The Cosmic Landscape
Introduction
The air is very cold and still: except for the sound of my own
breathing, the silence is absolute. The dry, powdery snow crackles
whenever my boot touches down. Its perfect whiteness, lit by
starlight, gives the terrain a luminous, eerie brilliance, while the
stars fade into a continuous glow across the black celestial dome.
The night is brighter on this desolate planet than on my own home
world. Beauty, but of a cold and lifeless kind: a place for
metaphysical contemplation if ever there was one.
Alone, I'd left the safety of the base, to think about the day's
events and to watch the sky for meteors. But it was impossible to
think of anything other than the sheer enormousness and impersonal
nature of the universe. The pinwheeling of galaxies, the endless
expansion of the universe, the infinite coldness of space, the heat
of stars being born, and their final death throes as red giants:
surely this must be the point of existence.
Man-life in general-seems irrelevant to the workings of the
universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint
planet circling a star of no speci ... read full excerpt from: The Cosmic Landscape ebook
