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# 2019-02-18 - The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke | |
Illustration | |
A hard science fiction story about an atheist, Utopian human colony | |
in the far future that is visited by travelers from a doomed Earth, | |
as the Sun has gone nova. I enjoyed the idyllic, peaceful tone of | |
the story. | |
Another review notes that this book deals with the question of | |
whether humanity can thrive without the existence of challenge. Our | |
history has been the story of struggle against the elements, the | |
wild, and each other. Would we stagnate if aggression and strife | |
were bred out of the species? | |
# Intro | |
The total failure to find any trace of life in this Solar System, or | |
to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great | |
antennas should be easily able to detect, has prompted some | |
scientists to argue "Perhaps we ARE alone in the Universe..." | |
Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said, EITHER | |
answer will be awe inspiring. The question can only be settled by | |
evidence, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would | |
like to see the whole debate given a decade or two of benign neglect, | |
while the radio-astronomers, like gold miners panning for dust, | |
quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky. | |
"And the third, of course, was the seeding of the nearby stars in the | |
hope that the human race would not perish with the dying of its Sun." | |
[A human centric view.] | |
# Chapter 17. Chain of Command | |
"You can thank Earth for that. You gave us a Jefferson Mark Three | |
Constitution--someone once called it utopia in two megabytes--and | |
it's worked amazingly well. The program hasn't been modified for | |
three hundred years. We're still only on the Sixth Amendment." | |
# Chapter 21. Academy | |
"Hence it followed that all life forms were worthy of respect and | |
should be cherished. Some argued that even virulent pathogens and | |
disease vectors should not be exterminated under strict safeguards. | |
"Reverence for Life" became a very popular phrase during the Last | |
Days--and few applied it exclusively to human life." | |
"The concept of 'Metalaw'--I'm sure you've all heard the term--became | |
very popular. Was it possible to develop legal and moral codes | |
applicable to all intelligent creatures, and not merely to the | |
bipedal, air-breathing mammals who had briefly dominated Planet | |
Earth?" | |
[A more than human centric view.] | |
# Chapter 51. Relic | |
"It was given to me by some old and dear friends on my very last | |
night on Earth. 'All things are impermanent,' they reminded me. | |
'But we have guarded this for more than four thousand years. Take it | |
with you to the stars, with our blessings.'" | |
"It's all that's left of one of the greatest men who ever lived; he | |
founded the only faith that never became stained with blood. I'm | |
sure he would have been most amused to know that, forty centuries | |
after his death, one of his teeth would be carried to the stars." | |
[This is a reference to Gautama Buddha.] | |
# Chapter 54. Valediction | |
"Once I teased her by saying that fidelity was almost as strange to | |
the Lassans as jealousy; she retorted that they had gained by losing | |
both." | |
[The Lassan colony also embraced polyamory.] | |
author: Clarke, Arthur C. (Arthur Charles), 1917-2008 | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth | |
LOC: PR6005.L36 S66 | |
tags: book,fiction,sci-fi | |
title: The Songs of Distant Earth | |
# Tags | |
book | |
fiction | |
sci-fi |