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© Copyright 1999, Jim Loy
A poet looks at the stars,
And what does he see?
He sees the beauty of points of light,
Embedded on the inside of a black dome.
And he sees ancient animals and heroes.
The beauty is in the stars.
The animals, and the heroes, and the dome,
They are interesting.
But, they are only in the poet's mind.When I look at the stars,
What do I see?
I see a wide variety of brilliant spheres,
Moving in all directions,
Through three-dimensional space.
There is no dome.
That is an optical illusion.And Each star is infinitely more interesting
than any mere point of light could ever be.
Each star has its spectrum.
It has its velocity.
It has gravitational inter-relationships with other stars.
And most interesting of all,
Each star has a history and a future,
A birth and a death.
And every single star has it own mysteries,
Some small, some large, and maybe unsolvable,
Forever.Impersonal, isn't it?
No shallow, cartoon-like heroes and gods.
Instead, up there is a star that exploded,
Maybe wiping out an entire civilization
Of beings like nothing that I can imagine.
And, over there is a star that seems to have a planet.
Are there beings on that planet,
Or on some other planet elsewhere?
What animals and heroes do they see,
When they look at our star,
When they look at us?
Author's note: Is this a mixture of science and science fiction (as I mention hypothetical civilizations)? Well, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is considered hard science by many scientists, as there are sound reasons to deduce that there are millions of civilizations out there. "SETI bites" is a palindrome, by the way. I am not particularly interested or hopeful about SETI, myself. But it will become a very important subject, if the search succeeds.