When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect. - Arthur C. Clarke

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart,

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.