong there. So there's a, certainly a deep element of subjectivity here. Like some, you know, where I, I feel more at home in this place. You feel more at home in that place. What I'm at home in that place. What I'm saying is that the investigation that I've had with the moon of that question gives me maybe a little bit more of an ability to sort of step back and see why I'm reacting the way I am to a particular place, whether it's the Sonoran Desert or the moon. The last thing I would say about this is one of the things that I found so fascinating. You talked about Chesley Bonestell, and of course his work is so iconic.

He knew that he was painting an inaccurate moon, and a lot of people knew that they were painting or illustrating inaccurate moons. The selenographers, the 19th century astronomers who were mapping the moon. It's amazing. It's some really amazing stories in the book about, you know, these guys are literally going blind mapping the moon, the telescope being, you know, the 19th century version of the Apollo spacecraft as it were. And they know that the moon's mountains are rounded. They're not sharp peaked the way the Tetons or the Himalayas are,

but it just felt like that sense of the romantic sublime, they should be sharp peaked the way the Tetons or the Himalayas are. But it just felt like that sense of the romantic sublime. They should be sharp peaked. It's the moon as it ought to be, I think one of Chesley Bonestell's defenders says. But that's not how it is. So how can we step back a little bit from those preconceptions like, you know, Nevada is a great place to dump razor blades, as a general once said, or let's put lawn, Kentucky bluegrass on, you know, the deserts in Las Vegas, right? That kind of imposition of one place onto another place is something that we, I think, are going to have to think hard about now because of the Artemis program and going back to the moon.

We're almost accelerating a trend that the U.S. went to with its Western expansion that took 100 years. We're jumping forward a little bit, but I just love the section on Chesley Bonestell and the other artistic depictions of the moon of the early 20th century. moon of the early 20th century here in seattle in the seattle art museum there are a number of these again kind of momentous epic landscape paintings of the late and mid 19th century a really famous one i had reminded me of was albert bierstadt's puget sound on the pacific coast which is yeah a fantastical landscape that does not exist. And it wasn't, I'm sure they probably knew it wasn't real, but it was the Pacific Northwest as it should be, right? Right.

And to kind of cop the same language. And it was used in a sense to inflame the passions of Americans on the Eastern seaboard and elsewhere to kind of inspire this now, you know, obviously outdated ownership and taking of this land. And that's what I just see. So, and I think that we forget how close in time the early 20th century was to that period of the frontierism just being extended to the moon once it, you know, that kind of concept. So it was seemingly closed off in the late 19th century. And ultimately, as you point out,

there were some pretty negative consequences, particularly for the indigenous people who lived here to begin with, but it was as a propaganda and as a motivational piece of art, it seemed to be effective in pushing that narrative, which I think Chessie Bonestell's was as well. But now, with Artemis, we do have to actually face now the next coming decade exactly what this place is. And I liked how you point out that using the words colonized versus making a home are very different implications. They're very different implications. And I just want to jump in and say, Casey, too, I think that the 19th century landscape tradition in concert with

exploratory surveys of the West and the politics and, you know, racism of that moment, it's a very complicated story. We could also say like a lot of the artwork that was produced in that time helped create national parks. And the movement for national parks. And that led to that as well. Yeah. Displacing, displacing of indigenous cultures, but hey, the counter argument here is the moon. Well, there,

there's no indigenous culture, so it's fine. Like we could just go do our thing. Right. But you're hinting, you know, you're pointing out Leo. I think one of the arguments of the book is, well, sure. You know, if we want to, we want to strip mine Mari embryum, so that's visible from the face of the earth, we could do that. But do we want to do that? Because the moon is not just a real place, which I think has some worth, intrinsic worth, but it also places this outsized role in human culture. Like the moon, we can, you know, do the lawyerly thing. Well, there's a difference between saying it doesn't belong

