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Title: Dreams of an astronomer
Author: Camille Flammarion
Translator: E. E. Fournier d'Albe
Release date: August 12, 2024 [eBook #74239]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: D. Appleton, 1923
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAMS OF AN ASTRONOMER ***
DREAMS OF AN
ASTRONOMER
DREAMS OF AN
ASTRONOMER
_By_ CAMILLE FLAMMARION
_Translated from the French by_ E. E.
FOURNIER D’ALBE
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXIII
PUBLISHED, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A VOYAGE IN THE SKY 9
(1) TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND
MILES FROM THE EARTH 12
(2) THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION MILES
FROM THE EARTH 15
(3) AT SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY
MILLION MILES 18
(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION MILES FROM THE SUN 20
(5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES 36
(6) AT SIXTY THOUSAND BILLION
MILES 44
(7) IN INFINITE SPACE 49
II. THE WORLD OF LONG AGO 65
III. THE WORLD TO COME 79
IV. VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL 95
V. THE PLANET MARS 111
VI. THE GIANT WORLD OF JUPITER 123
VII. HEARTBEATS ACROSS SPACE 131
VIII. IDEAS CONCERNING COMMUNICATION BETWEEN
THE WORLDS 141
IX. STABS AND ATOMS 157
X. ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED? (A DISCUSSION
OF SCHEINER’S ARGUMENTS) 179
GENERAL REMARKS 182
HISTORICAL 184
THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 193
THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE 196
THE PLANETS OF OUR SYSTEM 201
THE POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF BEINGS
OF DIFFERENT CHEMICAL CONSTITUTION 210
REMARKS 215
INDEX 223
I. A VOYAGE
IN THE SKY
CHAPTER I
A VOYAGE IN THE SKY
INTRODUCTION
IT WAS at Venice. The lofty windows of the ancient Ducal Palace of the
Speranzi opened upon the Grand Canal. The orb of night was mirrored in
the waters by a furrow of silver spangles, and the immensity of the sky
stretched over the towers and cupolas.
When the musicians borne by the gondolas had turned the corner of
the canal to glide towards the Bridge of Sighs, their last choruses
vanished in the night, and Venice seemed to go to sleep in that
profound silence known to no hive of humanity but the Queen of the
Adriatic. This Venetian silence was untroubled save by the cadenced
beats of the old clock, and perhaps I should not have appreciated the
whole depth of the universal muteness but for the regular oscillation
of that apparatus designed for measuring time. The continuous
“tick-tock” marked out the silence, and, curiously enough, seemed to
intensify it.
Seated in the embrasure of the high window, I contemplated the shining
disc of the Moon enthroned in an azure sky filled entirely with its
light, and I remembered that this luminary of the night, so tranquil
and calm in appearance, moved a thousand yards in space at each beat of
the clock. This fact struck me for the first time with a certain force,
perhaps on account of the enveloping solitude.
Gazing upon the lunar globe, in which I could distinguish with the
naked eye the ancient seas and geographical outlines, I bethought
myself that it was still perhaps inhabited by beings organised
differently from ourselves who can live in an extremely rarefied
atmosphere; but what struck me even more forcibly was its rapid
revolution round the Earth, at the rate of 1,000 yards at each beat of
the clock, making 38 miles a minute, 2,280 an hour, 53,800 a day, or
1,500,000 miles for each lunar month.
I saw in my mind the Moon revolving round us from west to east in less
than a month, and at the same time I felt, so to speak, the daily
movement of the Earth about its axis, also from west to east, which
makes the sky appear to move in the opposite direction. While I was
still reflecting, indeed, the Moon had actually shifted and descended
in the west towards the steeple of the Chiesa. These terrestrial and
celestial movements, softer than those of the gondolas gliding on the
limpid waters, bear us along through reality as through a dream. They
measure the days and the years as we pass, like fleeting shadows,
while they endure for ever. The silent Moon, sphinx of the sky, shone
already on the waters silvered by her splendour millions of years ago,
while terrestrial humanity was still awaiting its slow unfolding in
the limbo of future possibilities. Strange animals peopled the forests
which covered the continents, fantastic fishes pursued each other
in the floods, vampires clove the air, and two-footed crocodiles,
which seem to be the ancestors of those of Egyptian mythology, showed
themselves in the clearings on the banks of the rivers. Later the same
Moon shone on the birth of the flowers, on the nests of the first
birds. But how many nights had she not illuminated with pale beams
before the first glance from a human eye fell upon her, before the
first human thought ascended towards her! To-night she shines upon a
populous and active humanity, flourishing cities, marble palaces, built
amid the clouds. Just now, at my feet, in a gondola a pair of lovers
called upon her to witness their eternal vows, forgetting that her
rapid phases are the symbol of our changefulness and our shortness of
life. Yes, she has been the confidante of many mysteries, and for a
long time yet will radiant youth sing under her sky its eternal song
of love. But one day, a poor, enfeebled lamp, she will only shine upon
a cemetery of ice; there will be no more clocks for measuring hours
nor human beings to count them. Thus I mused, in the bright moonlight
which seemed to intensify all the shadows and to deepen all the abysses
between the palaces plunging into the black water. This neighbouring
world exists at a distance of 240,000 miles from us. Our thoughts fly
thither in a flash. With the speed of light, the distance is covered in
1⅓ second. In imagination I took flight up to the distant luminary. I
forgot Venice, the Adriatic, and the Earth, and I felt myself carried
beyond the confines of the terrestrial atmosphere.
(1) TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND MILES
FROM THE EARTH
I seemed to approach the pale Phœbe and to arrive suddenly above the
immense chain of the lunar Apennines, which separate the “Sea of
Vapour” from the “Sea of Rain,” not far from the central meridian. I
recognised, just as I had so often observed them in the telescope, the
amphitheatres and craters of Archimedes, Autolycus, and Aristillus, and
I hovered for some time over the steep cliffs of the “Sea of Serenity.”
I saw the traces of old submersions and I distinguished several craters
almost obliterated by formidable land-slides. I got accustomed to this
view the more rapidly for the fact that astronomical instruments have
long familiarised us with this neighbouring world, and that certain
details of lunar geography are better known than are many points of
terrestrial geography. Those immense amphitheatres, those yawning
craters, those steep-walled mountains, those deep valleys, those
numerous cracks in the soil--we have studied them all and we know
them. We find there the geographical result of considerable volcanic
activity, craters 2 miles in depth and 60, 100, or 150 miles wide,
mountain peaks 4 or 5 miles high, plains and valleys where the traces
of successive selenological epochs are traceable. In the lower depths I
observed the effects of a sensible atmosphere, surface changes produced
over immense stretches of ground by the action of the Sun’s rays during
days fifteen times as long as ours, changes of aspect due to the frost
of the long lunar night and the thaw under the midday Sun, long white
streaks traversing the circular plains; something like geysers in
activity; short-lived plants without any terrestrial analogy--a whole
world still alive, apparently in its last death-struggle. My thought
and my gaze rested on the pale figure of the Earth’s satellite, and
I asked myself whether there was not alive at that moment, in some
ancient city at the bottom of a crater or a valley, some thinking
being, with its eyes raised to the sky, contemplating the Earth where
we are and asking the same question: whether any intelligent beings
lived on the surface of that immense globe throning for ever over
their heads, and presenting to their minds the same riddle which their
abode presents to us.
While I thus reflected about our neighbour in space, the orb of night
had sunk in the west, and I saw at some distance from it on the left
a star shining with a reddish glow, shedding rays of fire over the
heavenly vault. I was not long in recognising in this ardent star
our neighbour the planet Mars, and I forgot the moon over this other
celestial island, the sister of our own, which has so many analogies
with our planet.
Here, said I to myself, is the planet of greatest interest to
ourselves, the one we know best. It gravitates round the sun along an
orbit traced at a mean distance of 143 million miles from the central
luminary. Our Earth passes through its annual revolution at a distance
of 92 million miles. There are, therefore, on an average, 51 million
miles between the two orbits. On the night of my vigil, Mars happened
to be at its minimum distance from the Earth. Fortunately, as the
two orbits are neither circular nor parallel, the real distance is
sometimes reduced to 37 million miles. Light, which takes 1⅓ second
to traverse the distance between the Earth and the Moon, takes 200
seconds, or 3 minutes 20 seconds, to cross the celestial abyss which
separates Mars from the Earth, It seemed to me that I really spent
those 3 minutes in flying the distance, and I entirely forgot the high
window of my Venetian palace over the aspect of the new world to which
the flight of my thought had brought me.
(2) THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION MILES PROM THE EARTH
It is not very far, astronomically speaking. It is, in fact, quite
near, a few paces away. The world of Mars is the first station of the
solar system, the first planet we meet on leaving the Earth to visit
the remote regions of the heavens. The farther we move away from the
Earth, the smaller grows the apparent size of our own world. Seen from
the Moon, our planet hangs in the sky like an enormous moon, four times
the size of our own satellite, and sixteen times as luminous, for it
is isolated in space and reflects the light received from the Sun,
as is done by the Moon and the various planets of the solar system.
From about 250,000 miles, therefore, the Earth still appears of a
considerable size, being about four times the size of the full Moon. At
2½ million miles it appears ten times smaller in diameter, but still
shows a perceptible disc. At the distance of the orbit of Mars, at the
time when the planets are in greatest proximity (37 million miles),
the Earth no longer shows a sensible disc, but is still the biggest
and brightest star in the entire heavens. The inhabitants of Mars,
therefore, admire us as a brilliant star in the sky, showing aspects
similar to those which Venus shows to us. We are their morning and
evening star, and no doubt their mythology has erected altars to us.
When I arrived on that planet, it was about midday on its central
meridian. I noticed two small moons revolving rapidly in their sky,
and I alighted on the slope of a mountain overlooking a distant sea.
The sea was shallow and full of water-plants. The panorama reminded
me of that which one sees from the terrace of the Nice Observatory,
and I seemed to see a Mediterranean of calm water, of a rather dark
bluish-green colour. But it was a different element, and I saw that
the plants were of a species unknown on Earth. Airy navies consisting
of a sort of bird-fishes glided through the atmosphere, and I soon
found that the inhabitants of this celestial territory have received
by natural evolution the enviable privilege of flying through the
air, and that their method of locomotion is particularly aviation.
Gravity is feeble on the surface of the planet, and hence the density
of beings and objects on that planet is much less than it is with us.
Engineering science has for many centuries reached a high degree of
perfection. They have carried out immense works, incomparably superior
to those achieved on our planet during the last century, and they
have transformed their globe by gigantic operations which earthly
astronomers are just beginning to appreciate by means of the telescope.
One may easily understand, indeed, that that world should be more
advanced than ours, because it is more ancient chronologically, and
because, being smaller than our globe, it has cooled down more rapidly
and has run through the phases of organic evolution at a greater rate.
Its years are nearly twice as long as ours, in the proportion of 365
days to 687. While we count 37 years on Earth, the Martian only counts
20, and a man of 79 years on Earth is only 40 Martian years old.
This is an advantage of 88 per cent. Its condition of habitability,
its climate and meteorology, its days and its nights, are analogous
to ours. Even from where we are we can observe its continents, its
polar snows which melt in the spring, its canals which also change
with the seasons, its humid plains periodically varied by vegetation,
its clouds, generally very light, but dense enough towards the polar
regions, its mists in the mornings and especially in the evening, above
all, the perpetual changes, incomparably more intense than those of
the Earths surface--in a word, all those manifestations of an activity
greater than that of our own home of the present day.
I only delayed on Mars for the time necessary to form a general idea of
the life which animates our neighbouring globe and to make sure that it
is more active than that of terrestrial humanity, and I found myself,
some moments later, transported to the annular world of Saturn.
(3) AT SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION MILES
The conception of time, the appreciation of duration, are essentially
relative to the state of our mind. If we sleep profoundly for seven or
eight hours, that time will have made a gap in our life of no greater
length than that produced by ten minutes of sleep. The miners who by
the collapse of a shaft are entombed for five or six days before being
rescued, always believe that they have not been cut off for more than
twenty hours. Buried on a Tuesday, for instance, they will not believe
that they have had to wait till Sunday. On the other hand, one may
seem to pass several hours, very slowly, in a dream of a few seconds.
A friend of mine told me that one day, as he was riding through a
wood, his horse bolted and threw him into a ravine. He said his fall
had certainly not taken more than three seconds, but that during those
three seconds he had passed in review at least ten years of his life
in all their successive details and without any apparent hurrying of
events. Then, again, who has not observed how long the minutes may seem
during some hours of waiting?
The orbit of the Earth round the Sun being 92 million miles, and that
of Saturn 888 million, there are 796 million miles between the two
orbits. Light traverses this gap in 70 minutes. My fancy flew this
distance with the speed of light, and I was aware of these 2,240
seconds required to cover the distance at the rate of 186,000 miles a
second. Yet I am sure that I did not spend all that time in traversing
the distance to Saturn, nor even the lesser time corresponding to the
distance between Mars and the ringed planet, for the first stroke
of ten had sounded on the old clock when I forgot Mars and fixed my
attention on Saturn, and I arrived at my destination before the hour
had finished striking.
I alighted on the tenth satellite, whence one can easily appreciate
the grandeur of the Saturnian system. The enormous planet of, a
diameter more than 9½ times that of our globe, with a surface 90
times that of the Earth, and a bulk 745 times that of our floating
home, is surrounded by gigantic rings measuring 178,000 miles across.
Girt by this multiple ring, the planet presides over a retinue of
ten satellites revolving round it in a system having a radius of 8
million miles, a system which in itself constitutes a universe larger
than that known to the ancients. Until the age of truth inaugurated
by the conquests of modern astronomy, nobody on our planet, no poet,
no philosopher, no thinker, had guessed the real grandeur of the
proportions on which the universe is constructed. How small our Earth
appears seen from the Saturnian system! It is barely seen, once in six
months, as a small luminous dot near the sun, shining for a few minutes
in the evening after sunset, or a few minutes in the morning before
sunrise.
(4) TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION
MILES FROM THE SUN
In the depths of space, at a distance from the sun more than 30 times
our own, under a glow of light and heat 900 times feebler than that
which we enjoy, there roams the world of Neptune, among conditions
of life quite different from those which obtain on Earth. Those
short-sighted naturalists who affirmed even quite recently, with
professorial emphasis, that the abysses of the ocean are condemned to
an eternal sterility, because the conditions of light and pressure
are absolutely different from the conditions near the surface, have
received from Nature herself the rudest contradiction which can be
inflicted upon the pedantic science of pretenders to infallibility.
This contradiction, however direct and absolute, has not discouraged
them all, for there are still some who declare that life can only exist
on worlds having conditions identical with ours. Always the reasonings
of the fish who affirms--quite sincerely--that it is impossible to live
outside water! Let us leave these teachers to their illusions and
continue our ascent. Astronomy must be the great teacher of philosophy.
The distant world of Neptune, on which every year equals nearly 165 of
our years, and where ten years represent the whole historical interval
which separates us from the Romans (we must remember than 1,650 years
ago the Romans reigned at Paris and in Gaul, and neither France nor
any of the present-day nations were thought of), this neighbouring
world, I say, is well fitted to teach us to enlarge our narrow and
personal conceptions, especially as regards the measurement of time.
The calendar of that planet is just as exact, just as precise, as
ours, and a Neptunian year is not longer to those slow and reflective
beings who inhabit the place than is a terrestrial year to those
hurrying and agitated persons who swarm in our turbulent cities. Yet a
Neptunian adolescent of 20 has really lived nearly 3,300 terrestrial
years, without knowing that such a time is called “very long” by the
inhabitants of our planet, whom such a life would carry back to the
epoch of Homer and ancient Greece.
It would be impossible even with the most careful examination to
discover any point of comparison between the beings which live on
the Neptunian world and those which we know on Earth. None of our
classifications, whether of the animal kingdom, vast and diversified
though it be, or of the vegetable kingdom, highly complex in itself,
could be applied to them. It is another world, absolutely different
from this one. Spectrum analysis indeed establishes the fact that its
chemical composition is quite other than that of our terrestrial home.
