"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands"
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Ellis lobs a cosmic insult at the species, and the elegance is in the scale. By dragging the sun, moon, and stars into the sentence, he makes human greed look not merely immoral but laughably provincial: our appetites are so small-minded they would try to pawn the universe. The conditional clause, "had they happened to be within reach", is the blade. Nature survives not because we are virtuous, but because the most valuable things are physically inaccessible. Distance becomes the planet’s last line of defense.
As a psychologist writing in an age intoxicated with progress and empire, Ellis is needling the Victorian faith that more power equals more enlightenment. His "predatory human hands" frames acquisitiveness as instinctual, even animal, undermining the comforting story that civilization refines desire. The metaphor also anticipates the logic of extraction: if something can be taken, it will be taken; if it can be priced, it will be priced. He’s not describing a few bad actors but a recurring human pattern - the conversion of wonder into property.
The line lands today because it reads like a prequel to our era’s greatest hits: strip-mined mountains, monetized attention, data harvested from private life. Ellis’s real target isn’t astronomy; it’s entitlement. The cosmos functions as a mirror, reflecting how quickly reverence collapses into possession when the object of awe is close enough to grab.
As a psychologist writing in an age intoxicated with progress and empire, Ellis is needling the Victorian faith that more power equals more enlightenment. His "predatory human hands" frames acquisitiveness as instinctual, even animal, undermining the comforting story that civilization refines desire. The metaphor also anticipates the logic of extraction: if something can be taken, it will be taken; if it can be priced, it will be priced. He’s not describing a few bad actors but a recurring human pattern - the conversion of wonder into property.
The line lands today because it reads like a prequel to our era’s greatest hits: strip-mined mountains, monetized attention, data harvested from private life. Ellis’s real target isn’t astronomy; it’s entitlement. The cosmos functions as a mirror, reflecting how quickly reverence collapses into possession when the object of awe is close enough to grab.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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