JF Ptak Science Books Post 1932
"That those spots and brighter parts which by our sight might be distinguished in the Moon, do show the difference between the Sea and Land of that other World... The spots represent the Sea, and the brighter parts Land... That there are high mountains, deep valleys, and spacious plains in the body of the Moon... That there is an atmosphere, or an orb of gross vaporous air, immediately encompassing the body of the Moon... That it is probable there may be inhabitants in this other World, but of what kind they are is uncertain..."--Discovery of a New World in the Moone (1638). by astronomer John Wilkins
Reading about the rover Curiosity taking bites of the Martian surface to analyze brought to mind an early and elegant piece of reasoning which put to rest the claims of life on the Moon. Belief in Lunar life is ancient, stretching back (for example) to Pythagoras, Plutarch and Lucian (who wrote perhaps the earliest piece on flying off to another non-celestial sphere). In more recent times bigger scientific names get thrown into that selenite melting pot: Carl Friedrich Gauss was a believer int eh possibilities of life there, as were the astronomers Helevius, Bode and (later on) Olbers, Littrow and Gruithausen. (Franz von Paula Gruithuisen [1774-1852] published his findings of urban structures in the very rough terrain above the Schroeter crater; his Wallwerk was quickly discredited though by astronomers with more powerful telescopes.)
[The seat of the problem for Gruithuisen--the complex structures at left thought by high in observation a low-powered refracting telescope to be streets and buildings. Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, University of Arizona's HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment).]
In addition to the improvements in telescope resolving power--which provided better/more accurate maps of the lunar surface, particularly in the 1830's by Beer/Maedler and Lohmann--there was a major piece of thinking by Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846). Bessel was a superb observationalist and contributed vastly to the field with his work on stellar distance and identification, publishing his Fundamenta Astronomiae in 1818 and consequently constructing a star catalog of 63,000 objects. In 1834 he established that given the very sharp occulations that the Moon's diameter was found to be not very much smaller at all in relation to its measure by direct observation, meaning that the starlight was not deviated by atmospheric reaction, because the atmosphere of the Moon such as it was was 1/2000th of the density of that on Earth. Therefore: no perceptible atmosphere, no respiration, no life as it was understood to be "living".
Very pretty.
It is odd that given that work and the very barren maps being produced in the 1830's and the higher-powered telescopes that showed masses of scarred surface that there was a flurry of pro-Lunar-life stuff to hit the popular newsstands just a few years later. A famous (and first?) case of this was with Edgar A. Poe's "The Unparalled Adventures of One Hans Pfall" which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in June 1835 and which detailed the story of a debt-ridden Pfall who takes off to the Moon in a hot air balloon for it more debt-free climate, and who then sends back a Selenite messenger on another balloon, and, well, nothing really happens. A much ore effective hoax was perpetrated in the New York Daily Sun for six days in August 1835 in a story attributed to the great astronomer William Herschel about find vast and complicated life on the Moon. (In real life Herschel was a believer but I think never published on it.)
It is odd that such a fair amount of activity--something which was also the modern beginnings of ET-based storytelling of fear and hope--would begin a year after Besell's thinking. And in a reutn-to-home0again, the crater nearby the Wallwerk of Gruithuisen (who also claimed that the whitish polar icecaps of Venus were caused by fire ceremonies by practicing Venetians), named Schroeter, was done so in the honor of the astronomer Johann Schroeter (1745-1816), for whom Besell worked as an assistant. (Surveyor 2 landed about 100km from the Schroeter crater, as well.)
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