Lecture III The Age of the Stars
We have seen that spatially the scale of man is about midway between the atom and the star. I am tempted to make a similar comparison as regards time. The span of the life of a man comes perhaps midway in scale between the life of an excited atom (p. 74) and the life of a star. For those who insist on greater accuracy—though I would not like to claim accuracy for present estimates of the life of a star—I will modify this a little. As regards mass, man is rather too near to the atom and a stronger claimant for the midway position would be the hippopotamus. As regards time, man’s three score years and ten is a little too near to the stars and it would be better to substitute a butterfly.
There is one serious moral in this fantasy. We shall have to consider periods of time which appall our imagination. We fear to make such drafts on eternity. And yet the vastness of the time-scale of stellar evolution is less remote from the scale of human experience than is the minuteness of the time-scale of the processes studied in the atom.
Our approach to the ‘age of the stars’ will be devious, and certain incidental problems will detain us on the way.