Theologian and scientist John Wilkins realized in 1640 that it would be possible to fly to the moon. And then Wilkins did something that hadn't been done before: he designed a vehicle consistent with the principles of his time that could make the journey. Professor Allan Chapman of Oxford, who presented the story in a lecture at Gresham College in London, thinks Wilkins' work was the first serious investigation of manned flight to the moon. You can read more in Cromwell's moonshot: how one Jacobean scientist tried to kick off the space race in the Independent. Of course, it wouldn't have worked. Wilkins believed that gravity and magnetism were more or less the same thing, and that if you could reach an altitude of 20 miles, you would escape the effects of both, continuing on to sail easily to the moon. His vehicle was a flying chariot with feathered, flapping wings and gunpowder boosters. A brief excerpt: Although earlier philosophers and poets had written about visiting the Moon,...

Long-term thinking, so unusual in our era, was once commonplace, as the centuries-long construction of the great cathedrals of Europe reminds us. Or how about the remarkable Ise Shrine, a Shinto temple in Japan whose wooden structure is periodically rebuilt, and has been every twenty years for the last thousand. So the idea of constructing a star probe whose mission might last a century -- or a thousand years -- is not inconceivable, as long as we view it as a gift to the human future as much as a mission whose end we will see. But projects with a focus on 'the long now,' as Stewart Brand calls this multilayered view of time, can be found even in our own frenetic culture. Brand's book The Clock of the Long Now describes Danny Hillis' idea of a timepiece that will last for ten thousand years, and the Long Now Foundation envisions a 10,000-year library along the same lines. The most recent time-stretching project to come to my attention is the Deccan College dictionary of Sanskrit....

SpaceShipOne's splendid achievments have me re-visiting the days of my youth, when the most remarkable video I had ever seen was the jerky footage taken from a modified V-2 rocket as it lifted off some time after the war -- Walter Kronkite used this footage as the introduction to the CBS documentary series 'Twentieth Century.' You would see the launching pad dwindling below, then the scrub desert not all that far from where SpaceShipOne flew, and as the flight progressed, just a glimpse of a stunningly curved horizon that told you how far into the unfathomable black you had traveled. How exciting the future looked in those days, as I followed the flights of the X-15, a rocket vehicle whose altitude record SpaceShipOne exceeded today. I began to puzzle over the question of nostalgia for a future that never happened, an odd notion that makes me think of all the dreams we as a culture have assigned to the future at different times in our history. Then along comes a fine essay called...