Leave "Terrestrialism at the Threshold"

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and e...

 1420 megahertz

In the Next Generation episode “Galaxy's Child,” the Enterprise stumbles upon an alien life-form that lives in empty space, feeding on energy. Particularly tasty is radiation with a very specific frequency 1420 million cycles per second, having a wavelength of 21 cm. In the spirit of Pythagoras, if there were a Music of the Spheres, surely this would be its opening tone. Fourteen hundred and twenty megahertz is the natural frequency of precession of the spin of an electron as it encircles th...

 The Difference Between Vegetable and Animal

Thus it might be said, that the vegetable is only the sketch, nor rather the ground-work of the animal; that for the formation of the latter, it has only been requisite to clothe the former with an apparatus of external organs, by which it might be connected with external objects. From hence it follows, that the functions of the animal are of two very different classes. By the one (which is composed of an habitual succession of assimilation and excretion) it lives within itself, transforms i...