Dreams of an astronomer

by Camille Flammarion

III. THE WORLD TO COME

CHAPTER III
THE WORLD TO COME

The future is as real as the past. The world to come is in the mind’s eye as substantial as the world of long ago.

ONCE upon a time, in a solar system belonging to the constellation Andromeda, a planet a million times the size of our Earth bore on its surface a very advanced human race. The eyes of its inhabitants were constructed differently from ours and received radiations which are dark to us. Also, instead of five senses those human organisms possessed twelve. Their subtle and far-seeing industry had invented instruments of great space-penetrating power, and they had succeeded in determining at immense distances the volumes, masses, densities, physical and chemical constitutions, the movements, and the intrinsic nature of worlds at present quite indiscernible to us.

Amidst the glories of a sumptuous civilisation, those human beings, whose form did not at all resemble ours, thought, in spite of their progress in astronomy, that they were the centre, the final goal, and the justification for the existence of the universe. Some of their philosophers had indeed put forward the idea of a probability of inhabited worlds, but this idea, received with scepticism by most of the learned men and resolutely rejected by the theologians, was only accepted by the most liberal spirits with a reservation concerning the intellectual superiority of their race, considered as the necessary and normal type of all humanity. To them it seemed impossible that Nature should create anything other or better than what had been established in their own world; the zoology of their own planet set a standard, and living beings, they thought, could not be organised otherwise than as they knew them. To their minds, the area accessible to their observation included all the possible manifestations of the forces acting throughout the cosmos. It was only possible to have twelve senses, neither more nor less.

There came a time when some transcending genius discovered among the stars of the constellation which terrestrial astronomers call Centaurus the star which we call the Sun and around which we gravitate. He noticed round this star nine principal spheres circulating round it, and, by some secret sympathy, he directed his attraction chiefly to the globe which we now inhabit.

The star—our own Sun—and the nine planets we have just mentioned were invisible in our sense of the word. They only emitted dark rays, black light. For a long time already, in fact, the Sun had been extinct, and the humanities who had lived on the surface of the Earth, of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, of the trans-Neptunian planet and its sisters, had died in turn and had been gradually erased from the great book of universal life.

But by means of the superior methods of investigation which this Andromedic astronomer had at his disposal, he succeeded, after a laborious study which it took him 250 years of continuous work to complete, in reconstructing the history of the terrestrial globe, which interested him specially, and in discovering that it had been formerly inhabited by animals of different species, and in particular by certain bipeds endowed with relative intelligence.

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This obscure globe, a black bullet revolving round another black bullet, had a whole history of its own. It had contained in former times an intense and luxuriant life. The springs and summers had brought forth a profusion of flowers and fruit in the sunlit fields, the land had unfolded its golden carpet of corn, springs had murmured among the hills, birds had sung in the trees, the perfumed breezes of meadows and woods had been wafted through the valleys, rivers had rolled through the vast plains, villages and towns had grown up along their banks, human communities had gradually peopled the world, inventing fruitful industries, delightful arts, brilliant sciences; prodigious cities had, in different ages, raised palaces for kings and temples for gods; Memphis had succeeded Babylon, Athens had followed Memphis, Rome had cast Athens into oblivion, Paris had eclipsed Rome, and had vanished in its turn; hundreds of millions of brains had thought, hundreds of millions of hearts had beaten, eternal loves had been sworn, divine embraces had united loving souls, innocent children, charged by the light of day, had held out their arms for the kisses of their mothers, and life in all its forms had sparkled for millions of years in sheaves of light ever renewed like universal and inextinguishable fireworks. Struggles, miseries, lies, rivalries, ambitions, battles, despairs, tears, mournings, had too often disfigured with black tempests the sky whose clearness had, in the springtime of life, seemed unchangeable.

What had dominated everything was a wise and impenetrable trickery by which Nature persuaded all young girls to become women, to adorn themselves with irresistible allurements, and to open their arms to men in order to assure the continuity of life, hiding from their truthful eyes the dangers and sufferings to which she condemns them by surrounding them with flowers. And thus humanity had continued without a stop, believing that its destiny was to enjoy without end and progress without a limit; and thus it had finally reached the annihilation of the race and the planet, without leaving anything behind of its splendours and its conquests. What is past is past. Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if that history had never been written.

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For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas, shedding light and heat around it. After being a brilliant white it had become yellow and then red, passing, in the course of its cooling process, through the successive stages of white, yellow, orange, and red suns like Sirius, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, and Antares. As it had grown cooler, terrestrial life had become attenuated. The Sun had finally been covered with a solid crust, often pierced by the pressure of the incandescent lava within, and giving rise to prodigious volcanoes. With the failure of light and heat, the joys and pains of terrestrial life had come to an end. And the radiant day-star of former days had become an obscure globe covered with oceans and clouds, without a new sun to illuminate it, without day or twilight, careering through space in the eternal night, and gradually enveloped in a winding sheet of ice and snow consisting of carbonic acid. All the nations of the Earth had gone to rest in as many cemeteries. The dying Sun had recapitulated in its evolution the phases of its ancestors. In infinite space, the extinct suns are much more numerous than the luminous suns, and the stars revived by collision with another are the exception. Temporary stars, which only shine a short time, are exceptional occurrences.

Thus our extinct Sun still roamed through the void, carrying along its retinue of defunct planets and travelling with great speed through empty and unconcerned space.

And at the time of which we are speaking, the stars still shone in the sky, the worlds still gravitated around the suns in space; but they were no longer the same stars, nor the same suns, planets, or humanities; it was neither the Earth nor its contemporaries. Life continued to blossom; but it was not our life.

Just as, before the birth of the Earth, other worlds had flourished in space, so also after the death of our planet will the universe continue to exist, as it existed during the human era. And in the world of which we speak, a new and flourishing humanity shone in the joy of another sun. What had happened was in direct opposition to what terrestrial theologians had taught us concerning the end of the world. For them the end of the world was to have meant the end of the living universe and the establishment of a celestial and infernal world. For every one of the mortals inhabiting the future globe of which we speak, life passed with the fugitive and inexorable speed of the river which flows from its source to the sea, day by day, month by month, year by year, so swiftly that at the end of its course all the moments of that life seem to touch.

The inhabitants of the world of Andromeda lived on their immense globe and occupied themselves with their personal affairs as if our Earth had never existed and without suspecting that long before them, in the past, our human race had played the game of destiny, cradled in the illusion that they existed alone in the world. Nobody thought, amid the common people, that worlds succeeded each other in time as well as in space. Only the thinkers standing on the heights from which the whole of things and events can be surveyed, realised that important truth, that the doctrine of the plurality of worlds applies to eternity as well as to infinity.

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In our attempts to arrive at an idea of the constitution of the universe, two questions constantly and inevitably present themselves to our minds: the questions of Space and Time. They are correlative, but their interpretations are far from being identical, as is often supposed.

Space does not exist by itself, nor does time.

It is impossible to imagine the suppression of space. It is asserted in vain that space is the interval which separates two objects, and that if the objects are suppressed, space vanishes also. That is a pure scholastic sophism. The definition is not exact. One can safely say that it is impossible to suppress by a thought the place where objects could be. The place, the locality, that void, if you like, by whatever noun it is designated, is there quite ready to receive any object which our imagination can suppose to be there. Even though the universe did not exist, if nothing, absolutely nothing, existed, that nothing would still be space, empty space ready to receive an object. We are then forced to conclude that space exists by itself, even if it cannot be measured in any way.

It is not the same with time.

Time is created by the movements of the heavenly bodies. If the earth did not turn, nor the stars, if there were no succession of periods, time would not exist. It is astronomy which has created time.

If you suppress the universe, space continues to exist, but time ceases, vanishes, disappears.

We measure the duration of a second, of an hour, of a day, of a year, because the heavenly bodies are there as points of reference between which we can count. Besides, it is all relative. If the Earth moved twice as slowly, the days would be twice as long, but would be apparently the same. If our calendar were different, it would still be our measure of time, and we should be none the wiser.

One may put all the clocks forward or backward by one hour, and all the calendars by one day, one month, or one year, change the reckoning of the centuries, or modify the time system in any way one pleases, but it would not change the real course of nature.

