Thursday, September 20, 2007

The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Significant Sentences 08.

Significant sentences from Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower, a collection of Eiseley's essays on nature and humanity's relationship to it.

Title of story: "The Fifth Planet."

Summary of story: an amateur astronomer has been led to believe that between Mars and Jupiter there had been a fifth planet that had been blown to bits and that meteors from it were hitting Earth. He kept studying these meteors, hoping to find fossils which would prove life was "out there." But, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he no longer cares whether he finds evidence of life on that fifth planet. He concludes that that planet, if life existed on it, probably met the fate that this planet inevitably must--blown to bits by our own technology.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Musing about our planet and the US being founded the year after a court in the UK declared the slave trade illegal (five and a half centuries late but, hey...) with these twin racist freak shows and Israel and Saudi Arabia (w/ slavery into the 1960s) colluding in the strategy of tension to murder our kind by staging faux religious turf wars in a grab for possessions (declared evil in the common scripture)....and since a freak show best describes us...for whom could this be entertainment, but aliens...aliens w/ a grudge against us and any other arrogant and aggressive specie maybe...which brings to mind 'the culture' and it's 'non-intervention' protocol Gene Roddenberry in the Star Trek series also pioneered...it makes sense that if the earth, serves as a human 'wildlife preserve' on our home planet or system our members in the cosmos at large may well be helpless to stop our abominations...(oh, remember that nasty episode on Ceres illuminated by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki holocaust that Loren Eiseley wrote about in The Fifth Planet) or maybe we're just being quarantined...and left to our evil ways as an object lesson.