Children of the Sun
"Salamanders in the Sun who brandish as they run
Tails like the Americas in size,
Were stunned by it and dazed; wondering, they gazed
Up at Earth, misgiving in their eyes."
The Turn of the Tide
by C. S. Lewis
The fields; hard as granite were the clods;
Hedges stiff with ice; the sedge, in the vice
Of the ponds, like little iron rods.
The deathly stillness spread from Bethlehem; it was shed
Wider each moment on the land;
Through rampart and wall into camp and into hall
Stole the hush. All tongues were at a stand.
Travellers at their beer in taverns turned to hear
The landlord—that oracle was dumb;
At the Procurator’s feast a jocular freedman ceased
His story, and gaped; all were glum.
Then the silence flowed forth to the islands and the north
And it smoothed the unquiet river-bars,
And leveled out the waves from their revelling, and paved
The sea with the cold, reflected stars.
Where the Cæsar sat and signed at ease on Palatine,
Without anger, the signatures of death,
There stole into his room and on his soul a gloom,
Till he paused in his work and held his breath.
Then to Carthage and the Gauls, to Parthia and the Falls
Of Nile, to Mount Amara it crept;
The romp and rage of beasts in swamp and forest ceased,
The jungle grew still as if it slept.
So it ran about the girth of the planet. From the Earth
The signal, the warning, went out,
Away beyond the air; her neighbours were aware
Of change, they were troubled with doubt.
Salamanders in the Sun who brandish as they run
Tails like the Americas in size,
Were stunned by it and dazed; wondering, they gazed
Up at Earth, misgiving in their eyes.
In Houses and Signs the Ousiarchs divine
Grew pale and questioned what it meant;
Great Galactic lords stood back to back with swords
Half-drawn, awaiting the event,
And a whisper among them passed, “Is this perhaps the last
Of our story and the glories of our crown?—
The entropy worked out?—the central redoubt
Abandoned?—The world-spring running down?”
Then they could speak no more. Weakness overbore
Even them; they were as flies in a web,
In lethargy stone-dumb. The death had almost come,
And the tide lay motionless at ebb.
Like a stab at that moment over Crab and Bowman,
Over Maiden and Lion, came the shock
Of returning life, the start, and burning pang at heart,
Setting galaxies to tingle and rock.
The Lords dared to breathe, swords went into sheathes
A rustling, a relaxing began;
With rumour and noise of the resuming of joys
Along the nerves of the universe it ran.
Then, pulsing into space with delicate dulcet pace,
Came a music infinitely small,
But clear; and it swelled and drew nearer, till it held
All worlds with the sharpness of its call,
And now divinely deep, ever louder, with a leap
And quiver of inebriating sound,
The vibrant dithyramb shook Libra and the Ram,
The brains of Aquarius spun round—
Such a note as neither Throne nor Potentate had known
Since the Word created the abyss.
But this time it was changed in a mystery, estranged,
A paradox, an ambiguous bliss.
Heaven danced to it and burned; such answer was returned
To the hush, the Favete, the fear
That Earth had sent out. Revel, mirth and shout
Descended to her, sphere below sphere,
Till Saturn laughed and lost his latter age’s frost
And his beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;
The monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,
The unwedded Moon, forgot her woes;
A shiver of re-birth and deliverance round the Earth
Went gliding; her bonds were released;
Into broken light the breeze once more awoke the seas,
In the forest it wakened every beast;
Capripods fell to dance from Taproban to France,
Leprechauns from Down to Labrador;
In his green Asian dell the Phoenix from his shell
Burst forth and was the Phoenix once more.
So Death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless’d
Nothing greater could be heard
Than sighing wind in the thorn, the cry of One new-born,
And cattle in stable as they stirred.
From The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds by Flammarion, 1862:
THE HABITABILITY OF THE SUN
It is ridiculous to affirm that we are the sole purpose of the creation of the Earth, and that this star, on which have been distributed certain biological conditions far superior to those with which the Earth is clothed, would have no other prospects before it than a permanent sterility and an eternal death.
