Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

II. THE WORLD OF LONG AGO

CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF LONG AGO

I HAD a dream, which yet was not a dream.

I found myself as an observer of the world as it was 100 million years ago, inhabiting a planet in attendance upon one of those distant stars of space, in the middle of a sidereal universe analogous to that which exists at present, though it was not the same, for the universe of that time was destroyed long ago and the universe of to-day did not yet exist.

At that time, also, there were stars and constellations, but they were neither the same constellations nor the same stars.

There were suns, moons, inhabited earths, days, nights, seasons, years, countries, beings, impressions, thoughts, facts; but they were not the same as now.

The Earth which we inhabit was not yet in existence. The materials which compose it floated through space in a state of diffused nebulosity, gravitating about the slowly condensing solar focus. There were as yet neither water, nor air, nor earth, nor heavens, nor planets, nor animals, nor any one of those bodies reputed to be simple by chemistry, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, lead, copper, etc. The gas (which by its condensations and final transformations was eventually to give rise to the various gaseous, liquid, and solid substances at present constituting our globe and its inhabitants) was a single homogeneous gas, containing within it, like an unconscious chrysalis, the possibilities of the future. But no prophet could have foreseen the unknown which slumbered amid its mysteries.

Our planet showed at that time the aspect of those vague gaseous nebulæ which the telescope discovers on the floor of the skies and which the spectroscope analyses. The solar nebula in the course of condensation floated among the stars. All humanity with its history, every one of us with all his energies, all the living beings of this Earth, were contained in the germ of that nebula and its forces; but the beings and the things which we know were not to come into existence until after a long incubation of centuries. In the place of what was destined to be the Earth, there was nothing but a gas floating in starry space. Nor was it in the real “space” where we are now, for the Earth, the planets, and the whole solar system came from afar and flew swiftly across the void.

* * * * *

In the history of creation, 100 million years pass like a day; they dwindle and disappear, a fugitive dream, into the bosom of that eternity which absorbs all.

Then, although our planet did not exist, there were stars, suns, solar systems, and inhabited worlds as there are now. The humanities which peopled those worlds lived their lives as we live ours.

It would have been a wonderful spectacle for the thinker to contemplate the great work of all those beings. In passion or indifference, in pleasure or pain, in laughter or tears, in movement or repose, they lived; fighting, forgiving; accusing, forgetting; loving, hating; being born and dying; drawn into the fatal whirlpool; blindly succeeding each other through the generations and centuries, not knowing what gave them birth; ignorant of the fate in store for individuals and souls; playthings of that Nature which forms worlds and beings, stars and atoms, centuries and minutes, like soap-bubbles blown by a child into the air; and all plunging into the sea, like those whirls of sand which the desert wind raises and blows along in the typhoon or the breeze. It is the same spectacle as that which the earth offers to-day; living multitudes fighting for life and knowing only death.

The thought which must strike us most in our retrospective contemplation is that at that time the Earth did not exist. Not one of those human beings who live now, who will live in the future, or who have lived in the past, were then thought of. Nothing of all that now exists around us existed then. Yet in those ancient worlds which have disappeared long ago, the humanities which animated them had their vivid history, with flourishing cities, fights and struggles, laws and law-courts, judges of spiritual things, historians, economists, politicians, theologians, literary men, who took pains to tell the true from the false and to write down conscientiously what they, too, called “universal history.” For them, all creation stopped in their era and in their place; for all of them, creation was finished; the rest of the universe and of limitless eternity was lost in insignificance in comparison with what they called the “Present.” They never thought of the eternity which had already passed before them, nor of the eternity which would come after them.

They lived, learned or ignorant, famous or obscure, rich or poor, opulent or miserable, religious or sceptical, they all lived as if their era would never come to an end. Some of them, without losing a minute, amassed a fortune which their heirs hastened to dissipate; some spent their time in dreams and contemplations without thinking of the morrow. In one place there would be battalions inflaming the populace with their patriotic shouts; in another loving couples united their souls in mystery. Under the pressure of what they believed to be affairs of imperative importance, driven by the attractions of pleasure or borne on the wings of ambition, the inhabitants of that ancient world, like those of ours, flung themselves into the whirlpool of life. They, like ourselves, had days of glory and of sorrow; they had their ’89 and ’93, their Austerlitz and Waterloo, and political drama had its 18th Brumaire and its 2nd of December. Thus recently on our own Earth shone the life of Babylon, of Thebes, of Memphis, of Nineveh, of Carthage, the glory of Semiramis, Sesostris, Solomon, Alexander, Cambyses, and Cæsar; and to-day the silence of funeral solitude reigns supreme over the ruins of the palaces and temples, in the slumber of the invading night. In the history of the universe it is not only peoples, kingdoms, and empires which have disappeared, but it is whole worlds, groups of worlds, archipelagoes of planets, visible universes!

For eternity did not begin, it was never begun. The forces of Nature have never been inactive. For Nature itself, our measures of time, our conceptions of duration, do not exist. She has no past and no future, but a perpetual present. She remains immutable throughout her incessant manifestations and transformations. We pass away; She remains.

One can hardly think without terror of the innumerable beings which have lived on the worlds now lost, of all the leading spirits who have thought, acted, guided humanity in the path of progress, light, and liberty. One cannot think of Platos, Pascals, and Newtons of the vanished worlds without asking what has become of them. It is easy to reply that that is nothing, that they died as they were born, that all is dust and returns to dust. It is an easy answer, but it is not satisfying.

