Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed
to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight
hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but
then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles
--twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then I
took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there was
an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty
pages, and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as one
line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two
thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort
of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into
space."
Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that
great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty
thousand years (Lord Kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have
been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000 souls. I
assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in Paradise and
the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago. Traveling at
the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in
Alpha Centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out
behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart.
Few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures
as these.
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