The organisms which live on the surface of the different planets are
the resultant of the forces acting upon them. The origin of the human
form lies in the ancestral forms of the long animal series whence it
has gradually emerged, and of which it is the highest perfection,
and these primitive animal forms go back in an unbroken chain to the
rudimentary organisms unprovided with the senses which are the glory
of man, organisms which inaugurated the manifestations of life, but
which can hardly be described as living. They are neither animals nor
plants. They appear to be organised substances, already distinct from
the inorganic kingdom, but as yet only simple chemical combinations
endowed with a sort of diffused vitality, an elementary protoplasm,
the germ of all developments of terrestrial life, both animal and
vegetable. The first organised beings were formed in the bosom of the
warm waters of the oceans which covered the entire surface of the earth
at the time when the geological periods began. Their intrinsic nature,
their properties, their faculties, were already the resultant of the
chemical composition of those waters, of the density and temperature
of the surrounding medium; the variation of this medium and of the
condition of existence have brought about corresponding changes in the
development of this genealogical tree, and, according to the habitat
of the organisms, whether in the deep, middle, or upper regions of the
waters, on the sea-shore, in the low-lying plains, on sunny slopes
or mountain-tops, the genealogical tree gave rise to more and more
diversified organisms. Present-day terrestrial humanity is the last
flower, the last fruit of this tree. But all this life is terrestrial
from root to summit, and on every planet the tree is different. Life is
Neptunian on Neptune, Uranian on Uranus, Saturnian on Saturn, Sirian
on the system of Sirius, Arcturian on that of Arcturus, appropriate to
every medium, or rather, more strictly speaking, produced and developed
by each world according to its physical state and in harmony with that
primeval law which all nature obeys: the law of progress.
This immense symphony of life, adapted to every world according to
conditions of space and time, develops like a universal choir, the
parts of which are separated from each other by deserts of space and
by eternities of time. It appears to us discontinuous because we can
only hear one note at a time. But in reality there is no absolute
separation either in space or time. Jupiter will not be inhabited by
thinking beings for millions of years to come; from the point of view
of the Absolute, the interval is not greater than that which separates
yesterday from to-day.
All this happens and accomplishes itself naturally, and as if God
did not exist. And indeed the being whom the inhabitants of the
Earth have hitherto defined as God does not exist. The Buddha of the
Chinese, the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Jehovah of the Hebrews,
the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the Teutates of the Gauls,
the Jupiter of the Greeks, “God the Father” or “God the Son” of the
Christians, or the great Allah of the Mussulman, are human conceptions,
personifications invented by man in which he has embodied not only his
highest aspirations and his sublimest virtues, but also his grossest
prevarications and ugliest vices.
Man has conceived as God in his own likeness. It is in the name of
this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages and
under cover of all religions bound humanity in a slavery from which it
has not yet freed itself. It is in the name of this God who “protects
Germany,” “protects England,” “protects France,” “protects Italy,”
“protects Russia,” “protects Turkey,” protects all the divisions and
all the barbarities, that even in our own day the so-called civilised
people of our planet have been armed in war against each other and,
like mad dogs, have hurled themselves upon one another in a conflict
over which falsehood and hypocrisy, seated on the steps of the thrones,
figure a “God of Armies” as presiding, a God who blesses the daggers
and plunges his hands in the smoking blood of victims to mark the
foreheads of kings. It is to this God that altars are raised and Te
Deums are chanted. It is in the names of the Gods of Olympus that the
Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of
Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in
the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously
condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet,
John Huss, Savonarola, and so many other heroic victims; that the
Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands
and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive
in popular ceremonies; that Ravaillac stabbed Henry the Fourth. It
was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory the Thirteenth that
the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood and the free
thinkers of the reformation were chased out of France; it is for the
extermination of supposed heresies that many thousands of brave people
have been burnt alive; it was with cross in hand that the peaceful
natives of America were savagely massacred by the Spaniards; it was in
the names of the gods worshipped in Rome that the Christian martyrs
suffered the most awful tortures; it was in the name of the Christian
God that the fanatics, led by Bishop St. Cyril, stoned the beautiful
and learned Hypatia, and that in later times the Bishop of Beauvais
led the virgin of Domremy to the stake; it was in the name of the
Bible that the kings of God’s “chosen people” savagely exterminated
their neighbours; it was in the name of Allah that the standards of
Mahomet covered Europe with armies of assassins and that even now
millions of fanatics are ready to rise against the Europeans on the
cry of a “Holy War,” that Mahomet the Second painted the walls of St.
Sophia with the blood of his steed, that Genghis Khan and Tamerlane
marked their paths of conquest with pyramids of severed heads; it is
to the glory of these imaginary deities that even now so many and
useless souls condemn themselves to strange penances in the convents,
that the Russian stropzi mutilate themselves, that the howling and
dancing Dervishes writhe in mad contortions, that certain sects kill
their babies and drink their blood. Religious wars have been the most
horrible and odious of all, and the most insensate. People have killed
each other for the sake of a word or its interpretation, for the sake
of an adjective, for the “consubstantiality” of the Father and the Son
of the Trinity, for “homoousios” against “homoiousios,” for a thousand
other crotchets placed above the most elementary reason and proclaimed
articles of faith in the name of a God! This symbol of the oppressions
of peoples, of murder and robbery, this infamous being, does not exist,
and has never existed.
In making a god in their likeness, as miserable as themselves, men
resemble monkeys, who, raising themselves to the idea of God, would
figure him as a Grand Ape, dogs who would make him a Grand Dog, fleas
who would represent him in the shape of a Grand Flea. But it does
not follow that, because this inferior god does not exist, therefore
the universe goes on without thought, without a destiny, and without
laws. If the believers of all religions are in error, those who deny
the existence of any intellectual principle in the world are equally
mistaken. Yes, the evolution of nature takes place without the acts of
an anthropomorphic deity, without malice and without miracles. The only
name which would fit God would be the Unknowable. God remains hidden by
the very perfection of nature’s mechanism. In a healthy body we do not
feel the passage of the blood through the heart, nor the circulation
of blood in the brain, nor that of the air in the lungs, nor the
liver, nor the kidneys, nor the stomach, nor the bowels. The attention
is not directed to those organs unless they work badly. The world is
so arranged that they appear to work by themselves, and that is its
divine quality. Everything functions regularly by means of a perfect
construction, the gearing of which is invisible and silent, but which
we can only judge by the infinitesimal fraction of which we form a
part, and the author of which is a transcendental thought, impenetrable
to mankind. Force governs matter; _mens agitat molem_; but Thought
guides nature.
Yes, the supreme being is unknowable. The human mind cannot comprehend
the infinite, eternal, immutable spirit, the organising power of that
All of which the Earth and Man are but particles as imperfect as they
are mediocre. This Infinite is to the infantile deity imagined by man
as the midday sun is to the muddy obscurity of a mole-burrow under
the roots of meadow grass. His existence is proved by the universal
organisation. Everything is organised, from the humblest leaf to the
world system. An invisible, immaterial element of a spiritual nature,
as yet imperfectly revealed by our means of investigation, manifests
itself within us and around us. This spiritual principle should be
revered as enveloping the world and enfolding us. But the clergy of all
religions, of all times and of all countries, have always monopolised
the idea of God and appropriated it to their exclusive and intolerant
purpose of domination. When they speak of God, they mean their own
God. The free spirits who do not acknowledge their figure-head are
treated as atheists and hated and persecuted as such. They will not
admit that one may be a Deist and yet anticlerical. But they are not
too unintelligent to know that it is an injustice, a stupidity, and a
lie to treat as atheists those thinkers who deny the divinity of Jesus.
The people who dare to reduce God to their size and even to put Him in
their pocket are the greatest blasphemers.
It is strange that Man, still in a coarse, savage, and barbarous state,
hardly emerged from the primitive shell of ignorance, incapable of
knowing even his own body, hardly able to spell the great book of the
universe, should have considered himself capable of describing God. He
does not know his own little ant-heap and he pretends to discover the
unknowable. At a time when nothing was known, when astronomy, physics,
chemistry, natural history, and anthropology were as yet unborn, when
the feeble and meandering human mind was still surrounded by illusions
and errors, human audacity conceived the so-called religions and the
gods placed at their heads.
That Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, or Mahomet should
have striven to give to mankind a code of morals destined to deliver
them from barbarism and to teach them the idea of good, such efforts
and achievements cannot but receive the homage and admiration of all
who value the intellectual and moral progress of humanity. That
the founders and organisers of religious rites should place at the
head of every cult an ideal, an inviolable being in whose name they
pretend to govern, even that can be recognised as a work of social
utility, of a value not rising above the worldly standard, and having
no object beyond the general good of man and societies. But that
those gods invented by man should be considered as really existing,
and in an absolutely imaginary heaven which perished in the first
conquests of astronomy, that they should have been, and are still,
adored by a certain portion of the human race, and that even in our
time legislators of all nations dare to base their politics on divine
right, to show the “finger of God” in the most monstrous plagues of the
social body, and decorate their battle-flags with a local providence,
as in the time of Joan of Arc, of Constantine, or of David--that is
the shocking anachronism, a mixture of imposture and credulity, of
hypocrisy and stupidity unworthy of the era of sincere and positive
research in which we live, and which should load the functionaries
who live at the expense of such a system with the contempt of every
independent man.
Definitions are misleading. Were pagans like Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, not more spiritual than Pope
Alexander the Sixth or Cardinal Dubois, who were true atheists?
The search for the nature of the First Cause--I do not say the
“knowledge of God,” which would be an expression worthy of a
“theologian” and absurd in itself--but simply the search for the
Absolute Being, for the origin of the energy which sustains, animates,
and governs the universe, for the intelligent force which acts
everywhere and perpetually through infinity and eternity and gives
rise to the appearances which strike our eyes and are studied by our
science--this _search_, I say, could not be undertaken nor even
properly conceived before the first discoveries of astronomy and modern
physics, that is to say, before the investigations of Galileo, Kepler,
and Newton. It is only two centuries ago that the purely religious
idea, free from idolatries, from all sorts of mythologies, of errors
and superstitions produced by primitive ignorance--it is only during
the last two centuries that it was possible for this idea to arise
out of modern scientific evolution. All the religions existing at the
present day have been founded during ages of ignorance, when we knew
nothing about the earth or the heavens. True religion, i.e. the union
of free spirits in the search for truth, can only be the work of an
epoch like ours, in which some courageous and disinterested spirits
free from the hypocrisy of false doctrines, yet without falling into
the puerile atheism of superficial minds which only see the outer
shell, will sincerely and freely apply all branches of science to the
search for the intimate constitution of the universe and of the human
being. The future will teach us. To-day we know but little; we are
only beginning to learn. The unknown God conceived by the thinkers,
by Socrates, by Plato, by Marcus Aurelius, by Voltaire (as ardent a
Deist as he was a violent anticlerical), by Newton, by Descartes, by
Linné, by Euler, by Spinoza, by Kant, by all pure Deists, surpasses
in his grand immensity all the poor inventions of the clergy of all
denominations. One cannot see the creator of the hundred million
suns of the Milky Way looking down upon a small village in Judea and
inspiring Judith to seduce Holophernes with the object of cutting off
his head after betraying him with her caresses; or conferring on Joshua
the power of arresting the movement of the solar system to give him
time to exterminate the besiegers of Gibeon! What sort of opinion had
such writers of the Supreme Being? And what opinion of him is still
held by those preachers who continue to teach this “Holy Scripture”?
The Infinite cannot be comprehended by the Finite.
He who has made the tour of the world, who has visited Europe, Asia,
Africa, and the Americas, reasons in a manner wider beyond comparison
with the state of humanity than he who has never left his country.
Between the narrow, incomplete, and false ideas of the latter and the
judicious, exact, and just appreciations of the former there is the
difference of night and day.
Unfortunately we preach to the deaf. For one man who reasons there
are a hundred who do not. The struggle against the domination of the
spiritual directors is very platonic and the clergy despise it. The
Church has organised marriage, birth, and death into ceremonies which
seduce the imagination and please the women. Compare the civil marriage
and the religious marriage; the former cold, dull, insipid; the latter
impressive and attractive with the altar garlanded with flowers, and
the enchantment of the music which makes the creator descend into
the bosom of the spouse, “_Veni, Creator Spiritus_.” It will be
centuries before the religious form of marriage is entirely replaced
by the civil. A certain free-thinking father refrained from having his
four boys baptized so as to leave them entire liberty of conscience.
All four got baptized on the eve of their marriage as their brides
wished to be married in church. Faith or convention, that is how the
world goes--and the priests smile at the simplicity of the layman.
What is Sunday for most Christians but a day for fine clothes?
Tradition has created a distinguished society often permeated
with hypocrisy, but to belong to which is “good form.” Ancient
errors are preserved without being credited. Convention governs the
“well-disposed” people.
Independence of spirit is the rarest of phenomena. All religions are
sacred and respectable if they raise our thoughts to a higher ideal,
when they console the afflicted and relieve misery. But let them not
be exploited, and let there be no killing in their name! Ideal and
sentiment are part of the domain of thought, with as much right as
Reason. It is a mistaken policy to suppress them, and it plays into
the hands of reactionaries, who profit by the errors. To claim that
science demonstrates the non-existence of God and of the soul is an
unscientific argument. An education without ideals or responsibility,
which neglects conscience and proclaims rights without duties, is as
false as that of the Catechism which teaches the creation of Adam
and Eve, the temptation of the serpent, the universal deluge, the
incarnation of God, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection and ascension of
Jesus to the right hand of God the Father, or the resurrection of our
bodies (articles of faith which cannot, without heresy, be interpreted
as symbols, but must be taken literally), and it is socially more
dangerous, as we see by its fruits for the last thirty years, the
gradual increase of crime and the rule of the Apaches and anarchists
of all sorts. Why not follow the way of enlightened wisdom? If the
socialists were permeated with spiritual truth, they would hold the
world; they would continue the work of their predecessor, Jesus Christ,
in the light and with the positive methods of modern science. The false
gods invented by man, the legends, the superstitions, the errors, lies,
and hypocrisies, are not necessary to secure a place in the educational
system for the sense of honour, of duty, of justice, and of personal
conscience; and this is often forgotten by modern educators who have
suppressed everything without putting anything in its place.
Let us have no sectaries of any kind!
Humanity grows up. We are no longer children.
At the distance from the Earth which suggested such reflections,
the distance of the planet Neptune, the farthest limit of the solar
system known at present to astronomy, our judgment on the works of
man is quite different from that which satisfied us before we left
our country. We contemplate the solar system in all its grandeur, we
recognise the smallness of our own little planet compared with the vast
space in which it moves, and the short time of its revolution round the
Sun, and we feel that our ordinary terrestrial estimates have hitherto
been based upon those narrow and limited sentiments circumscribed by
the horizon of the church tower. We free ourselves from them and find
ourselves in a position to judge the immensity of creation with greater
liberty, independence, and integrity. But far as Neptune is from our
terrestrial home, it still forms, like ourselves, part of the solar
family. Other planets still unknown to terrestrial astronomy gravitate
beyond Neptune, the first of them probably at a distance 48 times as
great as the distance between the Earth and the Sun, that is to say, at
7,500 million miles, in an immense orbit which it takes at least 330
years to accomplish. The celestial voyage which I have begun takes me
beyond the outermost regions of the solar system. Flinging myself into
the infinite heavens, I arrived at another system by penetrating into
the cosmic domain of a star.
(5) AT TWENTY-FIVE BILLION MILES
Every star is a sun shining by its own light. The Sun which illuminates
us has 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth and weighs 333,000 times
as much. The dimensions and the masses of the stars are of the same
order. A large number of them are much more voluminous and their masses
are still more considerable.
Whatever star we approach, we find in it a sun like a blinding
furnace. These innumerable centres of light, heat, electricity, and
gravitational attraction only appear to us as small luminous points
on account of the immense abysses which separate us from them. The
nearest sun, our nearest star in space, burns at 276,000 times the
distance which separates us from the Sun, i.e. 25 billion miles from
here.
