Explore "Quo Vadimus?" by E.E. Fournier d'Albe on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sitting at my desk by a cosy and up-to-date gas fire on a foggy day, with tufts of mist steadily rolling up from the swollen waters of the wise old Thames, I try to realize that I am travelling through space at a rate of over a thousand miles a minute, on board a minor planet in forced revolution round a vast white-hot globe nearly a hundred million miles away.
Somebody has called astronomy the Futile Science, and I am not at all sure that the epithet is wholly undeserved. What do the stars matter to us? There was a time when they were believed to have an influence on human affairs, particularly those of kings and emperors. To-day they are insignificant specks at an immense distance from us, a distance so great that if they all were utterly annihilated neither we nor our remotest descendants should experience the smallest material effect.