Earth

To live again?

If hardly here; if, following even those rare dooms that do not preclude it, a second start for humanity is scarcely to foresee; if the ashes shall be barren ashes and life, though the earth be, not Phoenix⁠—then elsewhere? on some other world?

Faced with the rope if we stay prisoners here, shall we escape? Is life elsewhere in the universe possible? Possible for us?

Since men first saw the stars, the war of mundane plurality has been raging; and is still undecided. Not perhaps to remain so for long. The first heavier-than-ether machine to tour the seven planets will decide.

Those who will have other worlds inhabited, or inhabitable, recite a great poem of great names. The Vedas, the Zend-Avesta; the Orphic songs, the Ionian sects; priests of Anglesey, priests of Egypt. Thales, Empedocles; Aristarchus, Anaxagoras⁠—though it was less for his men in the moon than for his unpatriotic suggestion that the sun was larger than the Peloponnesus that Pericles’ friend got into trouble with the police. Pythagoras, Parmenides; Heraclitus, Democritus⁠—all the ancient names the modern mind finds most appealing. Xenophanes of Colophon, who also favoured the moon, though he warned against anthropomorphic imaginings. Heraclides of Pontus, who favoured everywhere. Alexander the Great was not sure, but he wanted to hold this view: there would have been more worlds to conquer. Zeno and many of the Stoics here found agreement with most of the Epicureans; Metrodorus of Lampsacus thought it as foolish to have created one living world as one living grain of wheat, and in two famous passages Lucretius endorsed. Then, after the inglorious Middle Ages, brave Giordano Bruno, burnt for this also; Montaigne, Cyrano de Bergerac (a bolder, more proboscidial H. G. Wells), Descartes; Gassendi, Locke, Hevelius; Huygens, whose Cosmotheoros remains the most famous plurality-book published, ingenious Fontenelle, great Swedenborg.⁠ ⁠… Among the moderns, those who knew heaven best: Kepler, Kant, Laplace, Herschel⁠—to omit the poets such as old Horace and Virgil, and the romancers whose imagination, not to be mocked at, may have hit the heavenly mark.

The anti-pluralists challenge some of these champions as wrongfully claimed, and jeer at some others. Themselves concentrate on quality rather than quantity: the sane sound Romans rather than the romantic Greeks, yet of the Greeks Plato and Aristotle, the two greatest; the glorious Middle Ages, the Saints and the Fathers, the popes of Russia, the Pope of Rome; of the modern astronomers the modernest, the freest from fairytale trammels, sane sound Englishmen rather than frothy Flammarions.

Flourish of nominal trumpets over, real arguments enter the field.

On the one side:

Wherever conditions for the evolution of matter into life obtain, there surely is life. Such conditions obtain in many places besides this tiny planet Earth. Waiving the stars, and considering only her fellow-members of the solar system, these are all more alike than unlike; their differences in shape, size, atmosphere, temperature, are less striking than their resemblances. Commonsense concurs with common modesty that worlds so similar to ours must have produced or one day be producing life. If the moon has little atmosphere, why assume that an atmosphere is necessary to living existence, to anything but the earth’s special form of it? If she is cold, why too cold⁠—with her fourteen generous days of twenty-four hours’ sunshine on end, such as never had Glasgow? In her craters the colours change⁠—sudden green when the sun rises⁠—indicating the presence of vegetation, likeliest in those low-lying places where, should air be needed, some air is likeliest to be left. If not vegetation, what is it? If Venus gets double our quota of sunshine and Mars only half, has not Nature, with her foresight and cunning, counterbalanced these differences by other differences: the Venerean clouds, the Martian cloudlessness? For Mars in particular, the signs of seasonal vegetation are convincing and converging to the point of proof; though no proof will persuade folk vain enough to fancy their own speck of dust unlike any other speck of dust in the universe, will prevent anthropocentric madmen from confining life, as an ant might to her ant-heap, to this one of a million bodies in space whose quality and history and destiny are in every essential the same.