Travelling with the speed of an express train flung into space at 40
miles an hour towards the nearest star without any stoppage or any
slowing down, we should not arrive at our destination until after an
uninterrupted flight of 75 million years.
Travelling with the speed of the swiftest projectile which the most
ingenious man-killers have yet constructed, a speed which we can reckon
as double that of sound, or 2,200 feet per second, we should yet
require a million and a half years to cover that distance.
If that star were to burst with a terrific explosion, and if the noise
of the catastrophe could be transmitted to us at the ordinary speed of
sound in air, we should not hear that explosion until three million
years had elapsed after its occurrence.
We should see the star shining steadily in the sky for four years after
the catastrophe which had destroyed it, because light travels through
space with a speed of 186,000 miles a second, and it would have to
travel with this constant velocity more than four years before reaching
us.
Seen from that distance, our brilliant Sun is reduced to the rank of
a simple star. The planets which gravitate around it, the Earth,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their brothers of the solar family,
are crowded up against it by the perspective of the distance and are
invisibly lost in its rays.
Considered at that distance in the sidereal universe, these provinces
of the solar empire are recognised as insignificant even by the most
optimistic spirit. Even if they did not exist at all, the suns of
infinite space would none the less shed their rays of life and light
all around. Our planet, which to us seems so important, becomes a
microscopic point impossible to discover by means of senses such as
ours, and its history told at that distance becomes like the flight of
a dragon-fly or even less, since we should never suspect its existence
if we did not know it. It is at such moments especially that the
pretensions of Pontiffs and the dogmatic assurance of their adepts show
forth in all their absurdity.
I felt transported into the system of that star, the nearest of all
those whose distances have been measured, a star belonging to the
constellation of the Centaur; it is the Alpha of that constellation.
This system is curious and more interesting than ours. Instead of a
single sun corresponding to that which shines upon us, two twin suns
gravitate one round the other in a time equalling 81 of our years,
and separated from each other by a distance of 2,000 million miles.
These twin suns are both of considerable brightness (first and second
magnitude, seen from here), and greatly superior to the central hearth
of our own system. Planets circulate around each of these luminaries
under their protecting wings, and receive from their radiation the
sources of their fertility and their life. They are illuminated by two
different suns, sometimes united in the same sky, sometimes separated
and alternating, differing in magnitude and brightness according to the
variation of the distances in consequence of the revolutions of these
worlds round their respective centres.
These are very different conditions of existence from those which
govern the destinies of the Earth and of the planets of our group. Two
suns! What curious alternations of seasons! What variations in the
climates! What transformations in the doubtlessly very rapid changes
of their vitality! What complications of their calendars, in the
succession of their years, their summers and winters, their days and
nights! The sole fact of the existence of such a system, relatively
near to us and already well-known to terrestrial astronomers, testifies
to the infinite variety disseminated in the starry depths of the cosmos.
What multiplicity of manifestations of the diverse forces
of nature must have been produced in this wealth of solar
development--manifestations strange to the phenomena studied on
our planet, and which are doubtlessly felt and appreciated by means
of senses differing absolutely from those existing in terrestrial
organisms, senses awakened, determined, and developed in those distant
worlds by their own natural forces.
On worlds illuminated, heated, and regulated by two suns life can only
have appeared and organised itself in forms very different from those
on Earth, having no doubt an alternating double life, served by other
modes of perception, other organs, and other senses. The thinker, the
astronomer, the physiologist, can no longer regard terrestrial life as
the type of all life. All we could learn, study, or know on Earth will
never be more than an infinitesimal and absolutely insufficient part
of the immense reality embodied in the innumerable creations of the
Infinite.
Yet it is a point which must be insisted upon before pursuing our
terrestrial investigations further, that whatever may be the variety
of stellar systems, the differences of volume, temperature, density,
illumination, electrification, movement, chemical constitution, etc.,
of the various globes which people the immensity of the universe, all
these worlds are linked amongst themselves by the same invisible and
imponderable Power which combines them all in a network of extreme
sensitiveness. The prodigious extent of the distances which separate
these systems one from the other does not prevent their being
connected together by some sort of maternal link. The distance from
the Earth to the Moon is 240,000 miles. The Moon acts constantly upon
all the molecules of our globe and upon the entire Earth, and every
one of us weighs a little less when that body shines over our heads
than when it is on the horizon. The distance from the Sun to the
Earth is 92 million miles; the Sun makes our planet move with a speed
corresponding to that distance, and the Earth in its turn displaces
the Sun in the heavens. The distance from the Sun to Neptune is over
2,500 million miles. The central globe acts upon that distant world and
makes it revolve round it, and on the other hand Neptune makes the Sun
revolve round their common centre of gravity, which is at a distance
of 144,000 miles from the centre of the Sun. Jupiter displaces the
Sun by 460,000 miles, and Saturn by 25,000 miles. The Moon disturbs
the Earth to the extent of 2,900 miles. At the same time Jupiter acts
upon the Earth, the Earth upon Venus, and so on. On account of this
reciprocal influence of all the heavenly bodies upon each other, not
a single point can remain in repose for an instant, and no heavenly
body can ever come back to the place it previously occupied. All that
we call matter is in perpetual motion under the irresistible power of
invisible, intangible, and imponderable force.
We have here a fact of capital importance, the consideration of which
must always be associated with the conception we can form of the real
nature of the universe. We have seen just now that the distance which
separates our Sun from the star Alpha Centauri is 25 billion miles. But
this distance is traversed by gravitational attraction. In reality the
two suns are not absolutely separated.
They know each other, they feel each other’s attraction, and they feel
the attraction of all the other suns of infinite space. They both roam
about, our own Sun with a speed calculated at about 200 million miles
per annum and Alpha Centauri with a speed of approximately 400 million.
The other suns of which we know the distance and the movement rush
on with similar speeds. Some of them fly with incomparably greater
velocities, which attain 200 miles a second, 11,000 miles per minute,
600,000 miles an hour, 15 million per day, and 5 or 6 thousand million
miles per annum, veritable starry projectiles of the heavenly fields.
But our whole sidereal universe itself is moving with its hundred
million stars through the immensity of infinite space. The movements
which we measure are relative and not absolute.
Our sun and its companions are driven through space by some initial
force and by the combined attraction of the innumerable stars of our
visible universe. Whether this force of attraction is a property
inherent in every atom of matter, whether these theoretical atoms
by which we explain the appearance of matter in order to account
for observed phenomena are centres of force, mathematical points of
concentration, or nodes and crossings of ethereal vibrations and
undulations, the fact which dominates our analytical contemplation
of the universe is that the innumerable worlds which people space
are not isolated from each other, but are united by a perpetual and
indestructible link.
Here we have a new and important conception of the unity of nature. And
what is equally worthy of attention is that this sort of communication
between the worlds cannot be defined better than by the word
“attraction.”
Attraction is therefore the supreme law among the worlds, among atoms,
and among beings. The stars which gravitate in the depth of space, the
Earth which revolves in the solar rays, the Moon which raises the tides
on the surface of the ocean, the molecules of stone or iron which cling
together by molecular attraction, the plant which pushes its roots into
the nourishing soil or raises its stem in response to light, the flower
which turns towards the Sun, the bird which flies from branch to branch
seeking a place for its nest, the nightingale which with incomparable
song charms the sweet mistress of the night, the man whose heart is
troubled at the appearance of a beloved being, the sound of a beloved
voice, or a fond memory--all these beings, all these things obey the
same law, that of universal attraction which in diverse forms governs
all nature and guides it--whither? Towards yet another attraction, to
the attraction of the unknown!
Amid the ignorance of the Absolute which surrounds us in spite of the
manifold, courageous, and persevering efforts of science, the fact
of the existence of such a force uniting all worlds together must be
appreciated at its proper value. It would be impossible to exaggerate
its importance. Let us then not forget it: the worlds are in mutual
communication by means of attraction.
(6) AT SIXTY THOUSAND BILLION MILES
Continuing my celestial voyage, I left the system of Alpha Centauri to
penetrate into the starry depths of the Southern Cross. I traversed
sunny shores and deserts of night, passing from sun to sun, from system
to system, flying past stars which blinded me one moment and then were
engulfed by the infinite night. The normal state of the universe is
night and silence. There is no light except round the suns and planets;
there is no sound but in their immediate neighbourhood, in their
atmosphere. In skirting stellar groups, I noticed enormous globes
rolling in a strange light, and I often seemed to feel electric shocks,
magnetic disturbances, certain indefinable sensations which warned me,
by a sort of malaise, that such spheres are unsuitable for our mode of
existence, and that they are inhabited by beings whose perceptions,
feelings, and thoughts differ from ours. I remember particularly having
seen in the course of my flight a group of many-hued worlds illuminated
by three suns, one a ruby red, one an emerald green, and a third a
sapphire blue, and so singularly illuminated by this false light--false
to us, but natural to them--that I asked myself whether I was not the
victim of an illusion and whether such creations really exist, though,
indeed, having observed those well-known associations of coloured suns
hundred of times in the telescope, I ought not to have been in doubt
for an instant. I stopped and approached one of those worlds and saw
that it was inhabited by beings who seemed to be woven out of light. To
their eyes, certainly, the inhabitants of our planet would appear so
sombre, heavy, and coarse that they might legitimately ask whether we
were alive and whether we felt ourselves to be alive.
Those are worlds peopled by aerial organisms whose brightness surpasses
the tint of the freshest roses and purest lilies. These beings live on
the very atmosphere which they breathe, without being condemned, like
the inhabitants of our planet, to be constantly killing innumerable
animals with which to fill their bodies.
Their beauty, delicacy, and brightness reminded me by contrast of the
conditions imposed by terrestrial life. I remembered that brute force
reigns supreme here, that millions of beings are killed every day to
assure the existence of the rest, that war is a natural law amongst
animals, and that humanity is so little freed from animal barbarism
that nearly all people continue to accept, as in primitive times,
slavery and servitude. Being so far from the Earth, I judged of the
colossal stupidity of the inhabitants of our planet. But if, down to
our own times, the nations have made their greatest glory consist of
international butcheries, that state is transitory. Every tree bears
fruit after its kind. Tortoises and bears cannot aspire to the wings
of the swallow or the song of the thrush. The military glories of
Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Bismarck, being of the
order of carnivorous animal instincts, last no longer than the brutal
repast itself, and a few centuries suffice to efface them from the
history of the planet.
Endeavouring to estimate the real importance of this history and of
our planet itself, I searched space, not only for the Earth which had
become invisible long ago, but even the Sun; but I could neither find
the Sun nor any of its brightest neighbours such as Alpha Centauri or
Sirius, nor any of the stars which one sees from the Earth. The whole
region of space where our floating island gravitates had disappeared
long ago as an insignificant point in the depths of space. Austerlitz,
Waterloo, Sevastopol, Magenta, Sadowa, Keichshofen, Sedan, were but
microscopic agitations in a Lilliputian ant-heap, amusement of infants
delighting in muscular exercises involving blood and smoke. Why blame
them? Why pity them? They do what pleases them and nobody forces them
to do it. Why should astronomy use a magnifying-glass to study the
microbes on a planet T The system of many-coloured suns, the blinding
organic wealth of which had inspired me to return to the earthly
twilight, revolves at a distance of 60,000 billion miles. Light takes
more than ten years to traverse this distance. Yet this is nothing
extraordinary in the way of astronomical distance.
Sirius, the most brilliant star of our sky, transported to that
distance, would be 3,500 times farther away than it is in reality,
and it would send us 12 million times less light. It would be a small
point, still within the range of the new photographic processes. It
would be a telescopic star of the 18th magnitude.
This sidereal milestone would be far from marking the limit of the
space accessible to telescopic investigation, which includes stars of
the 20th magnitude, and which, according to ingenious calculations, is
occupied by about 100 million suns. And indeed, as I advanced in my
celestial voyage, I crossed new abysses and discovered far ahead and
above me new stars which became suns, shone in the night and appeared
single, double, treble, quadruple, even quintuple, radiating a silver
or golden light, or emitting the most vivid and various colours; and I
guessed in passing at celestial earths peopled by unknown humanities
floating in these rays, before these worlds in turn rolled away and
disappeared beneath me in the night. They rushed with different speeds
in every direction through space, like luminous globes in the bouquets
of fireworks, and seemed to fly away in a starry rain.
When I reached the confines of our sidereal universe, the suns and
systems became sparser, and as I continued my ascent I found myself
engulfed in a black and desert void whence I could see the outer form
of our universe, resembling one of those many star clusters which are
seen in every telescopic field. This cluster became smaller and smaller
as I flew on into the outer darkness.
Then, in the infinite night I perceived above me another universe
which appeared in space as a pale and distant nebula, and I understood
that all we can see with our eyes in the clearest night and all that
telescopic vision has yet allowed us to discover represent nothing
but a local region in an animated immensity, and that there are other
universes besides that of which our Sun forms a star.
(7) IN INFINITE SPACE
I approached this second universe, which became larger and larger like
an archipelago of stars, and I soon arrived at its outskirts. As I
traversed it from end to end I saw that it also was composed of several
million suns separated from each other by thousands of millions of
miles. Then I found beyond it another dark abyss resembling that which
I had crossed to reach the second universe.
Continuing my flight, I saw a third, and I crossed it. A fourth
approached, then another, and yet another. And as I crossed those
deserts which separated them, in whatever direction my gaze endeavoured
to pierce the void, everywhere it discovered new universes in the
distance.
The splendid spiral nebulæ are not balls of gas but agglomerations of
suns, Milky Ways situated outside our sidereal universe.
Then I understood that all the stars which have ever been observed in
the sky, the millions of luminous points which constitute the Milky
Way, the innumerable celestial bodies, suns of every magnitude and of
every degree of brightness, solar systems, planets, and satellites,
which by millions and hundreds of millions succeed each other in the
void around us, that whatever human tongues have designated by the name
of universe, do not in the infinite represent more than an archipelago
of celestial islands and not more than a city in the grand total of
population, a town of greater or lesser importance.
In this city of the limitless empire, in this town of a land without
frontiers, our Sun and its system represent a single point, a single
house among millions of other habitations. Is our solar system a palace
or a hovel in this great city? Probably a hovel.
And the Earth? The Earth is a room in the solar mansion--a small
dwelling, miserably small.
Thus in the general economy of nature our planet has no more importance
than a poor little room in a considerable house. That house in turn is
lost in the middle of an immense town. And that immense town, which to
us represents the entire universe, is in fact nothing but a universe
beyond which in every direction there exist other universes.
How far is this reality from human pretensions, both ancient and
modern, which imagine that our world represents the infinite, that God
stops the Sun to illuminate one of Joshua’s battles--a miracle renewed,
says history, for Charlemagne and Charles V--and that the great Sower
of stars took upon himself a human shape to dwell among us!
What simplicity among sincere theologians! What imposture among the
chiefs of states who still dare to invest themselves with titles of
divine mandatories to enslave the people! Are not the real atheists
those either ignorant or insincere people who make the sublimest idea
the accomplice of all their mediocrities, and are not the real Deists
the independent searchers whose sole ambition is laboriously to look
for the causes and gradually to work up to truth?
With what strange religious systems has humanity up to now enveloped
its barren imagination! The Israelite who believes he is agreeable to
God in practising circumcision or in buying a new knife to be sure
that it has not touched pig’s fat; the Christian who imagines he can
make God descend upon a table and who is told by his preachers that
prayers and fasts have an influence upon the weather and agriculture;
the Mahommedan who sees the gate of Mahomet’s paradise opening before
him as he stabs a missionary; the fanatic who casts himself under the
wheels of the Juggernaut; the Buddhist who remains fascinated in the
beatific contemplation of his navel, or works a prayer-mill for the
remission of sins--these surely form the most ridiculous and infantile
ideas of the unknown and unknowable Being.
All these littlenesses are related to the primitive illusion of the
smallness of the universe, which was considered as a sort of screen
studded with golden nails and enclosing the earth in its centre.
Certainly if astronomy had had no other result than to enlarge our
general conceptions and show us the relativity of terrestrial things
in the bosom of the absolute, to deliver us from this ancient slavery
of thought and make us free citizens of the infinite, it would deserve
our veneration and our gratitude, for without it we should still be
incapable of forming true conceptions.
