I do not fully agree with the eminent authority, though he may be right.
Much fear has been the result of the comet's appearance ever since the
world began, and it is as good a thing to worry about as anything I know
of. If we could get close to a comet without frightening it away, we
would find that we could walk through it anywhere as we could through
the glare of a torchlight procession. We should so live that we will
not be ashamed to look a comet in the eye, however. Let us pay up our
newspaper subscription and lead such lives that when the comet strikes
we will be ready.
Some worry a good deal about the chances for a big comet to plow into
the sun some dark, rainy night, and thus bust up the whole universe.
I wish that was all I had to worry about. If any respectable man will
agree to pay my taxes and funeral expenses, I will agree to do his
worrying about the comet's crashing into the bosom of the sun and
knocking its daylights out.
THE SUN.
This luminous body is 92,000,000 miles from the earth, though there have
been mornings this winter when it seemed to me that it was further than
that. A railway train going at the rate of 40 miles per hour would be
263 years going there, to say nothing of stopping for fuel or water, or
stopping on side tracks to wait for freight trains to pass. Several
years ago it was discovered that a slight error had been made in the
calculations of the sun's distance from the earth, and, owing to a
misplaced logarithm, or something of that kind, a mistake of 3,000,000
miles was made in the result. People cannot be too careful in such
matters. Supposing that, on the strength of the information contained in
the old timetable, a man should start out with only provisions
sufficient to take him 89,000,000 miles and should then find that
3,000,000 miles still stretched out ahead of him. He would then have to
buy fresh figs of the train boy in order to sustain life. Think of
buying nice fresh figs on a train that had been en route 250 years!
Imagine a train boy starting out at ten years of age, and perishing at
the age of 60 years with only one-fifth of his journey accomplished.
Think of five train boys, one after the other, dying of old age on the
way, and the train at last pulling slowly into the depot with not a
living thing on board except the worms in the "nice eating apples!"
The sun cannot be examined through an ordinary telescope with impunity.
Only one man ever tried that, and he is now wearing a glass eye that
cost him $9.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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