From the Radiolab podcast: How far is the moon, really? Could you get there with a ladder?

In an episode we last featured on our Radiolab for Kids podcast feed back in 2020 — and in honor of its blocking out the sun for a bit of us for a bit last week — in this episode, we’re gonna talk more about the moon.

According to one theory, (psst listen our episode "The Moon Itself" if you want to know more) the moon formed when a Mars-sized chunk of rock collided with Earth; the moon coalesced out of the debris from that impact. And it was MUCH closer to Earth than it is today. This idea is taken to its fanciful limit in Italo Calvino's story "The Distance of the Moon" (from his collection Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver). Read by Liev Schreiber, the story is narrated by a character with the impossible-to-pronounce name Qfwfq, and tells of a strange crew who jump between Earth and moon, and sometimes hover in the nether reaches of gravity between the two.

This reading was part of a live event hosted by Radiolab and Selected Shorts, and it originally aired on WNYC’s and PRI’s Selected Shorts, hosted by BD Wong and paired with a Ray Bradbury classic, “All Summer in a Day,” read by musical theater star Michael Cerveris.

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Photo illustration by Jared Bartman
Video by W. Harry Fortuna