to anyone and, you know, or that we own it all. But essentially, I think we understand what we're saying when we say that, which is the moon has been in relation with our species for a very long time. And we need to respect that. And I say that as somebody who wants to go back, right? I want to go back. I want humans living on the moon. I had in my notes, again, that this romantic painting did help establish the concept of preservation. And then maybe that's where, with this type of observation, I think that you're talking about here is maybe one of the potential better outcomes or that you would like to see that this idea that this is a, it's sacred to a lot of people,

but there's also kind of a secular sacredness to it in terms of, in a sense, I think connecting it to this wilderness aspect that it's our closest celestial wilderness. And again, just to kind of extend this metaphor to the western romantic painting which we've probably i've probably belabored too long at this point but i found it very fascinating to kind of see those connections come up because it sets up a whole series of expectations a couple

things that occur to me here one would be you know if if i again i i want humans to return to the moon. I want us to have a just, vibrant life there and anywhere else on Earth. And I think we can solve a number of things at once. So I don't believe that this is setting one thing against another in a certain sense. But I don't want to look through my telescope and see a billboard for Arby's on Calabria's crater. Now, that's an exaggeration. But one of the things I just we were talking before the interview, I had a piece in Space News about the issue of putting human remains on the moon. And one of the arguments, I think it's disrespectful. I think it's bad policy. And one of the reasons I think it's bad policy is there is a slippery

slope. And one of the examples I came up with this, you know, well, what would stop somebody from projecting advertising on the side of the, you know, the dissent module of Apollo 11? There's nothing. I mean, you could just you could do that. I think that that is tacky at best. Right. And disrespectful. But that relationship or that sense that I'm sort of drawing on here is coming from spending a few years of looking at the moon and admiring that landscape and feeling it as a sublime place. So there are two kinds of sublime here that we could

talk about. And then there are two reactions to the moon from two Apollo crews that I think all sort of plays in together. One is the idea of the sublime, which has an intellectual history in the West that we don't have to get into, but one of the philosophers who really begins to talk about the sublime in serious fashion is Immanuel Kant. And he basically put, you know, professional philosophers, the three or four who might be listening to me right now, I don't know, will probably cringe a little bit. But simplistically put, you know, Kant's saying, yeah, you have these experiences and they can be overwhelming or nearly overwhelming. You know, and he has these great categories for what the sublime is out in nature. But at the end, you have this rational realization that, you know, conceptually what just happened. And so in the end for

Immanuel Kant, it's about human rational power. It's a kind of mastery. But there's another kind of sublime, which is, I think, really much more accurate, which is that sense of being embedded in something much bigger and having that sense of being overwhelmed, not in mortal danger, but being overwhelmed and having a sense of being overwhelmed, not, you know, not in mortal danger, but being overwhelmed and having a sense of your smallness in the vastness of the more than human world. And it's, you know, paradoxically really enriching for us to have those experiences. And the neuroscience is showing that. So that's one part of this. The other part of it is how we talk about these things. And still as bright, I have, I put some stuff on Apollo 8 you know like

the Apollo 8 crew goes to the moon and the the reactions are largely negative Frank Borman says it's a vast expanse of nothing well I'm sorry it's not okay you spend some time at the telescope it's not the crews that spend time studying the moon as the moon and studying science of it, especially, you know, Apollo 15, which I write about, they are enthusiastic. They think it's majestic, sublime. They think it's beautiful. They compare it to landscapes on earth. Jim Irwin said it looked like an Idaho landscape in winter. And all three of those crew members felt like it was a version of home. And home becomes a real theme in this book because I'm trying to sort of find my sense of home and, you know, sort of second half of my life using my

telescope as a part of that compass. And we're going to either build homes on the moon that are in right relation with human needs and values, or, you know, we'll just, as one of my sources, Alvin Harvey is a Denae aerospace engineering student at MIT says, you know, well, or we're going to tear ass through the moon. And we really shouldn't do that. So those reactions, I think, are really interesting. Apollo 8 coming at it without the scientific backing, you know, the sort of scientific grounding, because it was a different kind of mission, Apollo 15 going there going, well, this is this is an incredible place. And I feel like I'm at home here, because they knew the moon better. We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Greetings, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary

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And with your help, we are supporting new science and technology. You will grow the society to make our collective voice on behalf of space advocacy even stronger across the globe. And we are connecting more people of all ages with the passion, beauty and joy of space exploration. Your gift of any amount today is an investment in the future and will help us usher in the next great era of space exploration. Let's go beyond the horizon. Let's make new discoveries. Let's keep going. Let's change the world. The knowledge as a key, as you kind of imply here, to unlocking the experience of the sublime. It's been very much in my mind over the last few years. And you have an extended discussion of this.

And again, another theme through your book. And I'm glad you highlighted kind of the definition of it. Because it is a strange contrast of, in a sense, it's a version of a temporary ego death against the intensity of nature right and i think classically it has associated with feelings i think of religious exaltation um for sure and you can kind of see of yourself against your soul against the immensity of the divine and you can see looking at celestial experiences, and this is again, I think what Sagan keyed on as such an important way to communicate the value of space itself, is that that's a secular way to access that feeling. That there is nothing bigger than the cosmos and considering yourself within it is an aspect of that experience is the sublime and and what i like about it is that you you make a distinction it's

not beauty it's more than that and it and it has has strangely an aspect of some level of existential terror is required but probably stating it too strongly there, right? That it's, you need some level of unsettlement to access that. Yeah. To access that state. But it is important. I think it's probably something that our ancient ancestors felt much more often. And this is, I wanted to actually go back to the opening chapters of your

book where you go through some of the historical relationships with the moon. And maybe I'll open it with something that struck me was how strange it is or difficult it is from a modern perspective to place ourselves in the mind of a human 10,000 years ago who did not have modern scientific understanding, didn't have the systems of the world, had nothing to work with, and just yet saw the moon every night and depended on that as, in a sense, a source of time, marking of time. Have you tried to put yourself into that experience? And how successful have you been to try to forget everything that you've been enculturated to and just experience the moon de novo yeah it's uh

not too successful it's hard right i mean it's like how do you and how do you and how do you know that you've succeeded you know right yeah there yeah. There's no control group here. But no, I think, well, let me say this. You know, I do open with that prehistoric sense of timekeeping. And again, that was one of the things that deepened the moon for me. It's like, oh, yeah, this makes perfect sense. And I had not given it any thought at all. I was thinking as I was starting to write the book that, you know, scientific history and so forth, and there'll be some folk tales about the moon and we'll move past those.

Well, that became actually, you know, rich. I'm a secular person. I'm a hard materialist. But thinking about how someone 45,000 years ago was making sense of this light crossing the sky. And if you spend any detailed time looking at the moon, its motions are very complicated. They're not easy to track. So this was a sort of science.

They were tracking the moon and understanding what it was doing in terms of motions across the sky and using those phases to create an intermediate level of time between the day and the season in many parts of the world. That's pretty sophisticated. You know, that's one of those sort of things that sort of deepens my level of appreciation for our relationship with this object. One of the things I would say about the sense of the sublime, when I was teaching and when I would teach the sublime, I love talking about it with my students.

I would say, look, there's a difference between standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and being awed by its immensity. Neuroscientists talk about awe, A-W-E, versus the sublime. We're talking about the same thing. So there's that. And that's accessible if you're ready, in a sense. You have your phone off and, you know, whatever. Sometimes you go to those places and you don't experience it. The other side of it would be, you know, you're standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and it starts to crumble and you start to slip.

Well, now that's not sublime. That's just sheer mortal terror, right? When you have a sublime experience, when you have that sense of being awed or overwhelmed or nearly overwhelmed by a phenomenon in nature, whether it's static, you know, not just like the size of a mountain or a canyon, or for me, also the view of the moon, it is wordless. You pass through a stage of wordlessness. And so you talked about ego death, and that does happen. So I don't know if that puts me in touch with a kind of long, pre-historical narrative of silence, of being awed by the larger world. But I'd like to think that probably that does. And that's part of why we still have the sublime. We think we're

hardwired to have those moments. And again, because of the way most of us live, at least in the first world, in the developed world, we have fewer and fewer opportunities for that, which is why, you know, looking at the moon, there it is. You can see it from anywhere. And maybe that gives you a chance to sort of open that space up. Right. Well, and that's kind of what I was getting at with the idea of a prehistoric human staring at the sky, that without a system, I mean, they had metaphor, they had beliefs, but they didn't have a system for the reliable modeling of the natural world in a predictable way. And the sublime, in a sense, would be, you know, they were constantly beset by seemingly impossibly powerful things around them. Right.

