MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
CHAPTER 1 
MAN'S: DHEATER OF ACTION’ 
Maw has his residence upon a world 8,000 miles in diam- 
eter. It is fifth in size and third in solar distance of the 
sun’s family of eight principal planets. The sun is an 
average star, situated about twenty-five trillions of miles 
from the nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, in the 
southern heavens. As it would be almost meaningless to 
name in miles the distances of the other stars, astronomers 
have devised another expression which is very striking. 
- This is the light-year, the distance which light, moving 
186,000 miles each second, covers in a full year. It equals 
some six trillions of miles. In these terms Alpha Centauri 
is at about four light-years’ distance from our sun and his 
family of planets. Though expressed in hundreds of 
millions of miles, the separations of the planets from each 
other and from the sun become, by comparison to the dis- 
tance of the nearest star, almost as nothing. Light travels 
from sun to earth in eight minutes. 
Only a few stars are known to lie within Ioo light-years 
of our solar system. The vast majority of them exceed 
1,000 and even 10,000 light-years in distance. The stars 
are not scattered uniformly outwards to infinity. If we 
could stand armed with a great telescope at a million light- 
years’ distance from the sun, we should see all of our own 
familiar starry system isolated like a little wheel whose rim, 
1 These introductory chapters on man’s setting are by Dr. Charles G. Abbot. 
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