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geofflambert -> RE: The Gorn Supremacy; stock AW1Steve v. geofflambert (1/19/2017 5:43:31 PM)
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Note to the reader: Imagine Morgan Freeman is reading this to you
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human peril, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Gorn, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And midway through the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Gorn, known on Earth as Lacerta Alpha 4 in the constellation Chamaeleontis, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about its star at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from its sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this world ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the Earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
cue animated existence:
[image]local://upfiles/37002/1298AF1473624C028FF7CBDDBBC75433.gif[/image]
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