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were in the wilderness they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day … And the Lord said unto Moses, the man shall be surely put to death … And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died …”
    There is no mention of the Moon in the Biblical story, but it was easy to add the tale that when the man protested that he did not want to keep “Sunday” on Earth (although to the Israelites, Sabbath fell on the day we call Saturday), the judges said, “Then you shall keep an eternal Monday [Moon-day] in heaven.”
    The man in the Moon was pictured in medieval times as bearing a thornbush, representing the sticks he had gathered; and a lantern, for he was supposed to have been gathering them at night when he hoped no one would see; and, for some reason, a dog. The man in the Moon, with these appurtenances, is part of the play within a play presented by Bottom and the other rustics in William Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.
    Of course, the man in the Moon was visualized as filling hisentire world, since the smudges seemed smeared over the entire face of the Moon, and since the Moon appears to be a small object.
    It was the Greek astronomer Hipparchus (190–120 B.C .) who first managed to work out the size of the Moon relative to the Earth by valid mathematical methods and who got essentially the right answer. The Moon is an object about ¼ the diameter of the Earth. It was no man-in-the-Moon-sized object. It was a world not only in the dark nature of the material making it up, but in its size.
    What’s more, Hipparchus had worked out the distance to the Moon. It is 60 times as far from the surface of the Earth to the Moon as from the surface of the Earth to the center of the Earth.
    In modern terms, the Moon is 381,000 kilometers (237,000 miles) from Earth and has a diameter of 2,470 kilometers (2,160 miles).
    The Greeks already knew that the Moon was the nearest of the heavenly bodies and that the other objects were all much farther away. To be so much farther away and to be visible at all, they must all be worlds in size.
    The notion of the plurality of worlds descended from the rarefied heights of philosophic speculation to the literary level with the first account we know of that reads like modern science fiction stories involving interplanetary travel.
    About A.D . 165, a Greek writer named Lucian of Samosata wrote
A True History
, an account of a trip to the Moon. In that book, the hero is carried to the Moon by a whirlwind. He finds the Moon luminous and shining, and in the distance he can see other luminous worlds. Down below, he sees a world that is clearly his own world, the Earth.
    Lucian’s universe was behind the scientific knowledge of his own time, since he had the Moon glowing and he had the heavenly bodies all close together. Lucian also assumed that air filled all of space and that “up” and “down” were the same everywhere. There was no reason as yet to think that that was not so.
    Every world in Lucian’s universe was inhabited, and he assumed the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence everywhere. The king of the Moon was Endymion and he was at war with the king of the Sun, Phaethon. (These names were taken out of the Greek myths, where Endymion was a youth beloved by the Moon goddess, and Phaethon was the son of the Sun god.) The Moon beings and Sun beings werequite human in appearance, in institutions, and even in their follies, for Endymion and Phaethon were at war with each other, disputing the colonization of Jupiter.
    It was not for nearly 1,300 years, however, that a major writer dealt with the Moon again. This came in 1532 in
Orlando Furioso
, an epic poem written by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). In it, one of the characters travels to the Moon in the divine chariot that carried the prophet Elijah in a whirlwind to Heaven. He finds the Moon well populated by civilized people.
    The notion of