Some conservatives will perhaps object that there are even in French
observatories astronomers who go to Communion, tell their beads, and
carry candles in the churches, and that the same mentality can be
found in certain English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and other
observatories. Yes, without a doubt, the fact is undeniable. Such a
psychological phenomenon has two explanations. Either these hybrid
beings are sincere or they are not. If they are believers, they are
illogical and in perpetual conflict with their scientific reason,
and we must not be astonished at the strange arrangement which their
conscience is capable of constructing between two conceptions of nature
which directly contradict each other. While incapable of explanation,
such sincerity can be respected, like that of the innocent infant who
believes all one tells him.
In the second, case it is hypocrisy, falsehood, rascality, personal
interest; and this sort of conscience is suitably judged by every
honest man.
These anomalies and limitations have not hindered astronomy from
bringing light and independence to spirits who can understand it and
who have the courage and the freedom of their opinions.
But in telling of my Venetian dream I did not want to indulge in
irritating polemics, and my only object was to show to some open eyes
the horizons of astronomical philosophy, and I hasten to return to my
sidereal voyage and to describe its last phase. I shall, however, add
another word concerning our tiny planet, remarking that its inhabitants
are as a rule so unintelligent and so incapable of judgment that they
imagine that all have an equal intellectual and moral value and that
in the most civilised country of this globe the vote of an imbecile
or a drunkard has the same weight as that of an educated thinker, so
that the legislative chamber entrusted with the fate of the country
is an incoherent mass of persons incompetent to deal with any of
the questions likely to arise. Half of them are ignorant and are
preoccupied with their private concerns. In this system of pretended
equality, Judas is the same as Jesus, Philip II equals Marcus Aurelius.
Torquemada is the same as St. Vincent de Paul, Fouquier-Tinville the
same as Mirabeau, and the wine-merchant at the corner is the equal of
Archimedes and Pythagoras. There is no reasoning. Our little planet
is as insignificant morally as it is physically. Among terrestrial
humanity only one man in a hundred is intelligent. Humanity is
practically no older than four or five years as regards intelligence
compared with what it ought to be normally.
I had traversed several universes analogous to our galactic system,
universes separated from each other by abysses of nothingness, and
what had struck me most in this general survey was meeting a number
of humanities foreign to our own living in various regions of space,
living their own lives and carried along to their destiny in the
whirlpool of their personal affairs. While the inhabitants of the Earth
reduce creation to their own size, thousands, millions, billions, of
other humanities live in every degree of intellectual advancement on
solar systems which to them are the very centre of observation and from
which our terrestrial home appears lost in the infinite distance.
I also saw dead worlds. It is a fact worthy of attention that all
existence tends towards death. Beings only come into existence to
die. The worlds only attain periods of vitality to descend again into
decadence and the tomb. Suns only burn to be extinguished. Death would
therefore be the supreme law, the final result.
The mathematician can now calculate with great accuracy the date when
our Sun will become extinct aid when the Earth will roll on through the
eternal night like an icy cemetery. The entire history of terrestrial
humanity will have arrived at an absolute zero. The time will come when
even the ruins will be destroyed.
On account of the tendency of energy to establish itself in a state of
stable equilibrium in the universe, life will have an end on our planet
as well as the other worlds.
If everything appears thus to tend to extinction and death, it is
because we do not know the secret of the conservation of energy. An
end such as I have indicated is really unthinkable. The terms of the
problem contain their own condemnation. It is admitted that force and
matter can be neither created nor destroyed, and have therefore existed
and acted from all eternity. If therefore the final result of the
radiation of suns into space is their extinction and consequently the
extinction of life on their attendant planets, then since an eternity
has already elapsed during which energy has tended to equilibrium,
there ought to be not a single sun, star or planet in existence.
Now relatively, not to an eternal duration but only to a period like
a lightning flash compared with that, say a trillion years, the
life of a human race, of a planet, or even of a sun, is very short.
Geologists talk of 20 to 30 million years for the whole duration of
the geological eras from the origin of life on earth; physicists talk
of 100 million for the constitution of the terrestrial globe from the
liquid to the solid state; astronomers also assign 100 million years
to the age of the Sun, and even less to its future duration. Even if
we doubled or trebled these numbers, even if we multiplied them by ten
or even a hundred, we should not arrive at the millionth part of a
trillion years! Thus without going back to a previous eternity, if the
energy of suns had no other final result but extinction we should not
exist now and nothing that is would be.
The universe was not made of one piece at the origin of things. This
origin does not in fact exist. We find in space suns of every age.
There are old ones, there are new ones. Here are cradles, yonder are
tombs. If the first creations formed by matter and energy had not been
renewed, there would no longer be a universe. All primitive energy
which had animated the suns would be used up. Besides, matter and
energy are but one.
Just as in passing through a forest we find oaks in decay, green trees,
and new growths, thus also does the celestial traveller encounter in
space worlds long dead, dying worlds, worlds in full activity, and
budding stars.
Everything dies, but everything lives again.
Among the last worlds in full vitality which I visited on my voyage
among distant universes there was one which appeared particularly
remarkable on account of the high state of social progress. Although
this world is the most distant of all those suspected to exist in the
depths of space, yet the human race which dwells there is not very
different from ours, physically. It is divided into two sexes, and the
organic forms somewhat resemble those of our race. But the social state
is distinctly superior to ours.
A perpetual harmony reigns among all the members of this vast family.
Simple and modest, each of these beings has no higher ambition than
gradually to raise himself in the knowledge of things and in moral
perfection.
The atmosphere is not entirely nutritious, and there, as here, one is
obliged to eat in order to live. But they live exclusively on fruit and
vegetables, and kill no living being.
The functions of material life only take up a very short time, and life
is mainly intellectual. Instead of personal rivalries, great and small,
and the various ambitions which agitate the entire lives of the men and
women of our poor little world, those beings are mainly occupied in
study and pleasure.
There is no money. There are no rich nor poor. The fruits necessary
for nourishment can be picked anywhere beyond all needs. Summer is
perpetual and no sort of clothing has been thought of because the
bodily forms always keep their beauty, and coquetry would have nothing
to conceal.
There is no old age. On reaching a ripe age one goes to sleep and the
body dissolves like a cloud, which becomes invisible by the change of
state of its molecules.
No law has instituted the marriage bond. As it would be impossible to
contract for interest, because there are neither castes nor fortunes,
love alone guides the choice. On rare occasions the years reveal some
divergence of character sufficient to lead to a desire for another
choice, but when this divergence shows itself there is no chain to
break. Besides, they always remain lovers and never become married. The
desire of change, of variety, of curiosity, hardly arises because the
persons who have freely chosen each other love each other beyond all
others and have only chosen each other because they knew each other.
Friendships are sure and faithful, and there is no example of treason
dictated by the vile sentiment of jealousy.
Contrary to what happens on earth, every person whose life is ruled by
the sentiment of personal interest or ambition would be considered as a
monster beyond all explanation and thoroughly despised. In that world
they do not, as we do here, meet people who are constantly unhappy on
account of a desire to occupy all the best places, are never satisfied
with their own lot, and who, being indefatigable opportunists, grab
everything in their insatiable egoism, and die full of honours and
vanities.
There is no frontier. Humanity forms a single family. Communications
are established over the whole globe by a sort of language which passes
with the speed of lightning. An administrative council controlled by
universal suffrage directs public education, science, art, and justice;
and this universal suffrage is enlightened, and exercises its choice
among the best and wisest spirits. The dregs of the population are not
represented; the deputies do not shine by numbers and incompetence, but
by worth. In a country corresponding to France, their number would be
reduced from 600 to 100, every deputy possessing a special competence
in legislative questions. It is superfluous to add that a Ministry of
War has never been thought of there. The people, led by reason, do not
follow a fetish. Besides, no patriotic sentiment can there be exploited
or brutally debased, since no frontier divides humanity, and patriotic
sentiment consists solely in the recognition of intellectual worth.
No institute of so-called official science has been established there.
No Sorbonne has condemned the theory of the Earth’s movement, no
Academy has disapproved of the doctrine of perpetual peace. There
are no titles, no decorations. Nothing is appreciated but personal,
intellectual, and moral worth.
The word “infallibility” does not exist in the language of that
people. Only one religion reigns in their hearts: natural religion,
founded upon astronomy. Their faculties, more transcendent than ours,
their senses, more numerous and more penetrating, their more powerful
instruments of observation, have long ago placed them in communication
with neighbouring worlds, and they have been able to utilise astral
magnetism for purposes of transport from one world to another.
They have discovered the mystery of the union between force and matter,
and know that there is a fundamental identity between them. In their
own religions, they have never given God a name, and have never dared
to play at a cult, knowing that such puerility and such pride would
be unworthy of their merit. Their religion consists in a belief in
immortality based on the knowledge of the intimate nature of being, in
preparations for the future life, in efforts to make themselves better
and more perfect by a continual study of creation, and a mutual love
based on an enlightened sentiment of justice and equity.
They consider Reason as the highest prerogative of the human race, and
would consider any doctrinaire mad who would forbid the exercise of
that faculty for the sake of any religious system whatever.
From that world, nobody has ever yet perceived the Earth, and nobody
suspects its existence.
Their senses are more perfect and more subtle. While our human race
is less endowed than certain animals which can foresee a storm, the
changes of the seasons, and earthquakes, they possess the sense of
orientation, which we lack entirely, although on our own planet certain
species like the dog, the cat, the pigeon, and the swallow possess it.
They seemed to me absolutely happy, though exceedingly sensitive.
They spent the greatest part of their existence amid the most refined
pleasures. Their world is a perpetual paradise ever born afresh.
Perfumes arise from the bosom of splendid and varied flowers, and woods
are balmy with intoxicating spices, and the light of day plays upon
fairy-like scenery.
* * * * *
When I contemplated this marvellous spectacle, I felt surrounded
and penetrated, so to speak, with waves of sound which cradled my
enraptured soul in the most delicious melody my ears had ever heard.
The sensation of a celestial attraction seemed to carry me on a cloud
and make me slowly descend towards an island on which a palace of
flowers appeared. I felt a sort of electric shock and--I felt myself
in a high ogival window of Venice. A gondola filled with musicians was
returning from the Lido by the Grand Canal. Groups chanted harmonious
choruses, the sky shone with stars, the moon was setting behind the
domes, and Mars was descending towards the horizon.
The old clock sounded slowly the twelve strokes of midnight. “Well,”
I exclaimed, “I have been sleeping. Here I have been for two hours at
this window. Meanwhile the Moon has flown 4,850 miles in its orbit
round the Earth, and the Earth has traversed 410,000 miles in its
revolution round the Sun, drawn by that wonderful attraction which
rules the world across the voids of space; perhaps it also rules
our souls through the voids of time. “Thou beautiful starry sky,” I
murmured, “who hast taught us so much already, wilt thou not soon solve
for us the riddle of the great mystery? Thou art our hope, thou alone
canst teach us, thou alone canst open before our eyes the panoramas of
infinity and eternity.”
II. THE WORLD
OF LONG AGO
CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF LONG AGO
I HAD a dream, which yet was not a dream.
I found myself as an observer of the world as it was 100 million years
ago, inhabiting a planet in attendance upon one of those distant stars
of space, in the middle of a sidereal universe analogous to that which
exists at present, though it was not the same, for the universe of that
time was destroyed long ago and the universe of to-day did not yet
exist.
At that time, also, there were stars and constellations, but they were
neither the same constellations nor the same stars.
There were suns, moons, inhabited earths, days, nights, seasons, years,
countries, beings, impressions, thoughts, facts; but they were not the
same as now.
The Earth which we inhabit was not yet in existence. The materials
which compose it floated through space in a state of diffused
nebulosity, gravitating about the slowly condensing solar focus.
There were as yet neither water, nor air, nor earth, nor heavens, nor
planets, nor animals, nor any one of those bodies reputed to be simple
by chemistry, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, lead, copper,
etc. The gas (which by its condensations and final transformations
was eventually to give rise to the various gaseous, liquid, and solid
substances at present constituting our globe and its inhabitants) was
a single homogeneous gas, containing within it, like an unconscious
chrysalis, the possibilities of the future. But no prophet could have
foreseen the unknown which slumbered amid its mysteries.
Our planet showed at that time the aspect of those vague gaseous nebulæ
which the telescope discovers on the floor of the skies and which the
spectroscope analyses. The solar nebula in the course of condensation
floated among the stars. All humanity with its history, every one of
us with all his energies, all the living beings of this Earth, were
contained in the germ of that nebula and its forces; but the beings and
the things which we know were not to come into existence until after
a long incubation of centuries. In the place of what was destined to
be the Earth, there was nothing but a gas floating in starry space.
Nor was it in the real “space” where we are now, for the Earth, the
planets, and the whole solar system came from afar and flew swiftly
across the void.
* * * * *
In the history of creation, 100 million years pass like a day; they
dwindle and disappear, a fugitive dream, into the bosom of that
eternity which absorbs all.
Then, although our planet did not exist, there were stars, suns, solar
systems, and inhabited worlds as there are now. The humanities which
peopled those worlds lived their lives as we live ours.
It would have been a wonderful spectacle for the thinker to contemplate
the great work of all those beings. In passion or indifference, in
pleasure or pain, in laughter or tears, in movement or repose, they
lived; fighting, forgiving; accusing, forgetting; loving, hating; being
born and dying; drawn into the fatal whirlpool; blindly succeeding each
other through the generations and centuries, not knowing what gave
them birth; ignorant of the fate in store for individuals and souls;
playthings of that Nature which forms worlds and beings, stars and
atoms, centuries and minutes, like soap-bubbles blown by a child into
the air; and all plunging into the sea, like those whirls of sand which
the desert wind raises and blows along in the typhoon or the breeze.
It is the same spectacle as that which the earth offers to-day; living
multitudes fighting for life and knowing only death.
The thought which must strike us most in our retrospective
contemplation is that at that time the _Earth did not exist_.
Not one of those human beings who live now, who will live in the
future, or who have lived in the past, were then thought of. Nothing
of all that now exists around us existed then. Yet in those ancient
worlds which have disappeared long ago, the humanities which animated
them had their vivid history, with flourishing cities, fights and
struggles, laws and law-courts, judges of spiritual things, historians,
economists, politicians, theologians, literary men, who took pains
to tell the true from the false and to write down conscientiously
what they, too, called “universal history.” For them, all creation
stopped in their era and in their place; for all of them, creation was
finished; the rest of the universe and of limitless eternity was lost
in insignificance in comparison with what they called the “Present.”
They never thought of the eternity which had already passed before
them, nor of the eternity which would come after them.
They lived, learned or ignorant, famous or obscure, rich or poor,
opulent or miserable, religious or sceptical, they all lived as if
their era would never come to an end. Some of them, without losing a
minute, amassed a fortune which their heirs hastened to dissipate;
some spent their time in dreams and contemplations without thinking
of the morrow. In one place there would be battalions inflaming the
populace with their patriotic shouts; in another loving couples united
their souls in mystery. Under the pressure of what they believed to be
affairs of imperative importance, driven by the attractions of pleasure
or borne on the wings of ambition, the inhabitants of that ancient
world, like those of ours, flung themselves into the whirlpool of life.
They, like ourselves, had days of glory and of sorrow; they had their
’89 and ’93, their Austerlitz and Waterloo, and political drama had
its 18th Brumaire and its 2nd of December. Thus recently on our own
Earth shone the life of Babylon, of Thebes, of Memphis, of Nineveh,
of Carthage, the glory of Semiramis, Sesostris, Solomon, Alexander,
Cambyses, and Cæsar; and to-day the silence of funeral solitude reigns
supreme over the ruins of the palaces and temples, in the slumber of
the invading night. In the history of the universe it is not only
peoples, kingdoms, and empires which have disappeared, but it is whole
worlds, groups of worlds, archipelagoes of planets, visible universes!
For eternity did not _begin_, it was never begun. The forces of
Nature have never been inactive. For Nature itself, our measures of
time, our conceptions of duration, do not exist. She has no past and no
future, but a perpetual present. She remains immutable throughout her
incessant manifestations and transformations. We pass away; She remains.
