Moonshot

in just such a place. And while she was raised in a time of conflict, with the war between Napoleon and the British regiing, and her own family full of poor Protestant dissenters, she's still found time to dig, thanks in part to her father, a cabinet maker and amateur

fossil elector who needed a sidekick. While most women her age were being raised to be delicate wives to future husbands, Mary was learning proper fossil cleaning techniques from her father as they dug along the beach for relics to sell alongside his cabinetree. However, when he died suddenly of tuberculosis in eighteen ten, those fossils became a means of helping meet her family's needs. It didn't take long for Mary

to strike gold or strike bone, I guess. While digging with her brother Joseph, the two happened upon a skull. Joseph left Mary to unearth the rest of the fossil, and, through a painstakingly lung process that began to garner the attention of everyone in town, she revealed a seventeen foot skeleton that was referred to by scientists as a crocodile and by citizens as a monster today, though we know

it as the Eccleosaurus. By eighteen twenty three, at just twenty four years old, she became the first human to discover a complete plesiosaurus, being that Mary was a woman. Though news began to spread that it was a fake, noted French naturalist George Cuvier disputed the discovery all on his own, and even held a meeting at the Geological Society of London, a meeting that Mary was not invited to, by the way, But that meeting didn't go Cuvier's way,

and he ended up admitting his mistake. Yet, despite Mary's

continuous breakthroughs, she remained severely unrecognized for her work. In order to support her family, she was often forced to sell the fossils that she had worked so hard to find, clean, set and identify, and the men who bought them rarely credited her with the find and even when scientific journals and articles cited her ichtheos or discovery at the right age of twelve, they did not cite her by name, and the reputed Geological Society of London, the very place

that Cuvier had failed to convince of her reportedly fake fine, wouldn't admit her to their ranks. In fact, they wouldn't start admitting any women until nineteen o four. But Mary wasn't done breaking ground or barriers just yet. She began pioneering the study of copper lights or fossilized dinosaur droppings, and by eighty eight she had another first to add to her resume. After discovering a baffling collection of bones. The scientific world was a buzz from London to Paris

discussing how they would all connect. Mary did the hard work for them, putting together the first pterodactyl ever discovered outside of Germany, the largest flying creature to have ever lived at a time when fossils were the talk of the scientific world, Mary was at the top, even if no one wanted to acknowledge her. Specimen shows popped up all over major cities, housing countless bones that Mary herself discovered, and still her name was purposely left out among Jurassic talks.

But those who knew her understood what she was doing for the world. Mary's childhood friend, Harry de la Beesh, painted his famous A More Ancient Dorset, a painting inspired by her Ichtheosaur find. It was the first painting to use fossil evidence to create realistic representations of creatures from millennia past, and dear Harry sold Prince to a ravenous

public in order to raise funds for Mary. At the time of her young death in eight Mary Anning was still in dire straits financially, despite the countless prehistoric species she had discovered, identified and shared with the world. It would take another century before her legacy was restored to

its rightful place. Today, her finds can be seen proudly displayed at the Natural History Museum in London, and while it's still hotly debated among historians, there are some who believe that Mary is the she at the center of that famous old tongue twister. She sells seashells on the seashore a curious life. Indeed, everyone has problems, a bad boss, a noisy kid, or a train that's always late, and

we deal with them the best we can. Sometimes all it requires is a candid conversation, sending the offending children to their room to settle down, or leaving for work a little earlier, or if you're a math professor. Alexander Abian, you just blow up the moon. Alexander was born in Tabriz, Iran in nineteen three. He grew up there, earning his undergraduate degree there before coming to the US to pursue

his master's in nineteen fifty. From there, he went on to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD with a

focus in mathematics. Alexander held a variety of teaching jobs all over the country, moving from Tennessee to New York, then to Pennsylvania, and finally to Ohio, before eventually taking a job as a math professor at Iowa States in nineteen sixty seven, where he stayed for the rest of his career until retiring in nineteen Not much is known about his time at the university other than that it was uneventful for the twenty five years, at least when

compared to what happened in that year. Alexander published a piece in the university's newspaper with a wild claim, one that eventually spread beyond the campuses, borders and into the mainstream press. The professor had been watching what was going on around the world forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and blizzards, all brought on by one common culprit, the Moon, and

Alexander believed it had to go. He claimed that if the Moon was blown up, our seasons like summer and spring would disappear, taking almost all the natural disasters with them. How would he have accomplished this feat with nuclear weapons, of course. His plan was to drill a hole into the surface of the Moon, drop an atomic bomb inside, and detonate it remotely. The explosion would break the Moon apart, saving the Earth from the perils that have only gotten

worse over the years with climate change. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with his plan. A few NASA employees believed it was impossible, to say the least, for one, they knew that the Moon was responsible for many phenomena both on and around the Earth. The tides, for example, are controlled by the Moon, as is the tilt of the Earth. Without our Moon, our planet would tilt so severely it would leave one hemisphere in eternal darkness while the other

burned beneath a blazing sun all day. Secondly, exploding the Moon would cause a worldwide extinction event as debris entered the Earth's atmosphere and increase the planet's temperature, not to mention the chance that a big chunk of it could hit the Earth with such force it would wipe out everyone on the planet. But all of those situations were hypothetical. Anyway, to destroy the Moon, a single atom bomb wasn't enough.

Such an explosion would only damage the surface, but nothing below. Instead, miners would have to drill down hundreds of miles into the Moon's surface and deposit six hundred billion nuclear bombs in order to blow it all up. Alexander's idea was dismissed by many as a pipe dream, but the man himself wasn't so were He equated his detractors with the people who wrote off Galileo hundreds of years before, and as time moved on and the Internet took hold his

theory exploded across the globe. No pun intended, I swear suddenly everyone was getting ideas of their own. Unfortunately, Alexander Abian died in nineteen nine. He never got to see his plan fully realized. That is, unless he happened to see a similar story occur. During the summer of nine that year, a team of experienced oil drillers took a shuttle into space to put Alexander's idea to the test.

Except instead of drilling into the Moon, they drilled into an asteroid the size of Texas that was headed straight for the Earth. It took some doing, but the miners managed to blow up the asteroid before it reached the atmosphere using a nuclear bomb, a global extinction event had

been avoided. Of course, this wasn't a real event. It was the action movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, a film with the plot that was just as implausible as Alexander Abian's idea, but certainly a lot more entertaining. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership

with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye