When the Earth Had Two Moons Quotes

“The military spends just as much on space telescopes as NASA does, but theirs are pointing down.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“From infancy we know the Moon, and we have stared at it and been moved by it, and awed by it. Astrologers say that its presence is carved into our personality, our spirit, and our soul. Millions of years of humans have evolved beneath its constant benevolent presence, giving rise over a million-year time scale to a collective human awareness in which the Moon is anchor of poems, stories, mythologies, astrologies and religions. Humans have understood the Moon in scientific and prescientific ways- the geometers, timekeepers, recorders of tides, and predictors of eclipses. Priests and oracles; architects and planners; farmers and hunters and fishermen. In pursuit of a scientific understanding of the Moon, we cannot hastily unravel all of that. Scientific arguments for its origin and evolution are awash in context. Far beyond any geophysical, astronomical or cosmochemical analysis, the Moon has meaning.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“but once you have spent all that money and time, you can become locked into your hypothesis—in for a penny, in for a pound.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“True telepresence is not that far off, where instead of meandering with your fingers over a 3D topo map, you will come along in real time on a virtual field trip as your avatar strolls through a lunar lava tube hundreds of meters high and a kilometer wide, illuminated by thousands of glow-pods, to observe a new settlement under construction ahead of the first astronauts, being printed directly out of lunar soil.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“Instead of darkroom chemistry, or making pencil sketches, we stare at monitors and tweak pixels. There’s a growing separation between you and what you’re studying.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“Academics walk around with one or two big questions in their heads, which is why they lose track of time and bump into branches.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“As you read this book, keep in mind that you have the liberty to move on to a different paragraph or chapter as you please, aided by the illustrations that correspond to text in various chapters. Language is linear, but narrative need not be.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“Geology tells a tale. A 20-kilometer-high ridge wraps all the way around the equator of Saturn’s 1,500-kilometer diameter icy “walnut moon,” Iapetus. Ideas for how it formed are rather crazy, but one of them is true, or none of them are crazy enough. NASA/JPL”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky

“And how about great comets, their colorful tails blazing for nights on end for the world to see? Then, as now, there would be a competition to explain those things—my deity or yours, natural philosophy, magic, bullshit, and modern science. Human culture goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and the first stories told may have been tales of comets more spectacular than any we have ever seen.”
― Erik Asphaug, When the Earth Had Two Moons: Cannibal Planets, Icy Giants, Dirty Comets, Dreadful Orbits, and the Origins of the Night Sky