One can hardly think without terror of the innumerable beings which
have lived on the worlds now lost, of all the leading spirits who
have thought, acted, guided humanity in the path of progress, light,
and liberty. One cannot think of Platos, Pascals, and Newtons of the
vanished worlds without asking what has become of them. It is easy to
reply that that is nothing, that they died as they were born, that
all is dust and returns to dust. It is an easy answer, but it is not
satisfying.
* * * * *
Certainly, nobody can be so foolish as to claim to have found a
solution of the great mystery. For treating those profound problems of
eternity and infinity, we are about in the position of ants attempting
to gain a knowledge of the history of France. In spite of all their
mental gifts, which have indeed been fully recognised, in spite of
their goodwill, their gallant attempts and all their efforts, it is
quite probable that they would not get beyond the history of their
ant-heap and would not arrive at any reasonable conclusions concerning
human beings and their affairs. To them, naturally, the proprietors of
the woods and fields are the ants, and the plant-lice domesticated by
them. And the parasites of the Earth are those inedible insects which
interfere with them. Do they know that birds exist? It is doubtful.
As regards men, they do not know of their existence, though it may be
that the ants in civilised countries have in their antennal language
an expression corresponding to the idea of “sugar-maker,” or cook, or
confectioner, or for some implacable enemy such as a gardener. But even
if they suspected our existence, they could not form any idea about the
human race or its history but--the ideas of ants.
* * * * *
It would no doubt be as useless as it is foolish to lose ourselves in
the nebulosity of metaphysics to attain a solution which will escape
us for ever. But it is no doubt a proper subject for the exercise of
our mental faculties to think of this particular aspect of creation:
_Time_; to think that from all eternity earths inhabited like ours
have floated in the light of their suns, that from all eternity there
have been humanities enjoying the pleasures of life, and that from
all eternity the end of the world has sounded on the hoary timepiece
of destiny, burying in turn the universes and their inhabitants in
the tomb of annihilation and oblivion. For it is impossible for us
to conceive a commencement which was not preceded by an eternity of
inaction, and as far as the observational sciences can take us, they
show us forces in perpetual activity.
If infinite space dazzles us by its limitless immensity, an eternity
without a beginning and without end arises, still more formidable
perhaps, before our terrified gaze. The voices of the past speak to us
from the abyss: they speak of the future.
The past of extinct worlds is the _future_ of the earth.
* * * * *
In 100 million years, the earth where we live will no longer exist,
or if any wreck of it remains, it will only be a funereal desert. The
various worlds of our system will have achieved their circle of life,
the histories of its human race will long ago have been finished, our
own Sun, no doubt, will have lost its light and will roll along a dark
star, through the realms of night. It may be that, thrown back by
destiny into the melting-pot of perpetual change, united in a supreme
climax with some old dead sun traversing the same abyss, it will arise
like a phœnix from its ashes by the conversion of motion into heat.
But, then as now, the nebulæ will have given birth to suns, then as
now, endless space will be filled with stars without number gravitating
in the harmony of their mutual attraction, the planets will swing in
the rays of their suns, mornings and evenings will follow each other,
blue sky will spread overhead, clouds will float in the twilight
mysteries, perfumed breezes will blow through the woods and valleys,
mysterious sounds will stop the songs of the birds, and eternal
love will sway a later youth with the divine rapture of insatiable
aspirations. Marvellous ascension of life! Nature will chant, as it
does to-day, the hymn of youth and happiness, and an imperishable
spring will bloom for ever in this immense universe where the historian
of the past sees nothing but tombs!
If there are no limits to space, if, whatever part of the sky our
thought may essay, it can always pass on without being stopped by
anything, however swift or prolonged its flight, if, in a word, space
is infinite in every sense, it is the same with eternity: there is
no possible limit to it, and whatever end we may imagine, whatever
hour or minute fixed for its end, our thought immediately leaps the
obstacle and continues on its way. Infinity even now is filled with
budding worlds, worlds reaching maturity, decadent worlds, dead worlds,
disseminated in all regions of an unlimited space, gaseous nebulæ,
hydrogen suns, oxidised stars, planets in the course of formation,
congealed satellites, disintegrated comets--the forces of Nature are
everywhere active, the energy of creation remains constant, neither
increasing nor diminishing, and all the scientists agree in testifying
that what we call destruction and annihilation is only transformation.
Astronomy reveals to us Time as it has revealed Space. It shows that
there is nothing peculiar about our present epoch in the history of
Nature, nor about our present position in space, and it combines Time
and Space, the two forms of reality, in the same synthesis as the two
grand aspects of the development of the universe.
* * * * *
No, this dream was no dream. For to the human race which lived on the
different worlds of space during the ages preceding the formation of
our solar system, the Earth with all its history was only a possibility
of what the future might bring forth. It might never have existed at
all. The writers of history of terrestrial peoples, Moses, Herodotus,
Manetho, Ma-Tuan-Lin, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, Bossuet,
all those who have attempted to write universal histories, the great
Leibnitz himself, who placed the commencement of the history of a
small German duchy at the time of creation of the world, and even the
delightful author of the Metamorphoses, who tells of the history of the
birth of the Earth and Heaven--the astronomer smiles at their annals,
as he has smiled at the genealogies of the kings and the conquests of
the Cæsars--
“Battles of ants in microscopic space.”
Simple illusions of infants who fondle their dolls!
Let them invent new microscopes for distinguishing Charlemagne and
Napoleon in the ant-heap of Lilliput; we cannot find them! And the
whole Earth, where is it? By an abstraction of thought, we manage to
live before it and after it; its whole history has disappeared like a
lightning flash which passes in the calm of a long summer day.
* * * * *
As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages
passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories,
and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of
space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery
paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the
millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone
again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had
never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores
stretching away to infinity!
Suddenly, an immense black veil fell from the skies and hid the view,
and I saw no more. In front of this veil, our planet flew along with
its speed of 62 thousand miles an hour.
I found myself again in the ordinary condition of an Earth-dweller, who
sees nothing beyond the horizon, and who imagines that, in time as in
space, our mediocre humanity exists alone on the world.
III. THE WORLD
TO COME
CHAPTER III
THE WORLD TO COME
The future is as real as the past. The world to come is in the mind’s
eye as substantial as the world of long ago.
ONCE upon a time, in a solar system belonging to the constellation
Andromeda, a planet a million times the size of our Earth bore on
its surface a very advanced human race. The eyes of its inhabitants
were constructed differently from ours and received radiations which
are dark to us. Also, instead of five senses those human organisms
possessed twelve. Their subtle and far-seeing industry had invented
instruments of great space-penetrating power, and they had succeeded
in determining at immense distances the volumes, masses, densities,
physical and chemical constitutions, the movements, and the intrinsic
nature of worlds at present quite indiscernible to us.
Amidst the glories of a sumptuous civilisation, those human beings,
whose form did not at all resemble ours, thought, in spite of their
progress in astronomy, that they were the centre, the final goal, and
the justification for the existence of the universe. Some of their
philosophers had indeed put forward the idea of a probability of
inhabited worlds, but this idea, received with scepticism by most of
the learned men and resolutely rejected by the theologians, was only
accepted by the most liberal spirits with a reservation concerning the
intellectual superiority of their race, considered as the necessary and
normal type of all humanity. To them it seemed impossible that Nature
should create anything other or better than what had been established
in their own world; the zoology of their own planet set a standard,
and living beings, they thought, could not be organised otherwise
than as they knew them. To their minds, the area accessible to their
observation included all the possible manifestations of the forces
acting throughout the cosmos. It was only possible to have twelve
senses, neither more nor less.
There came a time when some transcending genius discovered among the
stars of the constellation which terrestrial astronomers call Centaurus
the star which we call the Sun and around which we gravitate. He
noticed round this star nine principal spheres circulating round it,
and, by some secret sympathy, he directed his attraction chiefly to the
globe which we now inhabit.
The star--our own Sun--and the nine planets we have just mentioned
were invisible in our sense of the word. They only emitted dark rays,
black light. For a long time already, in fact, the Sun had been
extinct, and the humanities who had lived on the surface of the Earth,
of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, of the
trans-Neptunian planet and its sisters, had died in turn and had been
gradually erased from the great book of universal life.
But by means of the superior methods of investigation which this
Andromedic astronomer had at his disposal, he succeeded, after a
laborious study which it took him 250 years of continuous work to
complete, in reconstructing the history of the terrestrial globe, which
interested him specially, and in discovering that it had been formerly
inhabited by animals of different species, and in particular by certain
bipeds endowed with relative intelligence.
* * * * *
This obscure globe, a black bullet revolving round another black
bullet, had a whole history of its own. It had contained in former
times an intense and luxuriant life. The springs and summers had
brought forth a profusion of flowers and fruit in the sunlit fields,
the land had unfolded its golden carpet of corn, springs had murmured
among the hills, birds had sung in the trees, the perfumed breezes
of meadows and woods had been wafted through the valleys, rivers
had rolled through the vast plains, villages and towns had grown
up along their banks, human communities had gradually peopled the
world, inventing fruitful industries, delightful arts, brilliant
sciences; prodigious cities had, in different ages, raised palaces
for kings and temples for gods; Memphis had succeeded Babylon, Athens
had followed Memphis, Rome had cast Athens into oblivion, Paris had
eclipsed Rome, and had vanished in its turn; hundreds of millions
of brains had thought, hundreds of millions of hearts had beaten,
eternal loves had been sworn, divine embraces had united loving souls,
innocent children, charged by the light of day, had held out their
arms for the kisses of their mothers, and life in all its forms had
sparkled for millions of years in sheaves of light ever renewed like
universal and inextinguishable fireworks. Struggles, miseries, lies,
rivalries, ambitions, battles, despairs, tears, mournings, had too
often disfigured with black tempests the sky whose clearness had, in
the springtime of life, seemed unchangeable.
What had dominated everything was a wise and impenetrable trickery
by which Nature persuaded all young girls to become women, to adorn
themselves with irresistible allurements, and to open their arms to
men in order to assure the continuity of life, hiding from their
truthful eyes the dangers and sufferings to which she condemns them
by surrounding them with flowers. And thus humanity had continued
without a stop, believing that its destiny was to enjoy without end
and progress without a limit; and thus it had finally reached the
annihilation of the race and the planet, without leaving anything
behind of its splendours and its conquests. What is past is past.
Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had
disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal
spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed
everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the
slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if
that history had never been written.
* * * * *
For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas,
shedding light and heat around it. After being a brilliant white it
had become yellow and then red, passing, in the course of its cooling
process, through the successive stages of white, yellow, orange,
and red suns like Sirius, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, and Antares. As it
had grown cooler, terrestrial life had become attenuated. The Sun
had finally been covered with a solid crust, often pierced by the
pressure of the incandescent lava within, and giving rise to prodigious
volcanoes. With the failure of light and heat, the joys and pains
of terrestrial life had come to an end. And the radiant day-star
of former days had become an obscure globe covered with oceans and
clouds, without a new sun to illuminate it, without day or twilight,
careering through space in the eternal night, and gradually enveloped
in a winding sheet of ice and snow consisting of carbonic acid. All the
nations of the Earth had gone to rest in as many cemeteries. The dying
Sun had recapitulated in its evolution the phases of its ancestors.
In infinite space, the extinct suns are much more numerous than the
luminous suns, and the stars revived by collision with another are
the exception. Temporary stars, which only shine a short time, are
exceptional occurrences.
Thus our extinct Sun still roamed through the void, carrying along its
retinue of defunct planets and travelling with great speed through
empty and unconcerned space.
And at the time of which we are speaking, the stars still shone in
the sky, the worlds still gravitated around the suns in space; but
they were no longer the same stars, nor the same suns, planets, or
humanities; it was neither the Earth nor its contemporaries. Life
continued to blossom; but it was not our life.
Just as, before the birth of the Earth, other worlds had flourished in
space, so also after the death of our planet will the universe continue
to exist, as it existed during the human era. And in the world of which
we speak, a new and flourishing humanity shone in the joy of another
sun. What had happened was in direct opposition to what terrestrial
theologians had taught us concerning the end of the world. For them the
end of the world was to have meant the end of the living universe and
the establishment of a celestial and infernal world. For every one of
the mortals inhabiting the future globe of which we speak, life passed
with the fugitive and inexorable speed of the river which flows from
its source to the sea, day by day, month by month, year by year, so
swiftly that at the end of its course all the moments of that life seem
to touch.
The inhabitants of the world of Andromeda lived on their immense globe
and occupied themselves with their personal affairs as if our Earth
had never existed and without suspecting that long before them, in the
past, our human race had played the game of destiny, cradled in the
illusion that they existed alone in the world. Nobody thought, amid the
common people, that worlds succeeded each other in time as well as in
space. Only the thinkers standing on the heights from which the whole
of things and events can be surveyed, realised that important truth,
that the doctrine of the plurality of worlds applies to eternity as
well as to infinity.
* * * * *
In our attempts to arrive at an idea of the constitution of the
universe, two questions constantly and inevitably present themselves
to our minds: the questions of Space and Time. They are correlative,
but their interpretations are far from being identical, as is often
supposed.
Space does not exist by itself, nor does time.
It is impossible to imagine the suppression of space. It is asserted
in vain that space is the interval which separates two objects, and
that if the objects are suppressed, space vanishes also. That is a pure
scholastic sophism. The definition is not exact. One can safely say
that it is impossible to suppress by a thought the place where objects
could be. The place, the locality, that void, if you like, by whatever
noun it is designated, is there quite ready to receive any object which
our imagination can suppose to be there. Even though the universe did
not exist, if nothing, absolutely nothing, existed, that nothing would
still be space, empty space ready to receive an object. We are then
forced to conclude that space exists by itself, even if it cannot be
measured in any way.
It is not the same with time.
Time is created by the movements of the heavenly bodies. If the earth
did not turn, nor the stars, if there were no succession of periods,
time would not exist. It is astronomy which has created time.
If you suppress the universe, space continues to exist, but time
ceases, vanishes, disappears.
We measure the duration of a second, of an hour, of a day, of a
year, because the heavenly bodies are there as points of reference
between which we can count. Besides, it is all relative. If the Earth
moved twice as slowly, the days would be twice as long, but would be
apparently the same. If our calendar were different, it would still be
our measure of time, and we should be none the wiser.
One may put all the clocks forward or backward by one hour, and all the
calendars by one day, one month, or one year, change the reckoning of
the centuries, or modify the time system in any way one pleases, but it
would not change the real course of nature.
The terrestrial days and years do not count in the heavens. The time
which can be measured in our own system on the nearest planets, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Neptune, although simultaneous with that which
we measure here, is not relative to ours. Time is essentially local. If
we did not exist there might be other measures of time, but it would
not be time according to our conception. In fact our impressions are
relative, there is nothing absolute in time. If we suppress life, the
sensation of time disappears, time itself ceases to exist. In empty
space, a thousand centuries are no longer than one minute, because they
do not exist.
It is we who say “yesterday” and “to-morrow.” To nature, everything is
“to-day.” Besides, every one of us has had the opportunity of proving
for himself that time does not exist when we sleep. To sleep one hour
or five hours is the same to us as regards the appreciation of time.
Time being purely relative, a sleep of a decillion years would be the
same as the sleep of an hour.
Renan the philosopher, who expressed this truth, added: “Heaven
does not exist; in a decillion years it may possibly exist. Those
whom a tardy justice places there will believe that they have died
the previous evening. To have been, means to be. Succession is the
absolute condition of our mind; but in a material object, succession
and simultaneity are confounded. When in the presence of death, we ask
whether the night will be long, we are as simple as the child who asks
the same question in going to bed, because he loves the daylight in
which he plays.”
If our thinking monads are associated with these worlds to come,
eternity is their empire.
Speaking in the absolute, time does not exist. But space exists.
