“It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see us as the minutest speck.”

For a time I stared in silence at the moon.

“It’s a world,” I said; “one feels that infinitely more than one ever did on earth. People perhaps⁠—”

“People!” he exclaimed. “ No! Banish all that! Think yourself a sort of ultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space. Look at it!”

He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below. “It’s dead⁠—dead! Vast extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you think they have seen?”

“None.”