Kulaki suddenly started to bob up and down in his chair. "Say, we might be on the track of something here," he said. "If those circuits have been in continuous operation for a million years ... we could learn an awful lot about reliability...."
Lee nodded in agreement. "We have a lot to learn, that's true enough." He cleared his throat nervously. "There's one more thing, I am about to publish a paper ... it's a sort of a general paper, but it has some bearing on the work going on here. I wonder if you'd be good enough to be a tryout audience for me?"
They sat back to listen.
Lee gave only the basic outline of his paper. He discussed his findings among the ruins on Mars and on the lone planet circling the star Tau Ceti; and he drew some conclusions from his investigations of the primitive human cultures found on the planetary systems of Sirius and Vega.
First, both Sirius and Vega have both been long known to be comparatively young stars. Astrophysical evidence compiled from the Twentieth Century onward, and finally geophysical data from the planets themselves, showed that Sirius and Vega—and their planets—were considerably less than a billion years old. By contrast, the Solar System was known to be at least five billion years old.
Now, the development of life takes time. It took close to three billion years for life to make its first appearance on Earth. Another two billion years of evolution were necessary before man arose.
"If the planets circling Sirius and Vega are less than one billion years old," Lee stated, "then the human populations of those planets—no matter how primitive they are—could not have originated there. They must have come from another planetary system. The closest system that could have born life on its own is our Solar System."
Second, the ruins on Tau Ceti and on Mars were both definitely built by human beings. The plans of the buildings, their furnishings and utensils, the scant writings and pictures that survived—all were of human origin.
"Although dating the time of destruction of these buildings is very difficult," Lee went on, "we can definitely say two things: they were destroyed suddenly in some immense cataclysm; and they were destroyed at very nearly the same time, both on Mars and Tau Ceti. I hadn't realized the correlation until this morning, but the destruction might easily be dated at approximately one million years ago."