On the other side:

The material conditions under which the mystery called life can evolve form an infinitesimal fraction of the infinite range of material conditions in the universe. The earth happens to coincide with that fraction. Hence⁠—though another world so coinciding could conceivably, theoretically exist⁠—on the earth alone there is in fact the mystery. Among the planets she alone is the right distance from the sun, has the due allotment of water, heat and light, the requisite mass, the suitable density of air. The moon is too cold, and too small; and too small to have retained an atmosphere. The thing that could exist without atmosphere would, whatever it was, not be life. That instantaneous green is an effect of light; what grass could spring up in a second or two? Mercury and (probably) Venus each turns one side towards the sun and the other forever away; one half is too cold and the other too hot. Mercury’s in any case too tiny. Venus is covered with water, an abode of fishes if of life at all. Mars has not enough water or air, and receives not enough sunlight⁠—if enough limelight from his romantic partisans. Jupiter, covered with cloud, and Saturn, bound fast by the ring, both are molten hot; nor could cool down to permit life on their surfaces until the sun’s radiation would be too feeble to support it. Outside the planetary eight, bodies with solid crusts are a rarity; not one, avers astrophysics, in a thousand. Few suns have planets, few planets air. What other world is like to be made of the right end-atoms (ash-atoms), to have the proper amount of light and the proper temperature, and a regular enough temperature and regular for long enough, and the right size and density and axis and rate of rotation and rate of advance, like to fulfil every one of the narrow and complicated geological and chemical and astronomical conditions, each one of which, present and compresent, is essential to existence? Earthmen are men; but the Neptunians no more real than Neptune’s mermen, the men in the moon mere moonshine. Is there life on the comets, the sun, the burning stars, the dead ones? The miracle of special circumstances has in one special corner allowed the miracle of man; no unreasoning preference for universality of vitality, no vague mixing of spiritual and spatial conceptions, can create it elsewhere.

Religion has something for both sides.

Christianity speaks unequivocally on one. Plurality is blasphemy. Were there a million worlds of people, then God the Father would have had to have begotten a million Sons, or else to send⁠—or to have sent⁠—or be sending⁠—His Only Begotten One to be slain for their sins a million times in a million different places. So it may be⁠—Christ is crucified always⁠—but not by the orthodox doctrine of the Church, which acted if not with love at least with leniency and logic when she burnt her Brunos, made one stake expiate a million crosses, one Campo dei Fiori a million Calvarys.

The religious temper in general, as distinct from Christian dogma, inclines the other way. God is everywhere, and therefore Man. Buddhism, Swedenborgianism, Pantheism, if they do not always posit, do not ever exclude material life on other material worlds.

In the innermost heart also, the irrational corner still inviolate from facts and from faith, stand equally poised the two opposite persuasions. Persuasion, utterly, we are here on earth only; persuasion, innerly, we are everywhere.

The anti-pluralists seem to lose. They make one fatal admission: that the special circumstances could, however improbably, repeat themselves. In a universe of infinite time and therefore of infinite similarities, if they could repeat themselves they must repeat themselves; if they repeat themselves once they repeat themselves forever.

Assume that they do. Assume that life elsewhere is a thing more likely⁠—less unlikely⁠—than life nowhere else. Is it therefore more likely now, at this coincident hour of earthly time?

Soon we shall know. There were folk bold enough through all the centuries⁠—through all the week⁠—before he crossed it to deny the possibility of crossing the Atlantic by air. Crossing interplanetary space will be more difficult, but the technical hindrances will be overcome. Then some celestial but not more charming Lindbergh will wing his way to the Moon. He may find some form of life there, grabbling deep in the Crater of Copernicus, swimming high through the Seas of Putrefaction or Serenity; or he may not. It may be a type of life very unlike ours, the people dark and strange, and hard to communicate with, much as trees and sponges and worms are hard to communicate with. Or very like ours: Judas Iscariot may still be there. More probably the lunar Lindbergh, if he got back to tell the tale, would report a dead world bestrewn with monstrous skeletons of an existence, neither vegetable nor animal, dead millions of years ago; a barren world with no prospects either vital or economic: no more gold for Old Glory, triumphantly planted on Mount Newton or the highest summit of the Leibnitz Hills.

