On 24 April 2014 00:42, Jesse Mazer <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hi Liz, >>> >>> The "billions" make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we >>> still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for "a mind blowing >>> amount of time". >>> >> >> Sure, but I think at the time "millions of years" was a mind-blowing >> amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment >> doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on >> this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my >> personal bias. >> > > The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at > http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any > appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they > did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake > quote was probably a paraphrase of: > > "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it > before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an > hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred > million years put together." > > Thank you. I thought he wouldn't have used "billions and billions" - it just wasn't in the public consciousness, and would have sounded, at best, either childish or pretentious. A hundred million is about what people could grasp at the time, when the age of the Sun (calculated from then-known processes of energy generation) was in the tens of millions of years.
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