I am the biggest anachronism on Planet Earth.
Cassini – who discovered Japetus in 1671 – also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other.
The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial.
I thought this couldn’t happen in astronomy. Isn’t celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.
I agree that was terrible – but what could my government do about it?” “A great deal – if it wished. But that would have offended the people who supplied it with oil – and bought its weapons, like the land mines that killed and maimed civilians by the thousands.
Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made.
Politics is the art of the possible’?” “Quite true – which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
That’s still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you’re the only person who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain?
Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to – ugh – eat them became economically impossible. I don’t know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants it produced. And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques.
Well, that’s a relief. You know that I have the greatest possible enthusiasm for this mission.” “I’m sure of it. Now please let me have.
Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference.
Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men.
Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.
With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while – perhaps as much as ten minutes – to locate the line in the whole body of English literature.
Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been.
One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water.
For it was their world, not Man’s. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars.
Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service – in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist – he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It.
There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer.
Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color – the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets – of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth.