Hard to find a bit of this that I can excerpt from this (“Another Empty, Lifeless Planet Found“), but I’ll try:
A reporter raised his hand tentatively. Travers stabbed her cigarette in his direction. “Wouldn’t you say,” he asked, “or rather couldn’t you say the fact that the universe is so massive and so unique and we’re learning so many new things every day is as fascinating and thrilling and scientifically significant as discovering life on planets other than our own?”
“Every day, I look at graves through a telescope,” Travers said. “Every day I study the stillbirths of the universe. We are a tiny pinprick of life in a sea of death, and it will swallow us all.”
“It will swallow us all,” the team chanted together.
Via Ken Hite, who pretty much nailed the description:
This @mallelis piece is like H.P. Lovecraft writing for the ONION: http://t.co/MCKVSs2YvK #fb
— Kenneth Hite (@kennethhite) September 18, 2013
Moe Lane
PS: I know, I know: that’s not supposed to make me feel chipper. But I’m apparently getting the latest Laundry RPG supplement on time after all, so there you go.
What’s worse than a Cosmic Horror? Nothing, it would seem.
Maybe it ties in with the giant pentacle in the former Soviet Union…
That was pretty good.
Thanks for posting that.
Think of our planet and how it has changed over the last 4+ billion years. We probably look sad when the moon decided to depart for its own orbit or the two or so times we were a ball of ice or after that asteroid deep six-ed the big lizards. We have only been farmers for less than 20,000 years and producing electromagnetic waves for about 200 years. Anyone looking for us would have missed us until very recently.
The big deciding factor in the potential for life is how many generations of its parents going nova it took to make a sun. It takes a few to produce carbon atoms and more to get up to the heavy metals. You need a certain size planet with an iron core to generate enough gravity to prevent the atmosphere from drifting away. Even so, you would probably have to discover a planet after its 4th billion birthday to have any hope of seeing even minimal life signs. Timing is everything.
That planet looks dead but as Miracle Max would say “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do…Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”