A good read. I only wish I had the intellectual prowess to have something to add.
I will say, once you really digest it, it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun, even though the sun is not visible. Truly internalizing your place on this "floating sphere of rock and water" is as close to a religious experience as I have had.
But I'll never walk on the moon, and I'll never see an earth-rise. I am convinced the moon is a ball of rock, but my mortality and inability to go and see tenders my heart towards those who firmly believe in other 'unconfirmed' ideas, say, that the moon is a bowl of fire or that lightning bolts are Zeus having a go on some poor soul. It makes me sad and afraid in a way the young, strident, physics loving, atheist me in the past could not understand.
> How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
We do owe something to the supernatural, for killing it. I just don't know what. Love? Then again, maybe we owe something to Socrates, for killing him.
> I'll never see an earth-rise
You wouldn't see one even if you were on the Moon, which doesn't rotate with respect to the Earth. (In the spirit of your comment, you can satisfy yourself about this intuitively by reflecting that we always see the same face of the Moon, so somebody on that face wouldn't see the Earth changing position in the sky, either.)
You'd probably get into lunar orbit before descending to the surface, so that would offer you an opportunity to see the Earth rise (sort of).
You are not wrong, and I am not trying to be pedantic. But I want to take this opportunity to bring up an interesting phenomenon.
While the Moon is tidally locked with Earth, a slight wobble in the Moon's motion (an effect called lunar libration) allows us to see more than 50% of its surface over time.
Therefore for an observer positioned on the Moon's limb (the boundary between the near and far sides), this wobble would cause the Earth to slowly rise just above the horizon and then dip back down. This movement would be extremely slow, taking place over many days, and would only involve a portion of the Earth's surface, not the entire planet rising completely into the sky. But it is the closest thing to earth-rise and set, you can get from the surface of the moon.
The wobble is caused by the moon speeding towards earth (on approach in its elliptical orbit) and then slowing down (on receding away) while still having a constant spin on it axis.
> it becomes impossible to look at the crescent moon at night and not immediately triangulate the position of the sun
I do that too, like the moon is lit from the right, slightly from above so yes obviously the sun is over there, up, aaaand... nope, it's sunset. Something's not right, is the light curved?
Anyway, that's the day I learned about the lunar terminator illusion[1]. Honestly, even knowing about the phenomenon, it still feels quite mind-bending to think about it.
That whole article seems odd to me. I don't think I've ever felt this illusion, at least not when old enough to even think about the geometry of it.
I don't intuit the cylindrical projection mentioned in that article. I "feel" an arc over the hemispherical sky. I know the terminator is perpendicular to that arc and the moon chases the sun towards the horizon.
I wonder if latitude or other local terrain and climate features influence what sort of mental model one develops about this...
A strange position, to require to experience something to believe in it. Yet in the same time, reverting back by default to superstitions and supernatural beliefs, which in the most logical sense were never truly experienced by anybody. But I guess they soothe some highly illogical emotional core from our distant past which made fight-or-flight and similar reactions possible.
You do you (or let your 'heart' do you), happy to not feel member of such group in any way nor sharing such concerns. Life is too short and there are properly amazing things to experience each day, that's a better focus of experiencing this world IMHO.
Oh I believe in it. I can't experience it, and yet I believe completely. Yes, my argument is stronger than one who thinks the moon is a bowl of fire, but epistemology, science itself, unfortunately confirms that I do not know. My point is simply that this realization should give you sympathy to those who believe something different. My concern is not with my own beliefs, it's with the ability to bridge the gap with others. To heal the "crack in the cosmos", and to avoid the science-shock described in the article.
I don't know if you are right about things "not experienced by anyone"
If anything, men we owe much to like Darwin, Newton and Lematire were religiously trained and lived religious lives - their belief and experience is vastly different from yours (projecting an atheist belief system on you based on your comment) and you have no way to relate to it. But the fact that our greatest advanced came from minds running that operating system is not something you can waive away.