Oliver Morton Books

Long before the Moon became a scientific object, it was a divine presence. In Mesopotamia, the Moon-god Sin traced his course through the heavens, regulating time and harvests. In Greece, Selene’s chariot rode nightly across the sky; in China, Chang’e’s story wove immortality and loss into the lunar...

From The Moon: A History for the Future

In the seventeenth century, with the invention of the telescope, myth began to yield to observation. Galileo’s drawings of the Moon in 1609 shattered the dream of celestial perfection: here was a world of mountains, craters, and shadows, illuminated by sunlight, not self-luminous purity. By renderin...

From The Moon: A History for the Future

From the earliest irrigation canals to the dream of weather modification, humans have been trying to harness nature’s forces. In this historical thread, geoengineering appears not as a sudden leap into the unknown, but as the latest in a long lineage of interventions. The twentieth century gave us t...

From The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

Before one can weigh the ethics of shaping the climate, one must first understand what the climate is and why it is changing. The greenhouse effect—the physics by which gases trap infrared radiation—is foundational, known since the nineteenth century. The human addition of billions of tons of carbon...

From The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World