“I firmly believe that at the period when the moon was inhabited, the nights and days did not last 354 hours!”
“And why?” asked Nicholl quickly.
“Because most probably then the rotary motion of the moon upon her axis was not equal to her revolution, an equality which presents each part of her disc during fifteen days to the action of the solar rays.”
“Granted,” replied Nicholl, “but why should not these two motions have been equal, as they are really so?”
“Because that equality has only been determined by terrestrial attraction. And who can say that this attraction was powerful enough to alter the motion of the moon at that period when the earth was still fluid?”
“Just so,” replied Nicholl; “and who can say that the moon has always been a satellite of the earth?”
“And who can say,” exclaimed Michel Ardan, “that the moon did not exist before the earth?”
Their imaginations carried them away into an indefinite field of hypothesis. Barbicane sought to restrain them.
“Those speculations are too high,” said he; “problems utterly insoluble. Do not let us enter upon them. Let us only admit the insufficiency of the primordial attraction; and then by the inequality of the two motions of rotation and revolution, the days and nights could have succeeded each other on the moon as they succeed each other on the earth. Besides, even without these conditions, life was possible.”
“And so,” asked Michel Ardan, “humanity has disappeared from the moon?”