* * * * *

Certainly, nobody can be so foolish as to claim to have found a solution of the great mystery. For treating those profound problems of eternity and infinity, we are about in the position of ants attempting to gain a knowledge of the history of France. In spite of all their mental gifts, which have indeed been fully recognised, in spite of their goodwill, their gallant attempts and all their efforts, it is quite probable that they would not get beyond the history of their ant-heap and would not arrive at any reasonable conclusions concerning human beings and their affairs. To them, naturally, the proprietors of the woods and fields are the ants, and the plant-lice domesticated by them. And the parasites of the Earth are those inedible insects which interfere with them. Do they know that birds exist? It is doubtful. As regards men, they do not know of their existence, though it may be that the ants in civilised countries have in their antennal language an expression corresponding to the idea of “sugar-maker,” or cook, or confectioner, or for some implacable enemy such as a gardener. But even if they suspected our existence, they could not form any idea about the human race or its history but—the ideas of ants.

* * * * *

It would no doubt be as useless as it is foolish to lose ourselves in the nebulosity of metaphysics to attain a solution which will escape us for ever. But it is no doubt a proper subject for the exercise of our mental faculties to think of this particular aspect of creation: Time; to think that from all eternity earths inhabited like ours have floated in the light of their suns, that from all eternity there have been humanities enjoying the pleasures of life, and that from all eternity the end of the world has sounded on the hoary timepiece of destiny, burying in turn the universes and their inhabitants in the tomb of annihilation and oblivion. For it is impossible for us to conceive a commencement which was not preceded by an eternity of inaction, and as far as the observational sciences can take us, they show us forces in perpetual activity.

If infinite space dazzles us by its limitless immensity, an eternity without a beginning and without end arises, still more formidable perhaps, before our terrified gaze. The voices of the past speak to us from the abyss: they speak of the future.

The past of extinct worlds is the future of the earth.

* * * * *

In 100 million years, the earth where we live will no longer exist, or if any wreck of it remains, it will only be a funereal desert. The various worlds of our system will have achieved their circle of life, the histories of its human race will long ago have been finished, our own Sun, no doubt, will have lost its light and will roll along a dark star, through the realms of night. It may be that, thrown back by destiny into the melting-pot of perpetual change, united in a supreme climax with some old dead sun traversing the same abyss, it will arise like a phœnix from its ashes by the conversion of motion into heat.

But, then as now, the nebulæ will have given birth to suns, then as now, endless space will be filled with stars without number gravitating in the harmony of their mutual attraction, the planets will swing in the rays of their suns, mornings and evenings will follow each other, blue sky will spread overhead, clouds will float in the twilight mysteries, perfumed breezes will blow through the woods and valleys, mysterious sounds will stop the songs of the birds, and eternal love will sway a later youth with the divine rapture of insatiable aspirations. Marvellous ascension of life! Nature will chant, as it does to-day, the hymn of youth and happiness, and an imperishable spring will bloom for ever in this immense universe where the historian of the past sees nothing but tombs!

If there are no limits to space, if, whatever part of the sky our thought may essay, it can always pass on without being stopped by anything, however swift or prolonged its flight, if, in a word, space is infinite in every sense, it is the same with eternity: there is no possible limit to it, and whatever end we may imagine, whatever hour or minute fixed for its end, our thought immediately leaps the obstacle and continues on its way. Infinity even now is filled with budding worlds, worlds reaching maturity, decadent worlds, dead worlds, disseminated in all regions of an unlimited space, gaseous nebulæ, hydrogen suns, oxidised stars, planets in the course of formation, congealed satellites, disintegrated comets—the forces of Nature are everywhere active, the energy of creation remains constant, neither increasing nor diminishing, and all the scientists agree in testifying that what we call destruction and annihilation is only transformation. Astronomy reveals to us Time as it has revealed Space. It shows that there is nothing peculiar about our present epoch in the history of Nature, nor about our present position in space, and it combines Time and Space, the two forms of reality, in the same synthesis as the two grand aspects of the development of the universe.

* * * * *

No, this dream was no dream. For to the human race which lived on the different worlds of space during the ages preceding the formation of our solar system, the Earth with all its history was only a possibility of what the future might bring forth. It might never have existed at all. The writers of history of terrestrial peoples, Moses, Herodotus, Manetho, Ma-Tuan-Lin, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, Bossuet, all those who have attempted to write universal histories, the great Leibnitz himself, who placed the commencement of the history of a small German duchy at the time of creation of the world, and even the delightful author of the Metamorphoses, who tells of the history of the birth of the Earth and Heaven—the astronomer smiles at their annals, as he has smiled at the genealogies of the kings and the conquests of the Cæsars—

“Battles of ants in microscopic space.”

Simple illusions of infants who fondle their dolls!

Let them invent new microscopes for distinguishing Charlemagne and Napoleon in the ant-heap of Lilliput; we cannot find them! And the whole Earth, where is it? By an abstraction of thought, we manage to live before it and after it; its whole history has disappeared like a lightning flash which passes in the calm of a long summer day.

* * * * *

As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories, and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores stretching away to infinity!

Suddenly, an immense black veil fell from the skies and hid the view, and I saw no more. In front of this veil, our planet flew along with its speed of 62 thousand miles an hour.

I found myself again in the ordinary condition of an Earth-dweller, who sees nothing beyond the horizon, and who imagines that, in time as in space, our mediocre humanity exists alone on the world.