And tracking them was a way of kind of asserting at least respect, if not some level of perceived control, but at least awareness. But that's a far... Predictive power. Predictive power. But that's a far... Being able to predict as, I mean, and that's continued for thousands of years after that. Predicting the motions of the moon is a far cry from understanding what it was. understanding what it was. And again, I just had these moments reading your early chapters of the book of just, it is so hard to place oneself in that mindset of seeing the moon, but having no

idea what it was. And it was just this thing that was completely distinct. It seemed to have some kind of pairing with the sun, but the sun, obviously, completely different in kind. And that the moon would change and shift and had all of these strange patterns. Appear and disappear over time, grow, and then become desiccated in a way, and then just go away. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Share some of the stories that you kind of found associated with the moon in this time, because I think that's really fascinating how human cultures tried to integrate that into their using. I think, again, we're always limited in a sense by our

experience. And so how did how did human cultures try to integrate what they saw without a model? Well, you know, Freud would be happy in that that we could just say you know it's all about love and death you know that seems to be our two major and yeah instinctive issues to be our things that we most are interested in yeah those those early you know mythological stories and folk tales and religious you know cross-cultural you know, all around the globe, the moon has mattered. And the stories tend to be largely about stories. And I mean that not in a disrespectful way, like these are narratives that are still powerful for a lot of people and for a lot of cultures. Then those stories, those narratives were, you know, a kind of proto-science right

away of trying to explain, as you're saying. And, well, one of them is the descent of Inanna. This is a Sumerian poem. It's about 5,000 years old. It's, you know, sort of on the order of the epic of Gilgamesh. And she is a goddess who, you know, rises in the night. And then after she descends and, you know, the light wanes and she disappears, she's a piece of rotting meat on a hook, but then she's resurrected, right? And so birth, death, resurrection, there it is. And the other aspect of it is sort of explaining these changes in the light of the moon because of love achieved or love spurned, all kinds of stories about the moon is either male or female, actually, you know, sort of depending on time and

place. But a lot of them have to do with, you know, the creation of some sort of love affair, you know, it's like the affair between the sun and the moon, say. So there are a lot of mythology, a lot of folktales. And speaking of that pre-scientific mindset, I mean, I decided to... This is my wife's favorite story in the book, although the experience of it she thought was pretty gross. When I took a recipe from an occult book of magic, 1500s, a 16th century occult book of magic, 1500s, 16th century occult book of magic that involved blood and a cow eye and a dead frog and trying to make a wish under a moon. And it was sort of my sort of, you know, half-hearted attempt to immerse myself in that mindset.

And, you know, it was just kind of gross, you gross, but it was also a small homage that I can make to, okay, here's this ritual that certainly people would have enacted in their time. This is in Europe in the 1500s and possibly later. And I don't believe in it, right? That's not who I am or my belief set. But also, a lot of people did. And they had a different kind of relationship to the moon. And even today, I think understanding that history, the mythological history, the folkloric history, the occult history, and the religious history, which continues today, right? As we've said, the moon continues to be an object of importance in religions and other cultures and a divine presence. That still matters, even if you and I might say primarily it's a scientific

relationship that has also this emotional value that I think that the science that I talk about in this book, especially, you know, starting from Galileo, Galileo makes, he looks at the moon through a telescope. Anytime we look through a telescope, we are in the lineage of Galileo and we are seeing the moon as a world. It's a real place, right? And as such, then we can bring a scientific mind to that. That mind is not barren. Like that's lyrical, that's rich. And I think it is also enriched by these adjacent stories that the moon is a real place, but it's also an archive of culture. Why do you think it took so long for humans to accurately

