Planets And Civilization

There Will Be Time.

At school in the 1930s, Jack Havig learns that:

"('A star passed near our sun and pulled out a ribbon of flaming gas that became the planets... The periods of world civilization are Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and modern time, which began in 1492.')" (p. 15)

That is the theory of planetary formation that is assumed in EE Smith's Lensman series and that would still have to be assumed even now by anyone writing any further Lensman novels. (I don't want to read any more Lensman but Anderson could have done it well.) How much has been learned about cosmology in the last century? See Significant Dates.

Finally, Eurocentric history.