![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When Alpha sets, Beta is at zenith when Gamma is at aphelion, Delta is near. In his 1941 short story "Nightfall", Isaac Asimov takes us to Lagash, a planet deep in a globular cluster surrounded by not one, not two, not three – but six nearby stars. Darkness is an inescapable fact of life on earth, an astronomical certainty which, for all the terror it brings in childhood, gives our daily existence its rise and fall, its ebb and flow, as night follows day follows night.īut what if it wasn't like that? What if night were not only dense and all-encompassing, but also sudden and unexpected? What if daylight were so pervasive, so constant, that total darkness was unimaginable, inconceivable? What if there were no one to teach us how not to be afraid of the dark? Stand there on the brow of the hill in Greenwich Park, your head still full of planets spinning on their computer-generated orbits, with the National Maritime Museum, the curve of the river, Canary Wharf and all the city stretched out beneath you, and the vista seems to roll inexorably east towards the curtain of night. Stumbling out from beneath the 45-tonne bronze cone of London's planetarium, unsteady from a virtual voyage through the solar system and beyond, you can picture the earth turning beneath your feet. ![]()
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