Take a look at the crescent moon tonight. Did it look the same a couple of hundred years ago?

The faint illumination of the shadowed part of the crescent moon is called earthshine. When the moon is a thin crescent as seen from the earth, the earth as seen from the moon is nearly at full phase and very bright (the full earth is about 50 times brighter than the full moon). If you observe the crescent moon over several successive nights, you will notice that as the crescent thickens (and the phase of the earth goes from full toward last quarter), the earthshine grows fainter.

Light pollution may contribute to the total amount of light the moon receives from the earth, but this light source would reach its maximum at full moon, when it is overwhelmed by direct sunlight. Since earthshine isn't a product of light pollution, it was visible in pre-industrial times. Leonardo da Vinci made a sketch of the moon with earthshine, and he even got the basic principle correct, although some of his details were wrong (earthshine comes mainly from light reflected off of clouds, not oceans).

The even more ancient expression "the old moon in the new moon's arms" is also a reference to earthshine, with the new crescent appearing to embrace the faint remains of the previous month's moon.

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Light pollution only makes it harder to see dim things in the night sky, so if anything the shadowed side of the moon should have been even more visible than now. I guess we could ask @morriss003 to confirm from his farm in Maui! :) Anyway until people started being able to do the math, there was no real reason to think that the bodies in the sky were as large or as far away as we now know, or that they were the same class of entity as the Earth.

Mostly ancient civilisations thought the cosmos was something like this:

They certainly weren't thinking of the Earth as particularly being the same shape as the Moon, whatever shape they thought either to be.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.