Everybody loves the Moon. But we, people in general, don’t know much about it. We know it follows an approximately monthly cycle and it has something to do with the tides. Oh, and 50 years ago for a brief period we sent some guys up there to check it out.

That’s really too bad. The Moon is fascinating. The unusual nature of the Earth/Moon relationship could very possibly be a major reason life developed on Earth. Or, put another way, without that particular relationship, it’s quite possible that life would not have developed here.

The Radiolab podcast The Moon Itself explores that relationship, and much more. Listening to it got me interested me enough to buy and read Rebecca Boyle’s excellent Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. It’s well researched and well presented, giving us a look at the science and the mysticism of the Moon.

Highly recommended.

By the way, it’s odd that of all the objects in the sky, we attach the definite article (“The”) to only three of them. The Sun, the Moon, the Earth. But we don’t say, “the Jupiter” or “the Titan,” “the Betelgeuse.” Even more curious is that, as far as I can tell, we use the Moon’s name to reference satellites of other planets. As in “Titan is Saturn’s largest moon.” Kind of like “She’s my girl Friday” refers to Robinson Crusoe’s servant and friend.

I also wonder if the “Holy Trinity” that I learned about in Catechism class can be traced back through earlier writings and associated with the celestial trinity of Sun, Earth, Moon. There’s certainly a whole load of mysticism associated with Sun and Moon, and I can easily envision a path for that evolution. Whether it can be documented is another matter entirely.

And another aside. I really like that Radiolab provides a text transcript of their episodes. While I’m driving I’ll hear something that I want to go back to later. It’s a whole lot easier to search the transcript than try to find a particular word or sentence in a 40+ minute audio file. Although I wonder if that will be the case for much longer . . .