represent the moon as it exists in reality? You'd say in your book, the first painting that we can really point to that even closely tries to represent the moon as we see it would have been in the 1400s. The Jane Van Eck, which I actually went and looked that up and have had a picture of that in my notes for this. And I remember I had actually seen this in the Met. It's a very striking painting. And I did not realize that was the first time we saw it. It's the crucifixion, but there's a realistic looking, not quite accurate, but realistic looking moon in the background. So, why, I mean, if the moon was so important and meant so much and was so critical to just the vision of the night sky. Why did it take so long to, if not, you would think you would honor it by representing it as we saw it? Yeah, that's a very good question.

And I don't have an easy answer for that. And I don't think the art historians or historians of astronomy have an easy answer for that. I think it's probably bound up with taboos and with sort of conflicting views of the moon within the church. And our focus here to say, I'm not trying to sidestep, I don't really have an easy answer for that question. But the other thing to say about this is that the relationship to the moon in this representational way does go back a long time, right? There's rock art, there are petroglyphs, Aztec codex, you know, cultures seeing different shapes, animals and so forth on the face of the moon. face of the moon. So I don't really know why it took so long. But I do know that when Galileo looks at the moon in 1609, and he publishes the Starry Messenger in 1610, which is still a really beautiful piece of writing, he both changes the moon because we're seeing it as a real place. But then he, in a sense, reignites this debate about its reality. And so there's this counter push that other painters will then start painting the moon in a non-realistic way again, because they don't want to accept what Galileo is offering as evidence from the telescope.

It's almost by putting it under the telescope, he brought it into the domain of scientific inquiry. Totally. Yeah. Like in a literal and it's literal and metaphorical. Yeah. A figurative sense. Yeah. It's one of, I mean, it is one of the origins of modern science, you know, using, he uses an instrument for the first time that extends our senses and he brings different things literally in focus that we would not have seen had we not used this instrument to extend our senses. So, the telescope is right at the beginning of science, right? And his contributions are, they're enormous. And so, yeah, talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, and one of my fixations recently has been the dualism inherent within the Aristotelian cosmology, that we have this corrupted, ever-changing Earth that we experience, but then the cosmos is something fundamentally different.

It is perfect. And then there are these kind of intervening or intermediary celestial spheres or what have you, of one of which is the moon, which is closer to Earth because it does change, but it's still not the Earth. It is inherently different. part of this, some DNA or some core essence of that idea was so firmly rooted in human culture for so long. And not that it was created by Aristotle, but that it named an intuitive feeling that people had of the sky being literally not the earth in the most direct way and so why would you map something that's what you do on the earth it's only relevant to what you do on the earth and even what you were saying with galileo why like making the moon a world is a threat to this idea then oh it's all the same it's all the same domain ultimately and so so I wanted, that was an idea that kind of rose up in this idea that we see this

expressing itself over and over again in terms of human history and relationship with the cosmos. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that inherent in that might be one of the explanations why it took so long to have in Western art, this, this realistic or mostly realistic representation of the moon

and you know so that right because we would see the shapes of the moon represented right like it was the moon existed as its silhouette in a sense sort of stylized yeah a silhouette or a stylized shape useful was its shape as a way to measure things but but it itself was so, in a sense, profoundly alien, it was irrelevant to study. Yeah. Moving forward after Galileo, I really, this is actually one of my favorite parts of your book was the story of mapping the moon before we kind of still knew what it was, like through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and various levels of success in doing so by various individuals. And one of the ones I was quite tickled by was the British astronomer who asserted basically Britain's

ownership or he kind of named all these things after British features on the moon. He named all these features after, you know, british names and as almost you kind of sense as like an instinctive british colonialism attitude being immediately applied like oh we'll name it like britannia or you know victorium critter or something and yeah again it made me think of this connection back to this older idea of this almost biblical level of power of naming things. Like once you opened up the moon to, as a place, it's almost like as in the opening, you know, early parts of Genesis where you have Adam and Eve going around, they're naming the things that they see in the Garden of Eden as a way to demonstrate their dominion over them. And you saw a version

of this happening with the moon once it became open to the natural world, an early race to name the features on it as a way to assert some sort of control. Yeah, ego. Yeah. Ego, national politics, human dominion. No, absolutely. And, you know, I just circle back here to for a second. I just want to say, too, that there certainly were attempts in the sort of pre-Christian tradition, too, and into the Christian era of sort of philosophers trying to figure out, like, well, what is the moon? Like, is it just it's a perfect sphere?

