"The difference is more striking when we consider the fixed stars, because
in their case the distances are so enormously greater. The pole star, for
example, is so far off that light, traveling at the inconceivable speed
above mentioned, takes a little more than fifty years to reach our eyes;
and from that follows the strange but inevitable inference that we see the
pole star not as or where it is at this moment, but as and where it was
fifty years ago. Nay, if tomorrow some cosmic catastrophe were to shatter
the pole star into fragments, we should still see it peacefully shining in
the sky all the rest of our lives; our children would grow up to
middle-age and gather their children about them in turn before the news of
that tremendous accident reached any terrestial eye. In the same way there
are other stars so far distant that light takes thousands of years to
travel from them to us, and with reference to their condition our
information is therefore thousands of years behind time. Now carry the
argument a step farther. Suppose that we were able to place a man at the
distance of 186,000 miles from the earth, and yet to endow him with the
wonderful faculty of being able from that distance to see what was
happening here as clearly as though he were still close beside us.
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