ut into singing. No one would dare to say that a
thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for
moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be
manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating
houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from
door to door in cases and bottles.

First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with
a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,
outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea
that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be
more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we
ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be
much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our
continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from
the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what
science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick
out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We
manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet
as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,
we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one
wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and
mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected
enough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest
has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the
force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or
flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over
the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of
gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a
glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or
so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),
everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure
would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When
completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space
(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and
more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a
connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one
would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that
would a