The next expedition would be to Mars, always the most attractive of the neighbours. Those canals! (Is not the very word a mistranslation? By canali Schiaparelli merely meant channels; a translator’s error has largely created in England and America the Martian ideas there so passionately held.) They are vast aqueducts, or other mechanical constructions too geometrical to be accidental, or artificially irrigated scrips of intensive cultivation; the mesh of them, their pattern, their placing, their relation to the Martian equator, their hibernation, with a hundred other Lowell-listed characteristics, all join to proclaim them the work of conscious minds and of mighty. They are chance scratchings, whose Euclidean straightness is an illusion of the telescope, a delusion of its users. The seas! They are not seas. They are vast alluvial plains, that whole planet one vast Holland. They are terrible deserts.⁠ ⁠…

Life is a possible phenomenon on other worlds; one day we shall travel to other worlds. Could we live there? Other earths are habitable; are they habitable by man?

By the time he needed new worlds to conquer, his brain, his forethought, the subtlety and subservience of science his slave, would have increased beyond present understanding. Colonization of another planet would by then be an easy affair; and a well planned affair, slow, selective, scientific. There would be a restriction-of-immigration bill stricter than proud America’s, keeping out undesirables (perhaps proud Americans), imposing some aerial Areal Ellis Island. There would be time for and method in acclimatization. Transplantation, through ages prepared for, is a possible⁠—the probable⁠—future of this race.

Man is a very local species, due to very local conditions on the earth, made up of certain proportions of C and N and H and O, and clearly unable to breed, if even to breathe, in a world where the proportions of these elements would be different, as in every other known world they are. He would fall under the weight of his skeleton, choke through the lightness of his lungs. Transplantation is not probable, and not possible; we shall die where we were born.

The worlds to be colonized, being the habitable ones, may be inhabited already; not desolate heritages for our seizing. On his Itinerarium exstaticum the old Jesuit Father found lovely angels of silver on Venus, great angels of fire on the sun, angels everywhere and everywhere the friendliest reception. His experience may be repeated; shamefaced, we shall find each fresh world we alight on to be a land of brothers and of beauty, an abode of perfection and holiness:

Each of those stars is a religious house;
I saw their altars smoke, their incense rise,
And heard Hosannahs ring through every sphere.

Or, by Kant’s theory that the planets furthest from the sun (having, by Kant’s theory, had more time) have developed the highest organisms, we might expect a different reception according as we moved in towards the sun or out; under the latter alternative either a more intelligent welcome or a bitterer resistance, according as further physical evolution is held to imply higher ethical evolution or not. The treatment the so-called higher races down here have meted out to the lower; the story, earth’s blackest story, of white man’s wickedness to black, is no happy augury for the Martians’ treatment of ourselves, a race more alien and kithless. Why should they treat us kindly? Why should the war of the worlds be merciful? Why should it bring victory for us?

The war may be fought here. We may be fated to be the colonized conquered planet, wiped out within our own trenches by the Silenians or Silurians or Saturnians. By when things here were getting unfavourable, on Mars they would be worse. Migration hither is in plain fact the likelier. Next week the first man from Mars may be landing.

Time would defeat us again if our hopes flew further afield. Saturn and Jupiter have no hope of a habitability phase. Uranus and Neptune have long been too cold. By the time we shall need a world for escape, there will be none to escape to.

In the solar system, at least; the chance in the stars is beyond all statable conjecture. A few may possess cool-surfaced satellites; life, by some path incredible, may one day reach and, by some chance improbable, be able to continue there⁠—thence, post-deceasing it, to watch the old home flare.

If the life germs are everywhere; if the Universe is sown with them, is them; if from eternity to eternity they are spilt and spread from system to system by comets, by stellar dust, by radiation, by the secret ether, by ordered mutations, by methods mechanical or mystical we know not of, by high cosmic perpetual xenogamy; if, though some germs die of the inter-sidereal cold, others are better preserved by it to flourish and wander and found nations of people whenever they arrive at a world where the outlook for vivification is favourable⁠—like ours⁠—then we are migrants already, and shall be again; then life will last while the Universe lasts.

While the Universe lasts.⁠ ⁠…

Another world is at best a remand; on it also the sun will cease to shine. Could we fly further, to the planet of some other star⁠—this too must one day die. From dying worlds can life migrate forever?

Dead suns crash into dead suns, creating new great stars, which become new spiral nebulae, new masses of smaller stars, new hot sun, new cooling sun, new dead sun: the old titanic round. The materials being always the same and the conditions often similar, life in certain favoured corners of certain favoured new systems will begin all over again from the lowest forms: to die all over again as the circle wheels round again to death. Can this go on forever?

Or is there, end of all worlds, a Universe-end?