Dr. John Wilkins was a natural philosopher who lived from 1614 until 1672. He was crazy about getting to the moon and meeting the people who surely lived there. Wilkins believed that anything as Earth-like as the moon must have been created by God for living beings, and he was determined to meet them — despite the fact that he was three centuries ahead of his time.
In the 1600s, the scientific understanding of gravity and outer space was limited. Wilkins believed, like many 17th-century scientists, that there was no difference between the atmosphere of Earth and the conditions in space, and that Earth's pull was due to magnetism (磁力). It was only reasonable, then, that Wilkins believed a two-wheeled horse-drawn battle car with wings with enough speed could lift high enough off the ground to break free of Earth's magnetic pull and reach the moon.
Then Wilkins moved on to more pressing issues with his remarkable ability to think of new ideas: How would travelers feed themselves during the journey? He theorized that the main cause of hunger was simply the act of working against gravity, so getting to the moon without being burdened by it would be able to be realized. There was some knowledge at that time about the fact that air gets thinner and colder the higher up you go, but he had a fix for that too, "moistened sponges (湿润的海绵) might help us against its thinness".
By studying the way in which birds fly, which also happened to be part of the studies that led to planes and rockets centuries later, Wilkins put his theory to the test with the help of a colleague, Robert Hooke. Neither of the two ever recorded their attempts, but it's somewhat safe to say that it didn't work out. Hooke himself may have been the reason he gave up hope, in fact, since he was part of the team that discovered space was a place without oxygen.
