• Question: when did human start to know about space ?

    Asked by 362spaa38 to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      It started with the ancient greeks, and probably before that. However without telescopes they were limited in what they could see, so little progress was made until the invention of the telescope. After that, our knowledge has been accelerating faster and faster as we build bigger and more sensitive instruments to learn the secrets of the night sky.

    • Photo: Hugh Osborn

      Hugh Osborn answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      The stars have always been there. Even animals use them to guide their movements at night. I can imagine primitive humans round a fire discussing the points of light in the sky and what they might be!

      As for a real understanding of what space might actually be, it’s hard to know. The first culture to record in writing ideas about space were the ancient Greeks. They made many suggestions about space that have turned out to be correct. A famous Greek philosopher from more than 2000 years ago said that each star was a sun and each sun might have planets like the Earth – a fact that we now know is true!

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      Hi! 🙂 I think the boys have this one pretty much covered already, but I’ll just add that the ancient Greeks and Romans had many stories they told about the constellations. They usually involved a fair amount of fighting, jealousy and Gods behaving badly. An example is Ursa Major or The Great Bear. In Roman mythology, Jupiter (king of the Gods) was flirting with a young lady named Callisto, so Jupiter’s jealous wife turned her and her son into bears, throwing them up into the sky as punishment!

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