It's a kind of alabaster light or what have you. So there are these attempts. But you're absolutely right that once the telescope reveals the moon as a place, as a world with landscape, with topography, then it has features. Well, we need to know what those features are. So, yeah, they're all these competing astronomers with different political agendas and, you know, all fairly egotistical, wanting their naming system to be the one that fits. Longrenus, you know, threatens a fine for anybody, you know, who tries to usurp his naming rights to the moon. Sounds familiar, like corporate naming rights. And this continues until finally, you know, this settles down and we have the names that we have today. But it's also, yeah, it's simultaneously mapping the moon and its features, naming them and trying to understand what they are. So there's a story here about what created the creators, like the most prominent sort of feature

of the moon when you look at the moon. And you see even those giant impact basins, when you look at the moon with the naked eye, you see those sort of what Galileo called the ancient dark spots, the maria that look a little bluish in the sky here from Earth. And those are giant impact basins. So, huge asteroids caused those. Well, this was also an argument of science and subjectivity. So the inability to imagine a cosmos with so many flying rocks that would create so many impacts, it was inconceivable. So the paradigm was volcanoes caused this. Now, again, this may seem a little obtuse or sort of off, sort of off to an adjacent sort of interesting but, you know, narrow byway of the history of science. But it comes back to that question of, you know, how capable are we of stepping outside of any possible point of view that we've inherited a kind of discourse to use a critical theory term like we inherit a certain kind of discourse.

That's our paradigm box. Can we step out of it? Science helps us step out of it. Science is predicated on our stepping out of it. Like I will, you know, make a proposition here and it's falsifiable or verifiable. And that may be inside the box or outside the box. And I think that's sublime, like that's a sublime activity. So all of these things seem of a piece to me. I had somebody ask me, well, how can you write about science lyrically? And I'm like, science is lyrical. Like the act of science is lyrical, even if the practice and the diction of science isn't. as such a crucial activity as a generative process for pushing our ideas and hypotheses beyond what we think is possible given the data that we have to integrate into our understanding of the world that was a really great example to me of this this push away from gradualism in geology to catastrophism or or punctuated catastrophism maybe is a right a term for it but right you had to integrate like looking

at the moon they were trying just like no things have to be slow and gradual because we're trying to get away from you know creation in seven days type of stuff and exactly the the data forced that to be wrong. And you didn't you got that by going to the moon and taking the rocks back with you. And then you have undeniable data from it. And without that external process to and as I always say, to stress test your hypotheses that you develop on Earth, which is our otherwise kind of one data point planet, you don't know how accurate those are because you have one data point to test your validity of the world. And so you push these to various extremes. And it's like, do we really understand how things work? And we do that by going to places that push our boundaries of the possible. And we find where we have these blind spots or blind alleys or inability to see past ourselves. So, again, this aspect,

in a sense, of the sublime, where we push ourselves through, in a sense, this keyhole of logical engagement with the world into some other state of being, however briefly, by this ironic ego death, right? That it's like the immensity and the extremity of the cosmos helps push our brains and our understanding of the world into these new directions by the very interrogation and effort to pursue it. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing, the couple of things I would just say quickly in response to that one is the idea. And of course, it's, you know, hindsight is 20-20, right?