The terrestrial days and years do not count in the heavens. The time which can be measured in our own system on the nearest planets, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune, although simultaneous with that which we measure here, is not relative to ours. Time is essentially local. If we did not exist there might be other measures of time, but it would not be time according to our conception. In fact our impressions are relative, there is nothing absolute in time. If we suppress life, the sensation of time disappears, time itself ceases to exist. In empty space, a thousand centuries are no longer than one minute, because they do not exist.

It is we who say “yesterday” and “to-morrow.” To nature, everything is “to-day.” Besides, every one of us has had the opportunity of proving for himself that time does not exist when we sleep. To sleep one hour or five hours is the same to us as regards the appreciation of time. Time being purely relative, a sleep of a decillion years would be the same as the sleep of an hour.

Renan the philosopher, who expressed this truth, added: “Heaven does not exist; in a decillion years it may possibly exist. Those whom a tardy justice places there will believe that they have died the previous evening. To have been, means to be. Succession is the absolute condition of our mind; but in a material object, succession and simultaneity are confounded. When in the presence of death, we ask whether the night will be long, we are as simple as the child who asks the same question in going to bed, because he loves the daylight in which he plays.”

If our thinking monads are associated with these worlds to come, eternity is their empire.

Speaking in the absolute, time does not exist. But space exists.

It might be objected that space itself is a measure, and when we cannot measure it we cannot know it. No doubt if the terrestrial globe were 100 times smaller, 8 feet would barely be as long as one inch, and the man measuring “6 feet” from head to foot would really only be ¾ inch high. But nothing would appear smaller, because the metre would still be the ten-millionth part of the quarter circumference of the Earth, and everything would be reduced in the same proportion. As in the case of time, measurement is essentially relative and has nothing absolute about it. But this does not alter the fact that time only exists by the succession of events, whereas space exists absolutely.

Empty space, which is nothing to our senses unless we measure it by some length, cannot be suppressed. Whether we measure it or not this is nothing to do with its existence by itself. These measures of space which we take have no common measure with infinity, nor with absolute space; yet they are taken in absolute space, and depend upon our means of observation. In the infinite void we can imagine several measures of space, all very different: for example, a fourth dimension which for us has no dimensions at all, and in which modes of investigation unknown to us can discover other dimensions which we cannot even guess at, since for us three dimensions exhaust all possible measurements of space.

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The past which is no longer in existence, the future which is not yet, is contained as a germ in the present. To the universal eye, everything is in the present. In transporting ourselves, as we have done, into future times, we observe the events of those future times as if they were already present and already past. We are ephemeral atoms floating in the bosom of eternity, seen for an instant in a beam of light. We regard our epoch as a permanent reality—the illusion of a grain of dust which appears and disappears in the beam.

He who contemplates nature must live in those ages as yet uncreated as well as in those which have passed away. And the future as well as the past are even more real than the present, which does not exist, since from one second to another time climbs up into the future only to fall Lack into the pit of the past. Shall we say that the “present” is the present hour? No, for an hour is long. The present minute? No, for the minute is long to the observing astronomer or physicist. The present second! No, for it is exceedingly long to electrify. Shall we reduce the “present” to the tenth of a second? Yes, if you like, but it is still relative to our sensations. Still, let us agree to that. Here, then, is the present—a tenth of a second! All the rest is past or future, and eternity is the only permanent reality.

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Thus, from that point of space and time where we were placed in that celestial region of the constellation of Andromeda, we have seen arise before us, like a mummy awakening from a long sleep, the history of the dead Earth, while we saw life shaping itself in a world which, in our twentieth century, was not yet in existence. Thence, reascending through the ages, we watched the slow secular evolution of our humanity, until sunlit days became night and we lived in a new present which, in its turn, seemed unique and eternal.

The world to come is there, in the future eternity, just as the world of long ago is there, in the eternity of the past, and all is present in the Absolute.

God does not look either forward or backward. He does not remember, he does not foresee: he sees. We can write our verbs in the different times, past, present, and future. In transporting ourselves by means of thought beyond even the distant era of which we have sketched an episode, we could describe even this episode as an ancient event.

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The history which we have written took place—a hundred million years after to-day!