Premonitions of a Pale Blue Dot

"Since the earliest time, man has imagined this moment," intones a 1969 documentary [archives.gov] on the subject of the then-recent moon landings, "the moment when his fellow man would make the first journey to the Moon. Now the time had come. In the sixth decade of the twentieth century the ancient dream was to become a reality."

Perhaps it is true that our species has dreamed of travel to the moon since its youth - stories of moon travel go back to antiquity.

Lucian of Samosata was a 2nd Century writer whose True History [gutenberg.org*] is considered by some to be the earliest science fiction. Despite it's title, True History is really a work of satire, mocking certain credulous and absurd histories and historians of the ancient world. It is structured as a traveler's narrative after the style of the Odyssey, except that unlike Odysseus, (who only sailed the waves,) the hero of True History travels up to the Moon, and to the Underworld.

Included (at least in the linked edition) is Icaro-Menippus, a similar satire in dialog format. In Icaro-Menippus, the adventurer Menippus overcomes Daedalus' difficulty in wing engineering by avoiding wax entirely, instead cutting looking to nature, as so many engineers do today: In this case, cutting the wings off of a giant eagle and giant vulture. Thus Menippus is able to fly all the way to the Moon, and to the Sun, planets, and stars.

While on the Moon, Menippus looks down at Earth, and says:

Above all, I could not help smiling at those who quarrel about the boundaries of their little territory, and fancy themselves great because they occupy a Sicyonian field, or possess that part of Marathon which borders on Oenoe, or are masters of a thousand acres in Acharnæ; when after all, to me, who looked from above, Greece was but four fingers in breadth, and Attica a very small portion of it indeed.  I could not but think how little these rich men had to be proud of; he who was lord of the most extensive country owned a spot that appeared to me about as large as one of Epicurus’s atoms.  When I looked down upon Peloponnesus, and beheld Cynuria,  I reflected with astonishment on the number of Argives and Lacedemonians who fell in one day, fighting for a piece of land no bigger than an Egyptian lentil; and when I saw a man brooding over his gold, and boasting that he had got four cups or eight rings, I laughed most heartily at him: whilst the whole Pangæus, with all its mines, seemed no larger than a grain of millet.

Icaro-Mennipus in True History [gutenberg.org*]
Lucian of Samosata (100s AD), Thomas Francklin translation (1790)

Take that Carl "Pale Blue Dot" Sagan! Beaten by 1,800 years, by a guy who didn't even have a space program.

---

* This text uses Dr. Thomas Francklin's 1780 translation. This translation is said to be bowdlerized in the proper starched-shirt fashion of the age, and the editor's preface has a rather amusing defense of the practice. While bowlderization might not be ideal by today's sensibilities, it is nevertheless the version available from Gutenberg.