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Could That Have Been What Happened To The Human Race - A Willing Perversity That Set At Naught All Human Values Which Had Been So Hardly Won And Structured In The Light Of Reason For A Span Of More Than A Million Years?

-Clifford D. Simak

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Could That Have Been

Clifford D. Simak

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Could That Have Been What Happened To The Human Race - A Willing Perversity That Set At Naught All Human Values Which Had Been So Hardly Won And Structured In The Light Of Reason For A Span Of More Than A Million Years?

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The Chain Of Life Runs Smoothly From One Generation To The Next And None Of The Links Stand Out Except Here And There A Link One Sees By Accident.

This Is Written In The Elder Days As The Earth Rides Close To The Rim Of Eternity, Edging Nearer To The Dying Sun, Into Which Her Two Inner Companions Of The Solar System Have Already Plunged To A Fiery Death. The Twilight Of The Gods Is History; And Our Planet Drifts On And On Into That Oblivion From Which Nothing Escapes, To Which Time Itself May Be Dedicated In The Final Cosmic Reckoning.

These Are The Stories The Dogs Tell, When The Fires Burn High And The Wind Is From The North.

If The Means Were Available, We Could Trace Our Ancestry - Yours And Mine - Back To The First Blob Of Life-like Material That Came Into Being On The Planet.

Before Man Goes To The Stars He Should Learn How To Live On Earth .

It Would Seem To Me That By The Time A Race Has Achieved Deep Space Capability It Would Have Matured To A Point Where It Would Have No Thought Of Dominating Another Intelligent Species.

I'm Just A Propagandist And A Propagandist Doesn't Have To Know What He Is Talking About, Just So He Talks About It Most Convincingly.

You Still Could Go To Some Industry Or Some University Or The Government And If You Could Persuade Them You Had Something On The Ball—why, Then, They Might Put Up The Cash After Cutting Themselves In On Just About All Of The Profits. And, Naturally, They'd Run The Show Because It Was Their Money And All You Had Done Was The Sweating And The Bleeding.

I Have Tried At Times To Place Humans In Perspective Against The Vastness Of Universal Time And Space. I Have Been Concerned With Where We, As A Race, May Be Going And What May Be Our Purpose In The Universal Scheme — If We Have A Purpose. In General, I Believe We Do, And Perhaps An Important One.

We Came Into A Homeless Frontier, A Place Where We Were Not Welcome, Where Nothing That Lived Was Welcome, Where Thought And Logic Were Abhorrent And We Were Frightened, But We Went Into This Place Because The Universe Lay Before Us, And If We Were To Know Ourselves, We Must Know The Universe

Could That Have Been What Happened To The Human Race - A Willing Perversity That Set At Naught All Human Values Which Had Been So Hardly Won And Structured In The Light Of Reason For A Span Of More Than A Million Years?

My Reluctance To Use Alien Invasion Is Due To The Feeling That We Are Not Likely To Be Invaded And Taken Over. It Would Seem To Me That By The Time A Race Has Achieved Deep Space Capability It Would Have Matured To A Point Where It Would Have No Thought Of Dominating Another Intelligent Species. Further Than This, There Should Be No Economic Necessity Of Its Doing So. By The Time It Was Able To Go Into Deep Space, It Must Have Arrived At An Energy Source Which Would Not Be Based On Planetary Natural Resources.

Much Of What We See In The Universe ... Starts Out As Imaginary. Often You Must Imagine Something Before You Can Come To Terms With It.

It Is Only Of Life On Earth, However, That One Can Speak With Any Certainty. It Seems To Me That All Life On Earth, The Sum Total Of Life Upon The Earth, Has Purpose.

Once There Had Been Joy, But Now There Was Only Sadness, And It Was Not, He Knew, Alone The Sadness Of An Empty House; It Was The Sadness Of All Else, The Sadness Of The Earth, The Sadness Of The Failures And The Empty Triumphs.

It Seems To Me, Thinking Of It, That There Must Be Some Universal Plan Which Set In Motion The Orbiting Of The Electrons About The Nucleus And The Slower, More Majestic Orbit Of The Galaxies About One Another To The Very Edge Of Space

Without Consciousness And Intelligence, The Universe Would Lack Meaning.

There Is A Plan, It Seems To Me, That Reaches Out Of The Electron To The Rim Of The Universe And What This Plan May Be Or How It Came About Is Beyond My Feeble Intellect. But If We Are Looking For Something On Which To Pin Our Faith- And, Indeed, Our Hope- The Plan Might Well Be It. I Think We Have Thought Too Small And Have Been Too Afraid.

Time Is Still The Great Mystery To Us. It Is No More Than A Concept; We Don't Know If It Even Exists.

What Do You Mean By Faith? Is Faith Enough For Man? Should He Be Satisfied With Faith Alone? Is There No Way Of Finding Out The Truth? Is The Attitude Of Faith, Of Believing In Something For Which There Can Be No More Than Philosophic Proof, The True Mark Of A Christian?

If Mankind Were To Continue In Other Than The Present Barbarism, A New Path Must Be Found, A New Civilization Based On Some Other Method Than Technology

This Is The Very Center Of Everything There Is. A Huge Black Hole Eating Up The Galaxy. The End Of Everything.

And Time Itself? Time Was A Never-ending Medium That Stretched Into The Future And The Past - Except There Was No Future And No Past, But An Infinite Number Of Brackets, Extending Either Way, Each Bracket Enclosing Its Single Phase Of The Universe.

I Did Not Want To Move. For I Had The Feeling That This Was A Place, Once Seen, That Could Not Be Seen Again. If I Left And Then Came Back, It Would Not Be The Same; No Matter How Many Times I Might Return To This Particular Spot The Place And Feeling Would Never Be The Same, Something Would Be Lost Or Something Would Be Added, And There Never Would Exist Again, Through All Eternity, All The Integrated Factors That Made It What It Was In This Magic Moment.

My Reluctance To Use Alien Invasion Is Due To The Feeling That We Are Not Likely To Be Invaded And Taken Over.

Inside The Time Bubble We Do Not Age. We Age Only When We Are Outside Of It.

When I Talk Of The Purpose Of Life, I Am Thinking Not Only Of Human Life, But Of All Life On Earth And Of The Life Which Must Exist Upon Other Planets Throughout The Universe.

Here Lies One From A Distant Star, But The Soil Is Not Alien To Him, For In Death He Belongs To The Universe.

I Have Not Long To Live. I Have Lasted More Than A Man's Average Allotted Span, And While I Still Am Hale And Hearty, I Know Full Well The Hand Of Time , While It May Miss A Man At One Reaping, Will Get Him At The Next.

Must Faith Be Exactly That, The Willingness And Ability To Believe In The Face Of A Lack Of Evidence? If One Could Find The Evidence, Would Then The Faith Be Dead?

We Said, There's Another Second Gone, There's Another Minute And Another Hour And Another Day, When, As A Matter Of Fact The Second Or The Minute Or The Hour Was Never Gone. It Was The Same One All The Time. It Had Just Moved Along And We Had Moved With It.

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