The misty day, poems

The earliest intelligences began to ask questions in order to extend their knowledge. Before these intelligent extraterrestrial beings planned space travel, they engaged in astro-physical and astronomical research (as our own experts did before they sent the first rockets into the atmosphere). When they began to build spaceships their mathematicians and ballistic experts got together and calculated that, given the high velocity of the spaceship, time was different for the launching planet and the crew of the spaceship. Inconceivable? It has long been scientifically proved that different times hold good on interstellar flights at high speed. Time dilation, as this time shift is called, was first 'discovered' in our day, but it is an 'eternal' law, which was equally valid for the first space-travelling intelligences. What am I to do, says Zeus? was the question Friedrich Schiller asked in his poem 'Dividing the Earth'. What are we to do? was also the question the extraterrestrial beings asked themselves. How were they to realize the goal of their expedition, namely increasing their knowledge, if millennia would have passed when they returned from their journey into space? If there was no one left alive at home who could evaluate and benefit from the fruits of their voyage? Time and space could only be conquered, said the extraterrestrial academics, if they arranged for descendants at various times in as many places in the cosmos as possible -naturally 'in their own image'! So the astronauts were trained and given the mission during the long journey to make for all the planets apparently similar to their home planet and land on them ...»