The question of the final causes, raised by the habitability of satellites, brings into the field the question of the habitability of the Sun, of comets, of stars which do not appear to have been created for themselves, but with a view to other worlds. The Sun, this abundant source of light and life which sustains on our worlds so many races of organized beings, this central pivot whose domination ensures the stability, regularity and harmony of planetary movements, the Sun, we say, has as its principal aim the well-determined function of supporting the system in the voids of space. But if we consider that a great multiplicity of actions is ordinarily carried out in the works of Nature, and that this essentially active power constantly tends to the greatest sum of useful work, taking advantage of the apparently weakest forces, in places where one would least have supposed their presence or the possibility of their action, it will be admitted that to the indispensable utility of the Sun as support and home of the worlds, could be added the more admirable utility in its luxury of being the abode of high intelligences, occupying this radiant earth which knows neither nights nor winters, whose splendor eclipses all others, and which remains suspended like a magnificent region, enriched perhaps with the most opulent productions of nature; the works of creation always contribute to the most useful effect and the most complete goal. But let us hasten to say that these conjectures are purely hypothetical, seductive perhaps, but far below the reasons and facts on which the doctrine of the plurality of worlds is based. It would be vain and senseless to attempt to scientifically treat the question of the inhabitants of the Sun. The Englishman Knight, in a book in which he undertook to explain all the phenomena of nature by attraction and repulsion; the famous Doctor Elliot, who was acquitted in a court of assizes debate for having claimed that the Sun was inhabited and thus having passed himself off as mad; William Herschel, who came eight years later to espouse these ideas which had earned their author the title of madman (and life), and to proclaim the habitability of the solar star.
Bode, the German astronomer, wrote a memoir on the happiness of the Solarians; and several astronomers of our century, among whom we will cite Humboldt and Arago, believed, it is true, in this possibility, and adopted the theory of the solar physical constitution which seemed to permit habitation. Others have maintained not only that this star was inhabited, but also, following the example of Bode, that it was an immense abode of delights and longevity, and that the most precious biological advantages had been given to the most important of the worlds of the system, to the one which dominates all the others, which governs them, and which envelops them in its beneficial rays of heat and light. But whoever would indulge in arbitrary speculations on its habitability and its habitation would be engaging in error from the first step. As we have seen, the most recent work in physical astronomy removes us from the hypothesis that has been adopted since William Herschel on its physical constitution, a hypothesis favorable to its habitation, and the new analyses that have been made on this star offer very serious questions to those in favor of its habitability.
From Starmaker by Olaf Stabledon, 1937:
[The book talks about entire stars as living intelligent organisms] In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These "salamanders" either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star's own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star's tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows.
The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another.
From Flames by Olaf Stapledon, 1947:
Presently the flame began loudly calling out for its lost comrades, if I may so describe an invocation which was entirely telepathic. I cannot tell what words it used, if words at all. I was aware mainly of its visual images of other creatures like itself, and of its passionate yearning toward them; also of its longing for help and its memories of its past life. Translating these as well as I can, I think its appeal ran more or less thus: "Comrades, brothers! Where are you? Where am I? What has happened to me? I was with you in the cooling of the earth, when we knew that our time was done, and we must reconcile ourselves to eternal sleep in the crevices of the chilling lava. But now I am awake again and alone. What has happened? Oh help me, brothers, if any of you are awake and free? Break into this prison of cold solitariness! Lead me into the bright heat once more, and warm me with your presence. Or let me sleep again."
After a while the flame's call for help and comradeship was answered... "Do not despair," the voice said, "you will soon have less discomfort, Since you fell asleep, with so many others, the whole earth's surface has turned cold and hard, save where there is cold liquid. So long have you slept, that the very laws of nature have changed, so that the processes of your body are all out of gear with each other and with the changed world. Soon they will readjust themselves, and establish a new harmony; and then you will have health." The flame cried out "But why am I a prisoner? What is this cold, cramping cell? And where are the rest of you?" The answer came. "We are all prisoners. Hosts are sleeping prisoners up and down the earth's cold, solid crust. Hosts also are caught in the depth of the hot interior, not chilled into sleep, but impotent, held fast under the great weight of lava, and reduced by aeons of stillness and boredom into an uneasy trance. Here and there the lava bursts out over the cold surface of the earth, and a few break free; but very soon the cold subdues them."
From the article "A Giant Trilobite on the Sun":
"We've never seen anything quite like it," says solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters.
Last week she sat in an audience of nearly two hundred colleagues at the "Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and watched in amazement as Saku Tsuneta of Japan played a movie of sunspot 10926 breaking through the turbulent surface of the sun. Before their very eyes an object as big as a planet materialized, and no one was prepared for the form it took.
"It looks like a prehistoric trilobite," said Marc De Rosa, a scientist from Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. "To me it seemed more like cellular mitosis in which duplicated chromosomes self-assemble into two daughter cells," countered Guhathakurta.
The data were gathered by the Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft, launched in Sept. 2006 on a mission to study sunspots and solar storms. "This is the highest resolution magnetogram ever taken from space," says Tsuneta, Hinode's chief scientist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo. "It's showing us things we've never seen before."
From the article "Argonne scientists design self-assembled “micro-robots”:
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