So I try not to make fun of the people who are saying it was all volcanoes that caused craters on the moon. Oh, yeah. I would have sacrificed so many people during a solar eclipse back in, you know, if I had no idea what was going on. It was so scary. Yeah. All right. I'm cutting my arm off to get the sun back. Absolutely. So we have to, you know, let's, you know, it's like, we'd be mindful of that, but,

but when you look at that history, it's, it's really clear. And there were, and there were contemporaries who were beginning to argue this too. Like you're, you're taking the data point from earth, you're applying it to the moon. It's like volcanoes on the earth do not look like craters on the moon. So we come back to this idea of being maybe a little too ready to overgird on this other world, the closest world that we have are various terrestrial assumptions. That's a history of science point, but that also becomes, I think, also like a policy point. So if, if we're going to overgird certain assumptions, well, there's no indigenous life on the moon or is it air growth? You know,

we can do whatever we want to it. That, that to me seems like not the right lesson. Or even that markets would work on the moon the way that they would work here or a settlement of people living on the moon would have the same dynamics and access to the way it would work here in our various things. I think that's an interesting parallel there that you've found. I don't know if it's unfashionable these days because I'm out of touch, but to talk about Karl of Knausgaard, because I know that was like

10 years ago now, but I'm reading through his series of books, My Struggle, and I'm on the last one. And he talks a lot about this idea of, I wanted to talk about lyricism in science and how you wrote about things. And the theme, again, we've kind of, you've been running through and we've talked about a little bit is how do we use words to express the inexpressible? And it was just an interesting, in his book, as I was reading that, and I was reading yours, there were these overlapping discussions of it. And I just wanted to, a lot of what we were just talking about, he was writing here, what we see is never detached from the person we are. The mind has its limitations. They are personal, but cultural, too. And that there is always something we cannot

see and places we cannot go. If we are patient and investigate the words and their context carefully enough, we may nonetheless identify these limitations and what is revealed to us then is that which lies outside ourselves. And so, he's talking about poetry in particular there, which I thought might resonate with you. And then he goes on to say like, this is what learning is, seeing that which lies outside the confines of the self. And I just, that thought about how to access these various aspects of being using words as a tool and using something, again, looking at the moon as in a words as a tool and using something again the looking at the moon as in sense as a tool to allow yourself to shift into these different modes these are the transitory these are the steps to be at that place but because they're fundamentally inexpressible you can't

talk about them but these are the ways that they lead you to that we try well yeah and it's yeah they they open that pathway to you and so that seemed to be this also this theme within the book yourself and how you the the meta aspect of the book is how you wrote it to be lyrical and your background in in poetry and unlocking these aspects of experience that aren't literal. Yeah, yeah. No, that's what a beautiful quote, too. I'm humbled by the comparison or the juxtaposition here. One of the ironies here, you know, we've talked about the sublime and that sense of wonder and how it is typically often like it's a wordless experience in the moment. And then there's this subsequent stage of kind of recovery.

And it's like, I had the most amazing thing happen to me. Right. And you try it and language always fails in that way. And yet we, especially we, those of us who are writers, try to do that. And the toolkit is rhythm and sound and metaphor. I was very deliberate in the book thinking about metaphor because the common understanding of metaphor is that it's a comparison, but it's not. It's like a multiple exposure. You're asserting this thing over another thing in a weird way.

It's a kind of assertion of mastery, which I hadn't really thought about until just now. But J.G. Ballard is one of my favorite writers, and he's a master of metaphor in this sort of assertive and often surprising way. So I was trying. The struggle was to, you know, in the book, there are photographs in the book, but you know, how do you describe the lunar surface to someone who's not seen it? Can I, can I just say one of my favorite quotes? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Please read your book. If brutalist architecture had curves,

it would look like the Southern Highlands. I just wanted to, I just wanted to, I wanted to like jump in the air as I read. I thought that was so great. I just love that line so much. The Southern Highlands of the moon are incredibly rugged, right? So, there you go. So, incredibly rugged, a bit of a cliche, a bit of an abstraction, right? Versus the metaphor. So, hopefully the metaphor is memorable. Well, and it sticks with you and it's evocative, right? And so, you kind of hinted at this a little bit in terms of policymakers and people who are going to go and people who study it, but why do you think it's so important to think about how you talk about and write about this?