It might be objected that space itself is a measure, and when we cannot
measure it we cannot know it. No doubt if the terrestrial globe were
100 times smaller, 8 feet would barely be as long as one inch, and the
man measuring “6 feet” from head to foot would really only be ¾ inch
high. But nothing would appear smaller, because the metre would still
be the ten-millionth part of the quarter circumference of the Earth,
and everything would be reduced in the same proportion. As in the case
of time, measurement is essentially relative and has nothing absolute
about it. But this does not alter the fact that time only exists by the
succession of events, whereas space exists absolutely.
Empty space, which is nothing to our senses unless we measure it by
some length, cannot be suppressed. Whether we measure it or not this
is nothing to do with its existence by itself. These measures of space
which we take have no common measure with infinity, nor with absolute
space; yet they are taken in absolute space, and depend upon our means
of observation. In the infinite void we can imagine several measures
of space, all very different: for example, a fourth dimension which
for us has no dimensions at all, and in which modes of investigation
unknown to us can discover other dimensions which we cannot even guess
at, since for us three dimensions exhaust all possible measurements of
space.
* * * * *
The past which is no longer in existence, the future which is not yet,
is contained as a germ in the present. To the universal eye, everything
is in the present. In transporting ourselves, as we have done, into
future times, we observe the events of those future times as if they
were already present and already past. We are ephemeral atoms floating
in the bosom of eternity, seen for an instant in a beam of light. We
regard our epoch as a permanent reality--the illusion of a grain of
dust which appears and disappears in the beam.
He who contemplates nature must live in those ages as yet uncreated as
well as in those which have passed away. And the future as well as the
past are even more real than the present, which does not exist, since
from one second to another time climbs up into the future only to fall
Lack into the pit of the past. Shall we say that the “present” is the
present hour? No, for an hour is long. The present minute? No, for the
minute is long to the observing astronomer or physicist. The present
second! No, for it is exceedingly long to electrify. Shall we reduce
the “present” to the tenth of a second? Yes, if you like, but it is
still relative to our sensations. Still, let us agree to that. Here,
then, is the present--a tenth of a second! All the rest is past or
future, and eternity is the only permanent reality.
* * * * *
Thus, from that point of space and time where we were placed in that
celestial region of the constellation of Andromeda, we have seen arise
before us, like a mummy awakening from a long sleep, the history of
the dead Earth, while we saw life shaping itself in a world which, in
our twentieth century, was not yet in existence. Thence, reascending
through the ages, we watched the slow secular evolution of our
humanity, until sunlit days became night and we lived in a new present
which, in its turn, seemed unique and eternal.
The world to come is there, in the future eternity, just as the world
of long ago is there, in the eternity of the past, and all is present
in the Absolute.
God does not look either forward or backward. He does not remember,
he does not foresee: he sees. We can write our verbs in the different
times, past, present, and future. In transporting ourselves by means
of thought beyond even the distant era of which we have sketched an
episode, we could describe even this episode as an ancient event.
* * * * *
The history which we have written took place--a hundred million years
after to-day!
IV. VENUS THE
BEAUTIFUL
CHAPTER IV
VENUS THE BEAUTIFUL
Eσπερος ος кἀλλιστος έν ούρανω ιρταται ἁστηρ.
(Hesperus, most beautiful of stars in the sky.)
HOMER, _Iliad_.
IT was Homer who, 3,000 years ago, saluted Venus as the most beautiful
of stars. Who has not been struck with her wonderful brilliance? Who
can refrain, when she shines so marvellously in the heavens, from
greeting her as the brightest of the stars and asking what mysteries
are hidden in that light?
This radiant star of eve has been the first to be noticed since the
earliest ages; it is the only planet mentioned by Homer; Isaiah
celebrated her splendour under the name of Lucifer; at the time of
the pyramids the Egyptians called her “the celestial bird of morn and
eventide;” thirty-five centuries ago the Babylonians observed one of
its transits across the sun; the Indians called her “the brilliant,”
and the Arabs “Zorah, the splendour of the sky.” From the earliest days
of the world she was the goddess of beauty and love. Let us raise our
eyes to the heavens to-night: there is the star chanted by Homer and
Virgil.
* * * * *
How many events have happened since those far-off days! Nations,
languages, religions, all have changed. Where are the eyes which looked
upon Venus 3,000 years ago? Where are the hearts which confided to
her their vows of love for all eternity? And who will be _our_
successors when, 3,000 years hence, the Parisians of the fiftieth
century admire, as we do now, the star of the Iliad twinkling in their
sky? The history of man passes quickly, the waves succeed each other
and disappear in the ocean of the ages; the heavens remain, and the
astronomer smiles at great ambition and puny achievements.
* * * * *
Venus passes every eighth year through the period of greatest
brilliance (1889-1897-1905-1913-1921-1929). She is then so bright that
she casts a shadow like a small moon. This is easily seen either in
a dark room or when walking past a wall in the country. She can be
seen in daylight with the naked eye, not only before sunset, but at
midday if one knows where she is. No star or planet attains anything
comparable to such brightness.
This visibility of Venus in daylight has been noticed for a long time;
sometimes it becomes a public event, as in the spring of 1905. That
year among others our beautiful neighbour was under exceptionally
favourable conditions of observation. Everyone could see the radiant
planet flaming in the west in the spring; in February, March, and
April, the proximity of Jupiter, and sometimes of the Moon showed to
all eyes a most charming spectacle. The astronomical ignorance of the
inhabitants of the Earth is so universal that a free rein was given to
fancy, and in France one could read in the papers, under the title:
“The Luminous Phenomenon of Cherbourg,” a series of the oddest and
most contradictory descriptions. They spoke of an oval disc describing
curves in the sky; the appearance of an electric meteor; a halo due to
the deviation of the sun; of an illuminated captive balloon, of a new
kind of maritime signals, of an unknown star, of a comet, even of a
“constellation”!
And there was more to come. On the eleventh day of observation, April
11 (the strange apparition had commenced on April 1, and mariners might
have thought of an April hoax), the maritime prefect of Cherbourg
ordered the commander of the _Chasseloup-Laubat_ to study the
luminous phenomenon, A vessel was sent to look for Venus! The naval
officers could not explain the mystery; one of them, however, wrote
that it might be the planet Jupiter!
Other commanders, having heard of the comet discovered at the Nice
Observatory by M. Giacobini, announced that the “unexplained light”
might well be that comet! They did not know that that comet was a
telescopic one, invisible to the naked eye.
In the night of April 10-11 a meteorite was seen at Tunis. The question
arose whether it was not this meteorite which had first been seen every
evening at Cherbourg!
The phenomenon was signalled from Perpignan, Montauban, Nantes, le
Hâvre, La Réole, Amélie-les-Bains, etc.
And so on. Every sort of stupidity was given out on the subject.
Well, a star resplendent with light shone every evening in the western
sky. It was Venus, the famous Shepherds’ Star. It was seen from every
point of France, from Europe, Asia, the United States--and from
Cherbourg as well. For three months it reigned on high every evening.
It was also at its maximum brilliancy, and so bright that it cast a
shadow, as we have said. And nobody at Cherbourg spoke of Venus, nobody
compared with Venus the new star situated in the same region of the
sky, nobody thought that this mysterious heavenly body might be none
other than the radiant planet. Nobody seemed to know that Venus was
there![1]
The story repeated itself from December 1912 to March 1913. Venus
queened it over the first hours of the night, moving ever nearer to us
and remaining a little longer every evening above the horizon.
On the very rare date recorded by the postmarks as 12-12-12 (12
Dec., 1912), the conjunction of Venus and the Moon attracted general
attention, especially as the weather was fine. It was the same at the
other conjunctions, January 1912, February 11, and March 11.
This association of radiant Venus with the lunar crescent in the
evening sky offers to the eyes the most inspiring of spectacles.
The sensation caused at Cherbourg in the spring of 1905 by the
brilliant star of the evening shining upon the sea and taken for a
mysterious instrument of espionage was renewed in 1913, especially in
England. Those who saw it, blinded by its radiant beauty, were led to
confound the Shepherds’ Star with German airships, and accused them of
espionage.
One could read, in fact, in the paper, that the authorities on the
other side of the Channel were greatly alarmed by the nocturnal flight
of mysterious dirigibles which came under cover of the shades of the
evening and hovered over British ports. The cars and the balloons
themselves were, so it was said, invisible on account of the darkness,
but the powerful searchlights thrown upon the earth revealed the
unusual presence of the aerial intruder!
At the same time we received from Russia similar stories of the fear
inspired by Venus among the people, who professed to recognise in its
bright light the fires of Austrian aeroplanes spying out the upper
atmosphere.
In Roumania, Venus was taken for a Russian aeroplane; and in Bessarabia
(Russia), rifle-shots were fired at the beautiful planet, in the belief
that it was a Roumanian dirigible.
Yet it would be sufficient to use quite a small telescope or even a
good opera-glass to correct this error, for Venus showed phases which
would have immediately completed the identification, and certainly not
allowed it to be confused with aerial vehicles.
Such popular emotions caused by the appearance of Venus are not
confined to our own times. In December 1797 the young General
Bonaparte, after his wonderful conquest of Italy, returned to Paris to
receive from the Directory the honours which presaged the consulate.
Attended by a brilliant staff, he was going on horseback to the
palace of the Luxembourg, where the Directory awaited him, when he
was surprised to see, in the Rue de Tournon, all the people who stood
ready to greet him turn round and look at a point in the sky instead
of looking at him. His aide-de-camp told him that a star shone in the
sky and that the French saw in it the star of the conqueror of Italy.
It was Venus, then at its maximum brightness. Political conditions have
changed, but the star remains.
It was there in mythological times:
Venus Astarte, daughter of the sea,
Shook off her mother’s tears amid her fond caresses
And fertilised the earth in wringing out her tresses.
She was there, receiving the lovers’ holocausts within the temples
consecrated to her in Greece, Egypt, India, all over the world, for it
was from her brilliant or mysterious aspects of the morning and evening
that the cult of her charming personality was derived. Even nowadays
many an observer sees in her only a radiant beauty in an ethereal
dwelling-place, and does not remember that science has explained the
idol and transfigured the star.
From its greatest easterly elongation to its greatest westerly
elongation the brightness of the planet is such that when it is
not quite close to the sun it is usually seen with the naked eye
in daylight. Its phases are always curious and interesting. Their
discovery by Galileo was of great importance to the beginning of modern
astronomy in proving that the planets are globes without light of their
own, similar to the globe which we inhabit.
* * * * *
Venus is no longer for us an allegorical symbol lost in the incense of
the clouds and reigning over enslaved hearts; the Earth is no longer
an inferior abode controlled by celestial influence; the horizon
is grown wider, our planet has been liberated in unlimited space;
Venus has become a celestial Earth, our sister and neighbour, and the
better-informed eyes which contemplate it to-day see in her, not,
like Homer and Manilius, a luminous point shining above our heads
and controlling the feelings of our hearts and the movement of our
blood, but a world corresponding to the world we ourselves inhabit,
gravitating like us round the same sun, living on the same light and
heat, and fit like ours to bear a thinking race for whom the Earth we
inhabit is itself a star in the sky.
Venus, the brightest star which ever shines in the limpid glory of the
western sky, is not a star, strictly speaking; it is a planet, a world
like ours, and of the same size, which only shines by reflecting the
Sun’s light into space. When one remembers that it is the same with us,
and that, seen from the distance of some ten million miles, our Earth
shines with a similar lustre, one is forced to admit that we are much
more beautiful from afar than we are close by.
There is indeed no possible comparison between the two aspects. Seen
close at hand, we are agitation, the struggle for existence, fight,
battle, envy, jealousy, drama, hunger, often misery; seen from
afar, we are calm, serenity, pure nobility, celestial light, almost
an image of God! It is probably the same with Venus, so white and
so radiant seen from here; possibly if we could go close to her, we
should hear the cries of wild beasts in the forests, the battles of men
devouring each other in so-called civilised lands, and we might witness
geological and human revolutions, more formidable on account of the
fact that Venus, younger than ourselves, is less advanced in evolution.
Being nearer the Sun than we and enveloped in a very dense atmosphere,
Venus must have a higher temperature than the Earth. Its atmosphere is
heavily charged with hot vapours. Its sky is always overcast; thunder
and lightning must be never-ending. Electricity plays no doubt a
prominent part. But, although many things are imperfect, there is good
everywhere.
It is one of the charms of astronomy that it enables us to see through
time as well as through space. Those who remain in ignorance of the
elements of this science do not even know that they are depriving
themselves of the most agreeable satisfactions of the mind. They are
like travellers who pass through a wonderful landscape without even
asking where they are. This planet consecrated to Venus, the goddess
of beauty and love, who, in the days of ancient Greece, was said to
have emerged from the waves to charm gods and men, and whose mythical
history brings us such eloquent evidence of the influence of celestial
aspects upon the origin of religions--this planet, we say, owes its
terrestrial glory to its situation between the Earth and the Sun. While
our globe gravitates round the Sun at the distance of 92 million miles,
in a year of 365 days, Venus passes along the orbit contained within
our own, at the distance of 65 million miles from the Sun, in a year
numbering 225 days.
It follows that from time to time it passes between the Sun and
ourselves, approaching to within 25 million miles or even less, since
the two orbits are not circular, but elliptical.
* * * * *
One of the finest achievements of astronomy is having made man a
citizen of the heavens. The planet which we inhabit is a heavenly body,
just as is Venus, Mars, or Jupiter, and far from occupying the centre
of creation, it lies in the depths of infinite space as do the most
distant stars of the Milky Way. Venus possesses no more light of her
own than does the Earth; she simply receives the rays of the Sun and
sheds them into space as the Moon does. Take, for instance, a small
finder telescope and direct it towards Venus; you will see the form
of a crescent. It is no longer Venus, but Diana. Take a rather more
powerful telescope, and you will see that the border of this crescent
is not regular, and the southern pole is blunted and rounded, while the
northern pole is pointed. On increasing the power of your instrument
you will perceive the atmosphere by the gradual transition between the
illuminated hemisphere and the dark hemisphere, or by the blinding
clouds and light shadows which fleck its disc.
If you go still farther and give yourself the pains and the pleasure
of doing a few astronomical calculations, you will see that the
diameter of its globe is just the same as that of the Earth--within one
thousandth part!--but that Venus is a little lighter than the Earth,
its density being only four-fifths of ours, whence it results that
objects weigh a little less on its surface than they would on ours:
1,000 grammes transported on Venus would only weigh 880 grammes; on
Mars they would weigh even less, viz. 376 grammes; and even less on the
Moon, viz. 165 grammes. We are very heavy down here.
Astronomy alone teaches us that this young sister of ours is in
communication with us, not only by means of light, but also by
attraction, and that space, so far from being a separation between
worlds, is a real link, an invisible hyphen. For example, when the
distance between us and Venus is 25 million miles, light only takes 2½
minutes to cross that distance. Is that a serious separation? Even in
France a telegram, in spite of its name, takes more than an hour to be
delivered a few hundred miles away, on account of intermediate links.
If astronomers ever succeeded in establishing celestial telegraphy,
communication would be much more rapid between one world and another
than between one part of modern Babylon and another. An interplanetary
telephone would be almost instantaneous.
* * * * *
If the luminous beams from Venus to the Earth only take two or three
minutes to reach us, according to its proximity, the attraction between
the two planets is transmitted still more rapidly, for it does not
even take a whole second. And just think! At the distance of millions
of miles we feel the mysterious influence of Venus, we abandon for a
moment the regular course of our orbit round the Sun to follow in her
path. Celestial mechanics calculates this displacement and accounts for
it in its determinations.
If the Sun were not the strongest, the two sister-planets, Earth and
Venus, would gradually approach each other and would graze one another
like two dragon-flies roaming together through the fields of the sky.
But fortunately for us, the omnipotent Sun soon resumes its rights, and
everything is restored back to order.
The years of Venus are shorter than ours. Their precise duration
is 224 days 16 hours 49 minutes 8 seconds. We do not yet know the
diurnal rotation, i.e. the length of its days. According to certain
observations, this appears to be about 24 hours, while others indicate
that this planet does not turn upon its axis at all, or rather, that
its rotation is equal to its revolution and that it always turns the
same side towards the Sun.
