Kepler's Lunar Vision

Kepler imagined the Moon as a populated world with an atmosphere and exotic life. He reasoned that the near side of the Moon, which always faces the Earth, is a temperate land, warmed and illuminated during the lunar nights by sunlight reflected from the Earth. But the far side of the moon, which never sees the earth and only sees the sun for two weeks every month, is in turns a scorching desert and a landscape of ice riven by storms, its inhabitants alternately oppressed by the burning rays of the sun and the freezing night of empty space.