“SMALLNESS OF THE EARTH AS COMPARED WITH THE SUN AND FIXED STARS; GRANDEUR OF ITS PHENOMENA. -FORM OF THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE ; ITS DIMENSIONS.
The earth on which we dwell is one of the lowest in rank among the heavenly bodies. If an astronomer in some other planet were exploring the immensity of space, our earth, owing to its small size, might readily elude his intelligent view. A mere satellite of the sun, the volume of which is 1,255,000 times greater, the earth is but a point as compared with the immense tract of ether traversed by the planets in their courses round their central globe. The sun itself is only a spark, which seems lost amid the eighteen millions of stars which Herschel’s telescope discerned in the Milky Way; the latter, an immense agglomeration of suns and planets, which looks to us like a broad streak of light round the whole universe, is in reality nothing but a nebula; that is, a cloud of stars resembling a mist, which would be as nothing in infinite space. Beyond our own sky, other skies stretch far away into infinity, and others beyond these, so that light, notwithstanding its prodigious rapidity, takes eternities to cross them. How small the earth seems in this fathomless abyss of stars! Individually, it may seem immense to us; all too vast for our
littleness, we have not yet succeeded in investigating the whole of its surface; but, as compared with the whole sidereal cosmos, it is less than a grain of sand by the side of a mass of mountains, or an atmospheric particle compared with aerial space.”
from Biblioteca de Anarquismo y Anarquistas (2009-ongoing)
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías