MARS COLONY AND A TOWN NAMED FORTITUDE: 2/4: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet Hardcover – May 18, 2023 by Matthew Shindell (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Mars-Human-History-Planet/dp/0226821897/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. Due to its vivid color and visibility, its geologic kinship with Earth, and its potential as our best hope for settlement, Mars embodies everything that inspires us about space and exploration. For the Love of Mars surveys the red planet’s place in the human imagination, beginning with ancient astrologers and skywatchers and ending in our present moment of exploration and virtual engagement.
National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell describes how historical figures across eras and around the world have made sense of this mysterious planet. We meet Mayan astrologer priests who incorporated Mars into seasonal calendars and religious ceremonies; Babylonian astrologers who discerned bad omens; figures of the Scientific Revolution who struggled to comprehend it as a world; Victorian astronomers who sought signs of intelligent life; and twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientists who have established a technological presence on its surface. Along the way, we encounter writers and artists from each of these periods who take readers and viewers along on imagined journeys to Mars.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with Matthew Schendel. His new book is For the Love of Mars, a human history of the red planet. |
| 0:06.0 | The medieval world inherits the understanding of the ancients and then astrology, but I go to one note of clarity in Baghdad and Damascus |
| 0:18.3 | Matt informs us between the 10th and the 16th century, which is the dark ages in the West, an age of |
| 0:25.8 | futile superstition. They're very careful observations of the planets and the stars. |
| 0:33.0 | And that this sure looks like science. |
| 0:35.9 | Is that agreed upon that what was going on in Baghdad and Damascus was scientific observation? |
| 0:41.1 | Yeah, you know, we used to pretty much solely talk about a renaissance happening in Europe later. |
| 0:50.0 | Now it's pretty common for historians of science to talk about an earlier |
| 0:54.0 | renaissance that happens in the Islamic world where all of this ancient knowledge |
| 0:58.9 | in addition to knowledge that is being brought from different corners of the Islamic Empire. |
| 1:06.8 | You know, there are libraries built, there's a large translation movement, and then there |
| 1:11.9 | is original astronomical work being done as well. |
| 1:15.9 | So there's definitely a lot of what we would recognize today as science and knowledge production |
| 1:21.8 | happening in the Islamic world prior to that European renaissance |
| 1:27.0 | that in many ways is seated by the work that's being done in the Islamic world earlier and it's a lot of these texts |
| 1:35.2 | that are produced in the Islamic world not only the ancient texts that are being |
| 1:39.9 | translated but commentaries on those texts and extrapolations of those texts into, you know, more sort of contemporary to their time knowledge that ends up feeding that great renaissance in the West that you know if you if you think |
| 1:58.3 | about what's happening in the West people did use to talk about this period as the dark ages as a period in which, you know, folks had no access to knowledge. |
| 2:10.0 | In fact, what happens is after the Roman Empire collapses in the Western part of the empire what becomes Europe |
| 2:19.2 | They have what one historian has called the light inheritance or the light tradition of |
| 2:26.7 | ancient science. They they receive some but not all. They have fragmentary texts |
| 2:31.2 | whereas in the eastern part of the empire, the Islamic world, they have a lot more access to complete texts and a lot more of the writings that didn't survive in the Western part of the Empire. |
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