Before work this morning, I read part of an article in New Scientist[1] about the history and future of unmanned lunar exploration. The moon was referred to as “another world”, as in (and I paraphrase) “[some robot that landed on the moon] was the first [robot thingy. Lander?] to bring back [stuff] from another world”[2].
I’ve never really thought about this before, but now that it’s on my mind, I’d say that my concept of what this world is, includes the moon.
(It definitely includes tides, too, but probably not werewolves).
My concept of what this world is may be incorrect in an astronomical sense, but it feels right in a cultural and human sense. I mean, a world without a moon? That’s Krikkit just not cricket!
1 from July 2008; I have a slight backlog
2 it was very, very early this morning
GAAH! The second footnote just WILL. NOT. FORMAT. It was done in exactly the same way as the first one, and the whole post was written in one go, but one footnote works and the other one doesn’t.
This happened to me once before on the old system, too. Wasn’t MT4 supposed to fix this?!
(Cue this post getting comments about MT4 and Textile, but not about moons or worlds).
MT+6 weeks will fix that!
“Full story at six”?
“Off-world”, in the BladeRunner sense definitely means off Planet Earth. In my book the moon is another world. Doesn’t stop it from influencing ours.
But we’re getting dangerously close to angels and pins territory here.
Hmm. I wonder if that’s consistent across the sci-fi genre? (HENRY!!! We need you!!!)
In the 17th century, Bp John Wilkins [no relation] wrote The Discovery of a World in the Moone, Or, A Discovrse Tending To Prove That ‘Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World In That Planet (1638). It basically meant that the moon[e] was a world in its own right, with geography (selenography?) and in his book, living beings.
You know it’s early in the morning when the utter surreality of a spammer’s non sequitur makes you giggle appreciatively.
I always think of worlds as planets, but that’s just me.
Cath – hope you don’t mind me sneaking in under the hood. I fixed the reference thing. For some reason, you need to have a line break between the ‘fn.’ lines. I think this is a limitation of the ‘Textile’ markup rather than a problem with MT. You could alternatively use HTML.
And on the subject of the post, I’ve always considered moon and Earth as separate worlds.
HENRY!!! We need you!!!
I’m flattered, naturally, but I don’t think I could handle the responsibility.
Please keep your comment brief. Excessively long or offensively phrased entries will be edited
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So there.
Cath> I’m on the fence [as one would expect]. I could argue “it’s in the same world” since there is that gravitation and that the moon moves around our planet… [although I guess with that argument Mars and other planets may be our world too since we all circle around the Sun and we are in “the Sun’s world” ^^]
or, since we have a totally different atmosphere and oxygen and are separated by a vaaaaast distance, we are in different worlds. (I mean, UK and Canada might be in different worlds too?)
After this sort of childish “on this hand, on that hand” I think I’ll say they are different worlds. (looking at it from the God point though, maybe there is only one world in the whole world…. wait, I need that coffee now 🙂 )
John, yeah, but, but, he thought the moon was a planet!
Jenny, I’m with you – a world is a planet. Not a moon.
BTW that epic spam attack on my blog seems to have moved me to the top of the most active blogs list, for the first time in months. I’m sure things will be put to rights soon though.
M@, thanks for that (and for deleting all the spam that cropped up while I was asleep!) I’ll remember the spacing thing for next time.
Henry, did the responsibility get to you there?
Åsa, I suspect there’s no definitive answer – so far we have, what, 3 votes for “the moon is another world” and 2 for “no it isn’t”. Oh, and multiple votes each for bum, poo, and willy.
I’m actually quite surprised at all the comments on a post I wrote mostly as an excuse to use the Krikkit/not cricket pun I thought of as soon as I tried to think of a world without a moon…