Oh, a planet full of liberals?...................
Yes, that very thing occurred to me as I typed it.
BTW, I left out a word. Arthur Clarke's idea was that the "shape beings" on the radiation-blasted world took ten thousand years to complete a thought.
He said "What does it matter? All eternity stretched before them." Meaning that creatures that could survive under such extraordinary environmental conditions could also be expected to live forever.
A mental journey through the universe is being described.
"And he has barely begun his journey," answered Karellen.The planet was absolutely flat. Its enormous gravity had long ago crushed into one uniform level the mountains of its fiery youth — mountains whose mightiest peaks had never exceeded a few meters in height. Yet there was life here, for the surface was covered with myriad geometrical patterns that crawled and moved and changed their color. It was a world of two dimensions, inhabited by beings who could be no more than a fraction of a centimeter in thickness.
And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth's pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.
("Hexanerax 2, and nowhere else in the known universe," said Rashaverak. "Only a handful of our ships have ever reached it — and they have never risked any landings, for who would have thought that life could exist on such planets?"
"It seems," said Karellen, "that you scientists have not been as thorough as you had believed. If those — patterns — are intelligent, the problem of communication will be interesting. I wonder if they have any knowledge of the third dimension?")
It was a world that could never know the meaning of night and day, of years or seasons. Six colored suns shared its sky, so that there came only a change of light, never darkness. Through the clash and tug of conflicting gravitational fields, the planet traveled along the loops and curves of its inconceivably complex orbit, never retracing the same path. Every moment was unique: the configuration which the six suns now held in the heavens would not repeat itself this side of eternity.
And even here there was life. Though the planet might be scorched by the central fires in one age, and frozen in the outer reaches in another, it was yet the home of intelligence. The great, many-faceted crystals stood grouped in intricate geometrical patterns, motionless in the eras of cold, growing slowly along the veins of mineral when the world was warm again. No matter if it took a thousand years for them to complete a thought. The universe was still young, and time stretched endlessly before them...
("I have searched all our record," said Rashaverak. "We have no knowledge of such a world, or even if such a combination of suns. If it existed in our universe, the astronomers would have detected it, even if it lay beyond the range of our ships."
"Then he has left the galaxy."
"Yes. Surely it cannot be much longer now."
"Who knows? He is only dreaming. When he awakes, he is still the same. It is merely the first phase. We will know soon enough when the change begins.")