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This moment exists to us. The same moment is being shared by other planets and other stars. Or is it? TPL A ahs fon A Alnenne nen mines bade IN cranes tA nanan nnnnn 2nd The light from a distant star may take 30 years to cross space and reach us. We can see a nova (exploding star) 1,000 years after it has actually burst and vanished. With strong telescopes, we can peer into the past. We could see that event 1,000 years after it had happened. Perhaps we could see a planet near that star, see a whole population panic and go mad as their sun started to expand and pour heat and radiation onto them. Perhaps long after our own planet is a dead cinder some dispassionate astronomer in some remote part of the universe will collect the light from abi. ae. 224 this moment and watch us groveling about in this year. We have learned to measure time by observing the special charac- teristics of our environment. Our days and nights are measured by the length of time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis. Our years are the number of days it takes to make one complete circuit around the sun. Our lives are scaled by the number of years our delicate organisms can survive. If the earth did not rotate, there would be no days. If it did not En | es eS | DEES | circuit the sun, there would be no years. If we were larger or smaller and lived on Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, our whole measurement of time would be different. Assume that a planet exists trapped in a binary (two-star) system. Its orbit is such that all sides of the planet are constantly bathed in light. No day/night cycle exists there. The inhabitants have no way of measuring time—even years-—by our standards. They would be living in a timeless void. The Pleiades actually contain more than 200 stars, although only seven are visible to the naked eye, many of them forming binary systems. As close as our astronomers can tell, those stars seem to be dying. In another few million years of our time, the Pleiades will be no more. From what we know about the Pleiades, the stars there seem to be swirling among great clouds of radiant gases. If they harbor any planetary systems, we wonder what effect those gases might have. An early contactee, Albert K. Bender, wrote a book containing so many far-out details that few ufologists took it seriously. He claimed that UFO entities told him that they lived underground on their home planet because periodically they passed through masses of deadly clouds which destroyed life and created a great blackness.* When Bender’s account, Flying 168 / Operation Trojan Horse The earth, too, has passed through clouds of blackness, according to ancient tradition. Three days