Because I'd say not to, and I'm not going to gonna there's no one specific i'm thinking of in mind but there is a style of science writing that i think has become very dominant in the last 10 50 20 years that i would call whiz bang science right of yeah sure and there's a role for that and i think it's there's and i think it can be very effective but i've i've seen it maybe become too dominant of like wow golly look at this look at this. And that's neat. But that's why I think one of the reasons I found your book so refreshing is that it had a style of lyricism to it that was able to bring out a deeper level of connection and humanity to the subject. Yeah, I appreciate that. And there's room for all kinds of discourse and diction, right, in this endeavor.

But in particular, going back to the moon, I think social media posts and photographs will dominate that. For an article I'm working on, it might be out by the time this airs, on art and Artemis and how we describe the moon. I spoke both with Jeremy Hansen and Victor Glover from the Artemis II missions. We described the moon. I spoke both with Jeremy Hansen and Victor Glover from the Artemis II missions. And that crew is so authentic and media friendly and savvy. And they're great storytellers. They're going to have 12 different public relations, you know, communications events during that mission. So they're going to have a lot of opportunity to do that.

My contention is that abstraction and enthusiasm only goes so far. And that metaphor and fresh diction takes us to different places. So here's my example. I could tell you it's raining cats and dogs at a subway stop. Okay, that's informational. It gives you a cliché, but it tells you what's happening. So here's a two-line poem from Ezra Pound called In a Station of the Metro. So the metro's, you know, in Paris, a subway stop. He says, the apparition of these faces in the crowd, petals on a wet black bough. That's poetry, that's metaphor, that's descriptive, and it has connotations, it's rich, and it will last in ways that cliches and, you know, abstractions will not.

Why did you choose then, kind of this year, it's a piece of poetry from Byron as the title of your book. Explain maybe, is there a story behind that or is it just something that caught your eye and heart? You know, no. So the story behind it, you'll appreciate this and the listeners here, I'm sure almost all, if not all of our science fiction fans. So famous Ray Bradbury short story that also references that poem, And the Moon Be Still as Bright, which is about sort of the colonization of sense of identity with the Martians that have been devastated by the human presence. So I was rereading that story and I said, God, that's such a beautiful poem. Is that the one where they cross in the night, the two beings? No, this is where I think it's the third expedition lands on Mars. it's the third expedition lands on Mars and one of the members, Spender, he's the archaeologist and the other crew members are whooping it up and making a lot of noise and getting drunk. And he finds it offensive and disrespectful. I guess I'm the Spender of the moon. And I hope

I'm not because then he goes on a killing spree. Like he tries to kill the crew to keep humans from, from sullying the ruins, the ruins of Mars. But that poem is, is the origin of, of the Bradbury short story title. And he quotes that poem. And so I went back to it and, you know, the, the, the book is, you know, as I said, it's a search for place. It's a search for equanimity and, you know, just coming back to this idea that, you know, the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright. Like those two things coexist and they coexist in me. Like my sense of self is now bound up with this, this other world that, that I value and respect and hope that others will as well. Chris Kokinos, I really appreciate you spending time with us today. I, again, I love your book called Still as Bright, an illuminuminating History of the Moon from

Antiquity to Tomorrow. I recommend it heartily, and hopefully we will speak again soon. A pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chris. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, and thank you for enduring me geeking out on book stuff and literature. It's a part of my brain that doesn't get to be exercised on this show often. I hope you pick up the book and maybe some of the other authors we discussed, particularly Lauren Isley, I think underappreciated in these days, incredible writer of the mid 20th century and some of his melancholy writings about progress and science and space are really fascinating and moving.

As always, you can find more episodes of this show, the Space Policy Edition, as well as our weekly show, Planetary Radio, at planetary.org slash radio, and pretty much any major podcast distribution app. If you like this show, well, please subscribe to it. If you don't, share it with your friends and review it. Drop us a positive review if you like the show. That really helps us be found by other people and grow our audience. The Space Policy Edition, what you're listening to is a production of the Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California.

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