OUR FIRST AGE: Title Page & Song

IN THE BEGINNING

‘At first the infant, mewling and puking’

As You Like It, II, vii, 143-4

‘Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm –

a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms,
inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.’
Lynn Margulis & Dorian Sagan

The song I have chosen for Our First Age was written by Eric Idle from ‘Monty Python’. He called it ‘The Galaxy Song’, http://www.mwscomp.com/sound.html. This is the version sung by Australian John Seed, a renowned global activist for the environment.

EXPANDING UNIVERSE

Remember that you’re standing on a planet that's evolving,
And revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A Sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm at 40,000 miles an hour,
In a galaxy they call the Milky Way . . .
ECHO: Our Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains 400 billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light-years side-to-side.
It bulges in the middle 16,000 light-years thick,
But out by us it's just 3,000 light-years wide.
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point.
We go round every 200 million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe . . .
ECHO: Our Universe.

The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
12 million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth. *
And sink your roots deep into the galaxy,
Dance your life on Planet Earth.
ECHO: Yes, sink your roots deep into reality,
Dance your life for Planet Earth.

ORIGINAL ENDING (after *)
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

*******

I intend to post the five scenes of Our First Age throughout June,
and then one Age each month until December.
That means that the Epilogue and Two-Page Timeline will be posted in January.
If you would rather have a free email copy of the book, please sign in to my Guestbook
(see first post: An Introduction),
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