Name: 【TED】Alexander MacDonald: How centuries of sci-fi sparked spaceflight (How centuries of sci-fi sparked spaceflight | Alex MacDonald)
Uploaded: 2019-04-18T01:30:22.000Z
Duration: 13 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I want to tell you a story about stories.

Transition words & phrases

And I want to tell you this story because I think we need to remember

that sometimes the stories we tell each other

are more than just tales or entertainment or narratives.

for sowing inspiration and ideas across our societies

is about how one of the most advanced technological achievements

and how some of the most important transformations yet to come might also.

when Galileo Galilei first learned of the recent Dutch invention

that took two pieces of shaped glass and put them in a long tube

and thereby extended human sight farther than ever before.

When Galileo turned his new telescope to the heavens

These are pages from Galileo's book \"Sidereus Nuncius,\" published in 1610.

And in them, he revealed to the world what he had discovered.

And what he discovered was that the Moon was not just a celestial object

and dark \"mare,\" the Latin word for seas.

And once this new world and the Moon had been discovered,

people immediately began to think about how to travel there.

One of the first people to do so was actually the Bishop of Hereford,

Godwin wrote a story about a Spanish explorer,

who ended up marooned on the island of St. Helena

to harness the power of the local wild geese

and eventually to embark on a voyage to the Moon.

Godwin's book, \"The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither,\"

was only published posthumously and anonymously in 1638,

likely on account of the number of controversial ideas that it contained,

including an endorsement of the Copernican view of the universe

that put the Sun at the center of the Solar System,

as well as a pre-Newtonian concept of gravity

that had the idea that the weight of an object

would decrease with increasing distance from Earth.

And that's to say nothing of his idea of a goose machine

And while this idea of a voyage to the Moon by goose machine

might not seem particularly insightful or technically creative to us today,

what's important is that Godwin described getting to the Moon not by a dream

or by magic, as Johannes Kepler had written about,

And it was this idea that we could build machines

that would plant its seed in minds across the generations.

The idea was next taken up by his contemporary, John Wilkins,

but later, one of the founders of the Royal Society.

John Wilkins took the idea of space travel in Godwin's text seriously

entitled, \"Discovery of the New World in the Moon,

that 'tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in that Planet.\"

And note, by the way, that word \"habitable.\"

That idea in itself would have been a powerful incentive

for people thinking about how to build machines that could go there.

In his books, Wilkins seriously considered a number of technical methods

and it remains to this day the earliest known nonfiction account

Other stories would soon follow, most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac,

By the mid-17th century, the idea of people building machines

was growing in complexity and technical nuance.

this intellectual progress effectively ceased.

People still told stories about getting to the Moon,

Well, because the discovery of the laws of gravity by Newton

and the invention of the vacuum pump by Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle

that a condition of vacuum existed between the planets,

and consequentially between the Earth and the Moon.

no way of thinking about overcoming this.

the idea of a voyage to the Moon made very little intellectual progress

until the rise of the Industrial Revolution

and the development of steam engines and boilers

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【TED】Alexander MacDonald: How centuries of sci-fi sparked spaceflight (How centuries of sci-fi sparked spaceflight | Alex MacDonald)

commitment

effort

progress

realize