Gazing across the lightless light-years of space, or the silent aeons of geological strata revealed in a cliff face, encourages big thoughts.Take, for instance, the fate of the only inhabited planet currently known to exist: Earth.
Armed with a pilot's licence and an engineering PhD, he got to the semi-final of the selection process in 1989, but says he failed to make the cut for being "too independent for teamwork .As independent, perhaps, as his robots will need to be in their hunt for organisms in Europa's lightless ocean.
FRIGID, lightless waters, many fathoms below the ice of Antarctica and far from any open sea, might not sound like an ideal home but there are scores of species, including jellyfish and crustaceans, who find that it suits them perfectly well.
In terms of physical habitat, the advanced bony fishes are adapted to a wide and interesting variety of conditions, from fast, rock-laden torrential mountain streams in the Himalayas to the lightless depths of ocean trenches 8,370 metres (about 27,500 feet) below the surface, where many species manufacture their own light.
We think of the pyramids, of tombs in lightless spaces.
At Abu Ghraib, however, they reported that there were "many obstacles" to their mission, "imposed, apparently, at the behest of Military Intelligence," and what they were permitted to see and hear did not please them: men held naked in bare, lightless cells, paraded naked down the hallways, verbally and physically threatened, and so forth.
The performers, who are positioned in the corners of the room, seem to map the space with tones, like bats using echolocation to navigate a lightless cave.
Like the denizens of the old West Village trucks, piers, bathhouses, and bars, Catherine M. is addicted to the rush of novelty and controlled menace, to the thrill of sodomy in public places with faceless thugs, and to lightless back rooms full of ambiguous moans where the sudden flare of a match illuminates a grimace.
In this lightless warmth I'm dizzy, almost sick.
They went on, and down, into more heat and darkness, until they came to the last circle of this little hell: in a near-lightless room, a dull-eyed boy was shovelling coal into a kiln.'How long do you work?' asked the economist.'Ten hours a day, six days a week,' he replied.'How old are you?"Sixteen .And how long have you been working here?"Nine years.'The boy was uneducated.
I can't bear entering this almost-lightless zone for several hours of narrow, sterile conversations about which kind of cushion.