It is extremely difficult to determine its rotation, for two reasons.
Firstly, because its atmosphere is very dense and always full of
clouds, so that it is impossible to make out its geography and to
follow in the telescope the displacement of its surface details; this
is so easily done in the case of Mars, whose atmosphere is always
clear, and whose rotation is known with perfect accuracy, its period
being 24 hours 37 minutes 22½ seconds. The second reason is the
difficulty presented by the phases of Venus. The closer the planet
approaches us in its orbit round the Sun, the more does its disc
apparently grow in size and the less we see of its surface, because it
at the same time passes between the Sun and us, so that its illuminated
hemisphere, being naturally turned towards the Sun which illuminates
it, is hidden from us.
My personal observations lead me to believe that the period of rotation
is about 24 hours. At the Juvisy observatory we have often observed
and photographed snowy patches in the north and south, probably
marking the extremes of an axis and therefore a rotation.
This special point is not yet decided. It is quite possible that the
days are very long there, or rather, that they last for ever--perpetual
day on one side and perpetual night on the other side. That would make
it a very singular world. On one side light, heat, and life; on the
other, the icy coldness of death. Some might choose for their abode
perpetual sunlight; others might prefer a night illuminated perhaps by
electric light; yet others might prefer to dwell in the dawn or the
twilight. Beautiful Venus would then have one hemisphere in perpetual
night and one in perpetual day. How strange! How our worlds must differ
in the form of their organisms and the nature of their inhabitants!
* * * * *
The science of the stars opens unexpected outlooks on extra-terrestrial
life. We know already that Venus, the Earth, and Mars are three
floating homes controlled by the same forces, governed by the same
attraction and cradled in the fluctuation of the same magnetism.
Regarded from this point of view, Venus is more interesting to us than
she ever was in mythological times. Is not the knowledge of those
celestial sympathies a first stage of the road leading to the conquests
of other worlds?
[Footnote 1: The astronomical annuals had announced the brilliant
appearance of Venus. But who reads the _Nautical Almanac_? People
prefer to read the almanacs which falsely predict rain and fine weather
and guess at the political events of the year. Humanity prefers its
ignorance and its illusions.]
V. THE
PLANET MARS
CHAPTER V
THE PLANET MARS
THE inhabitants of the Earth are at last beginning to take some
interest in the sky. Tired of living as blind strangers to their
own country, they are beginning to know that the world on which
they move about is a planet gravitating round the Sun, and that
other sister-planets swing round at the same time in the harmony of
the solar system. Mars is now spoken of in public as one speaks of
politics and of socialism. In America as well as in Europe, at Buenos
Ayres, Mexico, or Caracas, as well as at Paris, Milan, Petrograd,
Budapest, and Stockholm, the latest telescopic results are discussed.
It is known that this neighbouring planet sometimes approaches the
Earth within 37½ or even 35 million miles; that astronomers have
their eyes on the planet and that they have observed luminous flashes
on it, the explanation of which is puzzling them. People remember
that in a certain year, 1877, the planet being in its greatest
proximity, straight lines resembling canals were discovered, and
that the question of possible inhabitants of this new country and
future communication with them has been raised. Questions are put and
answers are given, discussions give rise to curious confusions and
exaggerations, but the net result is that an interest is created in
these high questions which raise us above the vulgarities of ordinary
life, and a general knowledge of the universe is advanced. That is the
main thing.
The last occasions on which Mars was in close proximity to us were
1897, 1899, and 1909.
This remarkable development of public curiosity is easily explained
by the marvellous achievements of contemporary astronomy and the
admirable precision of certain results obtained. Unless one has a stone
instead of a heart and a lump of fat in the place of a brain, it is
difficult not to feel some emotion over the achievements of science. If
we declare, for instance, that we know the general geography of Mars
better than we do that of our own planet, the listener or reader is at
first inclined to be somewhat sceptical. But if we show him, either in
a telescope or in a diagram, the snows of the north or south poles of
Mars, he will admit that nobody has as yet had a complete view of these
regions on the Earth, in spite of the discoveries of polar explorers,
and he will be convinced that we do know those Martian regions better
than our own poles. That is already a fact of some interest; but we
can go farther than that.
It is not only the pole, but the whole surrounding country that is
better known on Mars than on the Earth, not only from the geographical,
but also from the meteorological point of view. Thus, for instance,
we can almost constantly measure the extent of the polar snows, and
we find that it varies with the seasons. We see with our own eyes the
melting of these snows taking place very rapidly under the light and
heat of the Sun, night after night, so to speak, during a summer which
is twice as long as ours. The snows disappear almost entirely, and only
a little ice remains on a region which we know, and which represents
the pole of extreme cold, situated 212 miles from the geographical
pole. In spite of the perseverance and heroism of arctic explorers,
none of these climatological facts have been witnessed on Earth. It
is possible that the Martians are ignorant of their own phenomena if
they have been unable to reach their poles. Still, since their poles
are free at the end of the summer, they are much better able than
we to explore their polar regions. We may say that in general the
meteorology and climatology of Mars are better known than those of
the Earth. At the time when you read these lines you do not know, and
nobody can tell you, what sort of weather you will have to-morrow.
But we do know almost certainly what the weather will be to-morrow,
next week, next month, on such and such a region on Mars: if we do not
wait till the winter comes, we know that it will be fine. Hardly do
we see a cloud between the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox,
neither in the equatorial nor the temperate regions, and hardly even
in the circumpolar regions. If we are unable to make a drawing of the
telescopic image of the planet, the difficulty hardly ever arises
from the Martian atmosphere, but from our own, which is so often
overcast or turbid. All the geographical configurations, seas, rivers,
plains, covered with vegetation according to the moisture available,
water-courses varying with the seasons, canals and oases, are mapped
out with precision; we know in advance which country will pass across
the field of our telescope; and the period of rotation, as already
mentioned, is known to the 100th of a second. It is 24 hours 37 minutes
22.58 seconds. We also know that the Martian year contains 59,355,041
seconds, i.e. 686 terrestrial days 23 hours 30 minutes 41 seconds.
But since that planet turns on its axis a little more slowly than the
Earth, there are only 668 Martian days in the Martian year. In fact
the Martian calendar is composed of two successive years of 668 days
and a leap year of 669 days. As in our case, there is no exact number
of days in the Martian year. Perhaps their calendar has also been
reformed several times without being made perfect. But let us hope
that they are not as stupid as we, with our months of 28, 29, 30, and
31 days, and calling the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth month the
seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth respectively; with our disagreement
about dates, Russia only arriving at the 1st of January when the rest
of the civilised world has reached the 14th; with our three kinds of
days: the civil day which commences at midnight, the astronomical day
which commences the next midday, and the naval day which commences the
previous midday; we who waited thousands of years before we could fix
an exact hour, because we counted from conventional meridians, and
the various countries could not agree upon the single meridian. Being
probably more advanced than ourselves in its planetary age, Martian
humanity is most likely more reasonable and is not mixed up with the
littleness of frontiers, dialects, customs, national rivalries, etc.
For a long time already, no doubt they form a simple unit. One may
also suppose that they do not celebrate their new-year festival and
its rejoicings amid the winter frosts, but in the hopeful days of the
equinox.
* * * * *
One of the most curious observations which have been made on this
neighbouring planet, or rather which have, apart from the canals,
attracted the greatest attention, is that of the luminous flashes. It
has been said that these flashes are all seen at the edge of the disc,
or beyond it. This is not correct; they show themselves on the line
which separates the hemisphere illuminated by the Sun from the dark
hemisphere--the line called the “terminator.” They are only seen when
the globe of Mars offers a sensible phase, and only along the line of
that terminator.
The phenomenon is a slight projection, swelling, or puffing-up of
the terminator. It is not a more extraordinary observation than that
of the irregularities in the lunar diameter at certain phases: the
Sun illuminates, either before its rising or before its setting, the
summits of mountains whose bases are still in darkness, and such
summits sometimes appear on the Moon as luminous points detached from
the disc. Some fertile imaginations have interpreted these flashes as
forests on fire or as signals sent out by the Martians. This is going
too far. But the possibility of the population of Mars by a human
species more intelligent than ours is quite a natural conclusion from
the observations. One may also guess without scientific heresy that
the canals of Mars are rivers straightened with a deliberate intention
of distributing water which has become a rarity over that planet. The
astronomers who deny these possibilities show a very poor spirit. But,
on the other hand, there is no reason to see nothing on that world
but human activity. Among several explanations of observed phenomena
one must always prefer the simplest. In the case of luminous dashes on
the terminator, the illumination of mountain-tops or clouds by the Sun
suffices to account for them.
Doubts were raised concerning this explanation by the height of 200,000
feet found by an astronomer for the elevation of these mountains. I
went over the calculation and found only 15,000 feet. These mountains
would not therefore be higher than Mont Blanc, and perhaps less. We
should also remember that those luminous projections appear every time
that the planet returns to the same condition of illumination with
regard to the Earth. They were observed in 1890, 1892, 1894, 1899,
1907, 1909, 1911, 1913, etc. The regions where they appear are a sort
of island called Noachis, another called Hesperia, and a third called
Tempe. According to all appearances, we have to do with high mountains
covered with snow and with still higher clouds.
* * * * *
The epoch at which the inhabitants of Mars can communicate with us
has not yet arrived, or perhaps it has already passed away. All
cosmological studies agree in presenting this planet as older than
ours, since it is farther from the Sun, and as having passed through
its phases of astral life more rapidly than we, on account of its
smallness and lightness. We cannot pretend to know the forms which
living beings may have assumed there; but we cannot imagine, on the
other hand, that the forces of nature, being the same as here and
exercised under almost identical conditions (atmosphere, climate,
seasons, water, vapours, etc.), have been sterilised by a perpetual
miracle of annihilation while on Earth the cup of life overflows all
round and the generative force of living beings everywhere surpasses
continual and permanent production. But whatever may be the forms of
Martian humanity, they must be superior to us, for several reasons. The
first of these is that it would be difficult for a human species to be
less intelligent than ours, because we do not know how to behave and
three-quarters of our resources are employed for feeding soldiers.
The second reason is that progress is an absolute law which nothing can
resist. If therefore the inhabitants of Mars have passed their infancy,
the centuries have brought them to an age of reason, and their present
state represents what our race will be in several million years.
A third circumstance is that they are better situated than ourselves
for escaping from the heaviness of matter. A given bulk of water,
earth, or other substance is only seven-tenths of the weight it is
here; 1,000 grammes taken to Mars would only weigh 376 grammes there;
and the woman weighing 8 stone would only weigh 3 stone there.
And, finally, the climatic conditions appear to be much more agreeable
there.
* * * * *
Those are all advantages in favour of the Martians. If, therefore, the
idea has occurred to them to make signals to us, it is probably not at
the present time. There is no reason that they should think of it at
the same time as we and should wait for us. Perhaps they tried 200,000
or 300,000 years ago, before the appearance of man, at the time of the
cave-bear or the mammoth. Perhaps they addressed themselves to our
planet at the time of the Iguanodon and the Dinosaurus. Perhaps they
tried again 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. Never having seen any sign of
life, they will have concluded that either there are no inhabitants on
the Earth, or that they are busy with other things besides the study
of the universe and eternal truths. That was true yesterday--and it is
true to-day.
VI. THE GIANT WORLD
OF JUPITER
CHAPTER VI
THE GIANT WORLD OF JUPITER
EVERYBODY notices, year by year, in a southerly direction, a bright
star which half the spectators believe to be the evening star, but
which so far from being Venus, is its very antithesis.
To mistake Jupiter for Venus is a sufficiently gross error. But even
this error is preferable to nothing. It is better to be mistaken than
not to see anything. A large portion of the human race sees nothing
at all, thinks nothing, and passes its whole life in the stupidity of
plants and slugs.
To notice the star in the sky, even to give it a wrong name, is
something, at all events. It shows that one does not go about with eyes
cast on the ground or occupied with worldly affairs and with the spirit
absorbed by material interests.
Venus, the Shepherds’ Star, the morning and evening star, is never far
from the sun. It is never in the south, neither in the evening nor at
midnight. Its orbit round the Sun lies within our own. Jupiter, on
the contrary, revolves round the same Sun along an orbit outside our
own, five times as far as the central luminary, at 485 million miles
instead of 92 million miles. The distance between us and Jupiter is
therefore always greater than 393 million miles except when the Earth
reaches the extremity of its elliptical orbit (“aphelion”) at a time
when Jupiter is in “opposition” to the Sun. We often see it at a medium
distance of 450 million miles. If the atmosphere extended over all that
distance, an aeroplane flying without a stop at 62 miles an hour, and
therefore covering 1,500 miles a day, would take no less than 300,000
days or 812 years to complete the voyage. It would be wise to take some
provisions with us!
But on what sort of a world should we arrive?
A giant world, an immense world, a strange world. It is only a thousand
times smaller than the Sun--that is to say, 1,000 times larger than the
Earth, or even more. Jupiter is eleven times larger in diameter than
our globe, i.e. 1,300 times larger in volume. Gravitation is enormous
at its surface, 2½ times what it is here. A man weighing 10 stone
here would weigh 25 stone there. But its density is very low, being
one-quarter of that of the earth. It is a world of water and more or
less dense gas.
Astronomers observe it with great interest since they see it furrowed
with various currents and enveloped in clouds and vapours. The currents
at the surface revolve with different speeds, so that it is difficult
to know what is the rotation of the planet itself. At the equator, this
rotation is accomplished in 9 hours 50 minutes 30 seconds; not far from
the equator, in the subtropical regions, it takes 9 hours 55 minutes 41
seconds. Since Jupiter’s year is twelve times as long as ours, there
are more than 10,000 days per annum.
Here is a curious circumstance: on account of the difference of
rotation, the Jovian year comprises 87 more (Jovian) days at the
equator than it does in the subtropical zone. If it were the same on
our globe, the inhabitants of the Congo, Colombia, Borneo, and Sumatra
would have a day more in their year (and even five in four years) than
those of Senegal, the Antilles, Siam, or India, a difference of 125
days per century! It would be difficult to keep their calendars in
agreement.
There are seven or eight kinds of currents between the equator and the
poles, so that one can say of Jupiter, as of the Sun, that it does not
turn in one piece.
And those speeds themselves vary with the years. In the southern
tropical zone there is a curious spot which has been followed with
some interest for fifty years. Although it is much larger than the
Earth, it seems to float in the current. Constant observation shows its
period of rotation to have been 9 hours 55 minutes 41 seconds in 1900
and 9 hours 55 minutes 39 seconds in 1906, and its period returned in
1913 to the figure of 1900. What is the nature of this floating spot?
In 1890 its colour was red. It then gradually got paler, and then
pink once more. Its shape was that of a long oval, measuring 26,000
miles in length, or more than three times the diameter of our globe.
The current in which it floats has not the same period of rotation
as the spot itself. The spot is pushed from west to east, and it has
shifted 57 degrees in two years. Now, a degree on the globe of Jupiter
in that latitude represents 720 miles. This Jovian formation has,
therefore, been displaced 41,000 miles, or a distance more than five
times the diameter of our planet. It is as if Australia were to detach
itself from the bottom of the sea and float about on the surface of
the Pacific Ocean! Does this oscillation, which we only see in plan,
and not in elevation, indicate the formation of a satellite trying to
disengage itself from its parent planet and not succeeding? It looks
as if there were on this giant world of Jupiter no surface at all,
but irregular aerial layers one over the other, and full of clouds.
The temperature must be very high, and enormous masses of vapour
are formed, to wrestle in prodigious storms. Though mythology is of
no importance here, it is evident that Jupiter is indeed the god of
thunder-storms. Jupiter is a world in the making, a sun which has lost
its light, but not its heat. Its density, nearly equal to that of the
Sun, is barely greater than that of water. A globe of vapour varied by
mountains of clouds, impalpable Himalayas, aerial Alps in convulsions,
fluid and constantly agitated Pyrenees! Its colossal bulk has prevented
its cooling as fast as our Earth, and it will no doubt take tens of
hundreds of millions of years to arrive at a temperature fit for
inhabitants. In all probability there is nobody yet on Jupiter, neither
men nor animals nor plants. This immense world is in its primordial
state and prepares itself for the future.
