"'At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 14, p. 93.
"Saunders saw part of the sun's huge blood-red disc shining wanly.
"So good-bye, Sol, he thought. Good-bye, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend."
-"Flight to Forever," p. 235.
Plunged into darkness by an eclipse, the Time Traveller flees back to his present:
"'So I came back.'" (15, p. 95)
Saunders has no alternative but to continue forward into "...the elemental dark." (ibid.)
"The universe was dead!" (ibid.)
A good place to close for the night. It is dark outside.
See also Good-byes
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And, of course, those who take an interest in it can know more about astronomy than what was known by the authors of these stories when they wrote them.
Ad astra! Sean
Yes. For example, the sun -will- expand, but not nearly as soon as people in 1890's thought -- they didn't know the nuclear physics.
If I recall "The Time Machine" correctly Wells expected the earth to somehow move closer to the sun as the sun cooled, and that is why the Time Traveller saw an enlarged sun.
Before there was any knowledge of nuclear physics, the top theory for where the sun's energy came from was the slow contraction of the sun. So the life of a star was thought to start as a Red Giant after a nebula had just collapsed, this contracts to a smaller & hotter star like the yellow-white sun and the star eventually cools to a red dwarf & on to a cool body that only emits modest amounts of infra-red light.
The time scale for this is much shorter than the real time scale in which stars fuse hydrogen into heaver elements for billions of years.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Anonymous!
Mr. Stirling: IIRC, our Sun has between one and two billion more years left on the Main Sequence. Anderson's GENESIS gives us some of his speculations about what Earth might be like a billion years in the future.
Anon: Exactly, classic scientific method. Theories are worked out that seems to fit observed phenomena, then revised and/or rejected as new facts becomes known, with new theories explaining them. And so, on and on.
Ad astra! Sean
For a while my comments have been posted as 'anonymous'. I think this should fix it.
So it was you!
Kaor, Jim!
I did think "Anonymous" was you!
Ad astra! Sean
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