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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