What if the ancient Greeks, geniuses, heroic expeditioners, pioneers in so many things, went to the moon in the 12th century BC?

This 50th anniversary has brought a flurry of thinking, writing and publishing about the moon and our (usually) earthbound species' relationship with it. So, for example, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, the scholarly Mary Beard has just reminded us in her piece The first moon landing: second century AD of an ancient visit to the moon, famous in Greco-Roman history and plausibly reported by second-century essayist Lucian in his True History.

The adventure Lucian describes "is a far cry from Apollo 11", Beard notices.

"The narrator and his mates are on a sea journey to very distant and strange parts, when their boat is caught up on a vast whirlwind and, after being transported upwards for seven days, end up on the moon (and quickly realise that they are now looking down at the Earth).

"They almost instantly get caught up in a war between the people of the moon and the people of the sun. But, when peace has been established, the narrator gives a bit of ethnography of the moon and its people.

"There are, for example, no women there, but for the most part men are simply born from men.

"Alternatively they have a way of planting testicles in the ground, out of which grow trees with men as their fruit. Their food appears to consist just of flying frogs, and the liquid they drink is compressed air."

Reading, transfixed, Mary Beard's summary of Lucian's report with its abundance of curious details (among moon-men baldness is thought attractive, the rich wear clothes of glass, the poor clothes of bronze), I was moved to think what a godsend Donald Trump and his disciples (including Boris Johnson) are proving to our story-loving species.

Thanks to them we are living in post-truth times in which we no longer know or care (so much) what truth is, and don't allow reason (whatever that is), and facts (whatever they are) to interfere with what we want to think and believe.

Beard thinks that Lucian was being satirical when he called his essay, with its moon report, a true history. But, now, with the truth being what we want it to be, Lucian's True History, like the Grimms' fairy tales, like everything once dismissed as mere fiction, takes on a new plausibility.

I choose to believe Lucian's action-packed account of Earthlings' first visit to the moon, to a place where once the bourgeoisie dressed in glass, to where, in fabulous orchards, men grew on trees. I also choose to believe in another voyage of lunar discovery, just discussed on the website of the moon-conscious Library of Congress.

In his plausible book The Man in the Moone, published in 1638, Francis Godwin follows the exploits of Domingo Gonsales, a Spanish nobleman who after a series of adventures on Earth makes a voyage to the moon.

Gonsales, visiting the island St Helena, discovers a species of burly, swan-like birds. He builds a carriage and harnesses a flock of them with a view to first flying around the island and then flying home to Spain. But, once aloft, the great birds zoom him up, up and away to the moon.

"When he lands there," the Library tells us, "he finds a whole new world there, which he refers to as another Earth. It's a place with plants, animals, and most surprisingly, a utopian civilization of tall, Christian people".

Alas, what had become of these fascinating civilisations by the time, in 1969, Earthlings made their second visit to the moon (if they really did, if that "landing" wasn't a fake thing, staged in some God-forsaken Australian desert with the connivance of notoriously shifty US president Richard Nixon and obliging Australian PM John Gorton) and found only a barren, dusty lifelessness?

Meanwhile in the Greenwich Observatory's new book The Moon: A Celebration of Our Celestial Neighbour, we learn that during the Cold War America came close to performing a nuclear bomb test on the moon.

It's just as well that Donald Trump doesn't read books and so is unlikely to find out about this moon-bruising idea, an idea that would surely appeal to his teeny-weeny mind.

There was active planning of the moon bombing (it was called "Project A119") so that, visible to the whole world, it would have been a demonstration of US military might to send a chill up the spine of the USSR.

In the end, the bombing didn't go ahead because the White House was worried that the American people, perhaps with affectionate feelings towards the moon (as reflected in popular sentimental love songs like By the Light of the Silvery Moon) would be upset by an act of cruelty towards our cuddly, faithful, silvery celestial neighbour.

One wonders if today's American people, brutalised and the balances of their minds disturbed by the Trump presidency, would oppose a new Project A119, perhaps designed to remind those pesky Iranians of US military might.

One can just hear a rally of thousands of Trump's patriotic "core" admirers, revved up by him, chanting "Nuke the moon! Nuke the moon!".