The Distance of the Moon
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What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber.
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wait wait you're listening to Radio Lab Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR Hey I'm Jada Boon Rod I'm Robert Krollwich this is Radio Lab and today on the podcast something a little different yeah a little while ago we happened to find ourselves on the stage of Symphony Space which is a theater in Manhattan in New York City and we were doing a show with selected shorts which is a radio show that's produced out of our home station WNYC heard across the country and they had asked us very generously to curate an evening of stories and so we chose a bunch of stories with the staff got some really unbelievably wonderful actors like who was there Jane Curtin was Jane Curtin read a story of Kiaris Cedric was there yeah and and Lee of Shriver read a story which you're gonna hear so we just want to play you that story which made up the second half of the show for this podcast and here's how that one began okay we are back for part two this next story could use a little bit of set up we think I don't know how many of you know this but there is a theory about 25 years old now that explains how the earth got a moon and it goes like this so about four and a half billion years ago the earth was you know fresh new planet was going around the Sun and the solar system was having a sort of a fiery sort of chaotic period and into the mix a very large planetoid about the size of Mars kind of went rogue and began bopping around and there was a head-on collision between the earth and this planet and the two went and the the incoming one melted much of the earth the earth became sort of vaporous and everything on the earth just went to gas and sort of flew up and then the earth just became sort of an unsolid for a while when it cooled the earth fell back into place and there was this extra thing very very close by that we called the moon but ever since that that moment these two celestial orbs the earth and the moon have been very gradually very very slowly drifting away from each other at a rate of and this is interesting one nanometer per second which is not a lot it's about just for practical sort of analogy that's about the speed that your fingernails grow but imagine your fingernails growing for four and a half billion years and you've got a pretty long fingernail yes or there are further away moon yes so this is a story from italo calrino I'm just doing the FM radio okay I don't know how he released he's a Cuban-born rider he moved to Italy grew up there a Foppa Nazis for the end of World War two wrote book about that then one of many other books and among them he created a series of stories called cosmic comics they mostly have the same map narrator a mysterious character called yes what's he going and kick quick kick quick you're having a whole debate backstage about how to say this how do you spell it you spell it q f w f q kiffwick yeah give you give it quick quick well you have to wait for it I am he'll be able to be able to order that so this this fellow he's very ancient he tells stories it the stories include the origin of the universe the beginning of time so and I should say it is it will be read for you today by an incredible actor director producer screenwriter and a man who for the last decade would you say has been Roberts unrequited boy crush yeah it's not it's not it's not like sexual anything it's just like but it is it is a thing because I now in this moment he just pops out Lee have come down to the stage and hands me this little piece of paper sort of pretending like he's handing Robert his phone number but yeah nothing on it I was I was watching a play once this is many years ago called don't look back and there was an actor in it named Jane
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What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber.