Anaxagoras was amazingly right about some things. He made it possible to view heavenly bodies as solid, physical objects. His idea that the Moon was flung off the Earth could be regarded as the first articulation of the 'fission theory' which George Darwin would revive in the nineteenth century. And his intuition of a connection between the Moon and meteorites foreshadowed the work of Gene Shoemaker and Harold Urey in the twentieth century.

Other philosophers followed Anaxagoras' example in regarding the Moon as a 'miniature Earth', and even broached the subject of extra-terrestrial life. Philolaus, a Pythagorean thinker, believed the Moon had animals and plants that were fifteen times larger than those on Earth, presumably proportionate to the difference between an Earth day and a Lunar day, Lunar days being the same as a terrestrial month.

However, the idea that the firmament could be polluted by Earthly substance horrified later Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who continued to regard the Moon as a divine being, and the surprisingly modern approach of some of the earlier Greek 'physici' was all but lost.