But in the year 1610, and almost literally overnight, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) forever changed mankind's view of the universe. Even then it was not regarded as something altogether physical, but rather a kind of ethereal never-never land.
It was unthinkable to the ancients that those twinkling lights might be actual places that could be traveled to, and only the moon served as a destination in a rare handful of fantasies. (Image credit: © Scriven Bolton Not for reproduction) This image appeared in "The Art of Space" (Zenith Press, 2014). The term "Planet Earth," so familiar to us today, would have been nonsensical.Īrt by Scriven Bolton. Indeed, the word "planet" comes from the Greek word planete, meaning "wanderer." While today we use the word to mean any solid, spherical body circling a star, 500 years ago it meant one of the five bright stars that were not "fixed" in the heavens. The planets were merely a special class of bright stars that wandered among the other "fixed" stars. The stars, while some were brighter than others, were nevertheless thought to be at more or less the same distance from the earth - though just what that distance might be was a matter for debate. It was certainly not thought of as a world in its own right. Second, there needed to be a realistic means of leaving the earth.īefore the seventeenth century, little was known of the moon. Two things were needed to change fantasy into reality.įirst, there needed to be solid, scientific knowledge about the actual conditions that existed beyond the earth's atmosphere and on the moon and other planets. Before the publication of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1869), literary journeys to the moon and planets were almost exclusively limited to allegory, fantasy or satire.
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