Spectrum analysis shows that the substances which abound there are
different from terrestrial substances. Any living beings who may
develop there will probably be chemically different from terrestrial
beings, and consist not of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, or nitrogen,
but of combinations of other substances. It will be a differently
constituted world.
Our interest in observing it is not lessened by that consideration.
The thinking mind knows that our present era is of no particular
importance. It has been preceded by other eras and will be succeeded by
other cycles. It is not because we live at this particular moment that
our time can be said to be of any special value. The years contemporary
with Jesus Christ or with the Pharaohs who built the pyramids had just
as much value as ours, and when we shall no longer be there, the Earth
will continue to revolve and measure out their days to our successors
indefinitely. Whether Jupiter is inhabited this year or in 500,000
years or in 10,000,000 years is the same to the philosopher. Everything
to him is present, both the future and the past ... this great subject
has already been dealt with, and there is no need to refer to it again.
Let us greet Jupiter as the symbol of the future. Behind him, among the
constellation, there are stars whose light, starting at the time of
the siege of Troy, has only arrived to-day. Thus in the same celestial
record the past and the future are thrown together, and they tell us
that if there is anything interesting in human life it is Thought, the
mind which contemplates the universe, which lives intelligently, and
without which all Nature would be but the play of an automaton.
VII. HEARTBEATS
ACROSS SPACE
CHAPTER VII
HEARTBEATS ACROSS SPACE
ACROSS 92 million miles of space the magnetic pulses of the solar heart
are transmitted to the earth, and they make the small and light compass
needle, ever trembling and seeking its pole, vibrate on its pivot.
This magnetic needle does not remain fixed in the magnetic meridian,
but oscillates every day to the right and left of the line, i.e. to
the east and west. The greatest deviation is produced at about 8 a.m.
The needle stops and returns to the magnetic meridian of the time (it
varies from year to year), crosses it a little after 10 a.m., and
continues to deviate towards the west, reaching its greatest deviation
about 1.15 p.m. It then returns to the meridian, which it reaches about
6 p.m. and crosses to the east. It moves very slowly, with a slight
oscillation between 8 and 10 p.m. to the east, attaining at 8 a.m. the
greatest easterly deviation with which we began.
Such is the daily oscillation of the needle, a process expressive of
the unknown and mysterious vital current which traverses our planet and
manifests, so to speak, the soul of the earth.
This phenomenon is absolutely general and is observed on the entire
globe, from the equator to the poles, in the same manner; the amplitude
of the oscillation increases with the latitude but not proportionately;
it only amounts to 1 or 2 minutes of arc in the tropics, to 9 minutes
in France, and 7 minutes in Norway. This variation corresponds sensibly
to the variation of temperature, the amplitude of which increases
from the tropics to the poles. Heat, electricity, water-vapour, and
barometric pressure are all associated with it.
There are certain perturbations, to be mentioned presently, to which
some human beings are sometimes a little too sensive. We live enveloped
in an invisible world.
The amplitude of this daily oscillation varies from day to day,
from month to month, from year to year. If we take the mean of the
observations of a whole year, we find that from one year to another
it changes from a certain amount to double that amount and that this
annual variation is regulated by a law. It is periodic, and the average
period is eleven or twelve years.
For instance, in 1870 the oscillation was twelve minutes of arc and in
1878 it was six minutes. I take the figures for London, Prague, Munich,
Rome, and Milan--not those for France, for no observations were made in
that terrible year, or they were made badly, and I made many enemies
by insisting upon them.
That year, 1870, was a maximum. There were other maxima, but not quite
so great, in 1883, 1893, 1905, and in 1916. The cycle varies from ten
to thirteen years.
Now, this behaviour of the magnetic needle corresponds exactly to the
state of health of the Sun, i.e. its activity or the number of sunspots
or whirlpools which indicate it as well as its gigantic flames,
protuberances, faculæ, and the various manifestations of its radiating
power.
There was a very considerable maximum of sunspots in 1870. Another
maximum occurred in 1883 and another in 1905, but the latter were less
marked than that of 1870. In 1918 another very well defined maximum
occurred.
Minima of sunspots, protuberances, and faculæ were observed in 1878,
1889, 1901, and 1913. Now, these maxima and minima correspond exactly
with the variation of the compass needle, as is shown in the tables and
curves published in my _Astronomie Populaire_.
If curves are traced for solar activity on the one hand and magnetic
oscillation on the other hand, it is found that the two curves are
absolutely parallel. Science has been able to trace this parallelism
very far, as far back indeed as the eighteenth century, and it is
found to include the aurora borealis, which is a magnetic phenomenon.
The concordance is evident and absolutely incontestable.
Thus there constantly emanates from the Sun a force different from
light and heat, a force we do not perceive with our senses and which
places our small and mobile planet in constant communication with our
central star, which is more than a million times greater in volume.
The Sun sometimes experiences violent expansions, perturbations,
tempests, and magnetic storms. The smallest disturbances which happen
in our formidable star are transmitted to us.
For instance: the years 1904 to 1908 were very strange so far as the
Sun was concerned. Instead of the single maximum which is usually
observed, there were two maxima, one in 1905 and another in 1907, 1906
being less active. The curve traced to represent the number of sunspots
shows two peaks, in 1905 and 1907 respectively, with a depression in
1906. It is the same with terrestrial magnetism: maxima in 1905 and
1907, with a slight weakening in 1906.
When I discovered this unexpected coincidence for 1906, several
sceptics were greatly surprised. Yet it is true.
It was the same when I accused the Sun of being the author of the
interruption of telephonic and telegraphic communication on September
25, 1909, which took place over the whole of France, in all Europe,
and throughout the world. The telephone girls were unjustly blamed and
the telegraph engineers were equally innocent. Why had no newspaper
thought of it? Perhaps because politics are cultivated more than
science in the papers of our unbalanced days. I do not accuse our
country more than another, the English, German, American, Australian,
and other editors having been equally astray concerning the cause of
the perturbation.
On that day the intensity of the earth-currents which produced the
breakdown was 50 million amperes, whereas the instruments work
regularly with 10 to 12 milliamperes. The whole terrestrial globe
had been plunged into a magnetic field of great intensity, into a
veritable dynamic ocean originating in a solar torrent. A large group
of sunspots surrounded by faculæ had arrived on the eastern limb of
the solar globe on September 17, and had gradually advanced towards
the central meridian of the solar hemisphere turned towards us by
the Sun’s rotation. On the 19th, this group had become much larger.
The spectroscope had indicated violent eruptions. The enormous group
of sunspots was visible to the naked eye and numerous photographs of
it had been taken at the Juvisy Observatory. It passed the central
meridian of the Sun on the morning of September 24 and continued its
course towards the western limb, disappearing from sight on October
1. The magnetic perturbation which struck our planet arrived 30 hours
after the passage of this group of sunspots across the central meridian
of the solar hemisphere facing us.
We had already, on October 31, 1903, observed a similar cosmic
phenomenon, and previously on November 18, 1882, and August 3, 1872.
Even before that date a similar event took place on September 1,
1859. But memory is short, and in any case astronomical ignorance is
universal.
The magnetic link, invisible but powerful, joins our Earth to the
central body of the solar system. Pœebus Apollo holds us in the hollow
of his hand at a distance of 92 million miles, and we feel his pulse
as he feels our feeble heart-beats. It is not only gravitation, nor
only light, nor yet only heat, which throws a celestial bridge from
the Sun to the Earth; it is also electricity; it is also magnetism;
it is a force still unknown and unexplained which no doubt maintains
communication between all the worlds. For the ethereal wave touches
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as it
touches us, and if we could utilise it we could communicate with our
neighbours in the heavens.
Interstellar magnetism! At each stage in the advance of science new
horizons open out, unexpected perspectives reveal themselves, enlarging
the field of our conquest over nature, but what we do know already is
a mere nothing in comparison with what we are yet to know.
What is the nature of the wave or substance which leaves the Sun and
reaches the Earth to produce those agitations of the magnetic needle,
those magnetic storms and auroræ boreales?
Contemporary physics has been busy for twenty years about ions,
electrons, and electric particles. The great perturbations described
above are supposed to be due to the arrival in the upper atmosphere
of torrents of electrons projected by the Sun and impinging upon the
Earth with a speed of several thousand miles per second. The phenomenon
is most intense when these emanations from the day-star hit the Earth
directly. When they pass on one side, nothing out of the way happens.
It may be that the torrent projected in a certain direction by the Sun
on September 24 filled space in the direction of projection, and that
our globe, travelling along its orbit at 67,000 miles an hour, only
passed through that region on the following day.
Ions and electrons, those convenient goblins of present-day physics, do
they exist? Nobody has ever seen them. Perhaps they are only ingenious
interpretations. What does certainly exist is electric force. We may
also think of the repelling force exerted by the Sun, which blows
so strongly upon the nuclei of comets and produces tails several
million miles long and always in the direction opposed to the Sun.
Electricity plays a great part in the appearance, the illumination,
and the dislocation of comets’ tails, as we see nearly every year in
the photographs taken at the Juvisy Observatory and which make such
picturesque and suggestive revelations (it even plays a part in organic
cells and among microbes).
Whatever may be the real nature of the force in action, it is certain
that the magnetic link differs from universal gravitation, but it is no
less intimate and all-pervading. The twin forces of gravitational and
magnetic attraction between worlds can only be likened to the universal
force of love, which attracts souls towards each other.
VIII. IDEAS CONCERNING
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN
THE WORLDS
CHAPTER VIII
IDEAS CONCERNING COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE WORLDS
THAT in a future, which is perhaps not very far distant, say in a
century or two, the inhabitants of our planet might enter into optical,
electrical, or telepathic communication with those of another planet of
the solar system is an event which we have some right to expect, though
it is not a matter of to-morrow.
About the year 1840 the astronomer von Littrow, Director of the
Vienna Observatory, put forward the idea of attempting an optical
communication with the Moon. A triangle traced upon the soil of the
Moon by three luminous lines each from 7 to 9 miles long would be
visible from here by means of our telescopes. We even observe much
smaller detail, such as the singular topographical designs noticed in
the lunar circle which goes by the name of Plato. Thus a triangle, a
square, or circle of that size, constructed by us on a vast plain by
means of luminous points, either during the day by the reflection of
sunlight, or during the night by means of electric light, would be
visible to the astronomers of the Moon, if such astronomers exist and
if they have optical instruments equivalent to ours.
The rest of the argument is of the simplest. If we observed on the
Moon a correctly constructed triangle, we should be considerably
interested. We should ask ourselves whether we had observed wrongly or
whether an accidental geographical movement might have given rise to a
regular figure. We should no doubt end by admitting that exceptional
possibility. But if we suddenly saw that triangle change into a square,
and some months later be replaced by a circle, we should then admit
logically that an intelligent effect proves an intelligent cause, and
we should think with some reason that such figures undoubtedly reveal
the presence of geometers on the neighbouring world.
From that position to a search for the reason for the formations on
the Moon’s surface and to the question why and with what object those
unknown comrades drew those figures would be a short step quickly
taken. Would it be with the idea of entering into communication with
us? The hypothesis would not be absurd. It would be put forward, it
would be discussed, it would be rejected as far-fetched and defended
as ingenious. And after all, why not? Why should the inhabitants of
the Moon not be more curious than we, more intelligent, of higher
aspirations, less stuck in the bog of material necessities? Why should
they not suppose that the Earth can be inhabited as well as their own
world, and why should these geometrical appeals not be made with the
object of asking us whether we exist? Besides, it is not difficult
to reply. We are shown a triangle, we reproduce it here. A circle is
traced, we imitate it. And so communication is established between the
Heavens and the Earth for the first time since the beginning of the
world.
Geometry being the same for all the inhabitants of the universe, and
twice two making four in all the regions of infinite space, and the
three angles of a triangle always being equivalent to two right angles,
signals thus exchanged between the Earth and the Moon would not even
have the obscurity of the hieroglyphics deciphered by Champollion,
and the communication, once established, would become regular and
fertile. Besides, the Moon is close by. Its distance of 240 thousand
miles is only thirty times the diameter of the earth, and many a rural
postman has covered that amount of ground on foot during the course
of his life. A telegram would arrive there in a second and a quarter,
and light takes the same time to cover that distance. The Moon is a
celestial province joined to our destiny by Nature herself.
Up to now we have noticed nothing on the Moon which might lead us
to suspect the existence of a thinking humanity inhabiting that
small celestial island. Tet the astronomers who specially observe
our satellite and who study its singular aspects with attention and
perseverance are generally of opinion that that heavenly body is not
as dead as it seems. We must not forget that in the present state of
optical science it is difficult in practice to apply to the study of
the Moon a magnification greater than a thousand times. To see our
satellite a thousand times closer than it really is still leaves it
at a distance of 240 miles. Now, what can be distinguished at such a
distance?
It is certain that mysterious variations actually occur on the surface,
notably in the arena of the amphitheatre of Plato as mentioned above.
What is also certain is that the lunar globe, 49 times smaller than
the earth and 91 times lighter, exerts on its surface a gravitational
attraction six times less than that which exists at the surface of our
own planet, so that an atmosphere analogous to the air we breathe would
be more rarefied and difficult to perceive from here. It is therefore
not surprising that this neighbouring world is so different from ours.
Besides, seen from a balloon 3 or 4 miles above ground, the Earth
appears deserted, uninhabited, as silent as an immense cemetery, and
whoever arrived from the Moon in a balloon could ask himself even at
that small distance whether there were any people in France or any
sound in Paris. Such at least is the impression conveyed to me by my
aerial voyages.
* * * * *
The cold and deathly aspect of our pale satellite was not encouraging
for the realisation of the original project of the astronomer J. von
Littrow, and soon afterwards, forgetting our nearest neighbour, the
imagination of some physicists was bold enough to consider the planet
Mars, which is never nearer than 35 million miles, but is the best
known of all the countries of the sky and which offers so many points
of resemblance with our world that we should hardly feel exiled if we
were to transport our household gods thither. The aspect of Mars indeed
tends to comfort us after that of the Moon. One could imagine oneself
in some terrestrial region. The seasons, summer and winter, autumn and
spring, days and night, mornings and evenings, waters, clouds, snows,
atmospheric variations, plains adorned with various vegetations--all
these things present many resemblances to our own world. The years are
longer there since they last 687 days, but the extreme variations of
the seasons are about the same as with us since the inclination of the
axis is about the same. The days are also a little longer, since the
diurnal rotation is 24 hours 37 minutes 23 seconds, but the difference
is not great. And you will notice that this is all known with great
precision, that diurnal rotation, for example, is known to within
one-tenth of a second, or we might even say one-hundredth of a second.
When, on a fine starry night, we examine this world through the
telescope, when we see the polar snows which melt in the spring, the
finely marked continents, the mediterraneans with long gulfs, the
eloquent and varied geographical configuration, one cannot help asking
whether the Sun which illuminates that world as it does ours shines on
nothing living, whether those rains fertilise anything, whether that
atmosphere is breathed by any living being, and whether that world
of Mars which rolls swiftly through space resembles a railway train
travelling empty without either goods or passengers. The idea that the
Earth where we are could swing round the Sun as it does without being
inhabited by any creature whatever appears so absurd as to be hardly
worth thinking about. By what permanent miracle of sterilisation would
the forces of nature which act there as they do here have remained
eternally inactive and barren?
* * * * *
It is therefore conceivable that one might apply to Mars the plan
originally proposed for the Moon. The distance of that planet is such
that although it is much larger than the Moon in volume, it appears 63
times smaller when it is nearest to us. Yet one may understand that
a telescope which magnifies 63 times enlarges Mars to the size of the
Moon as seen with the naked eye, and that a magnification of 630 gives
it a diameter ten times larger than that of our satellite.
Yet if ever the attempt is made to put any sort of project of
communication between us and Mars into practice, the signals would have
to be carried out on a much vaster scale. It would not be triangles,
squares, circles, of several miles which would have to be constructed,
but figures of 70 miles or more, always supposing (1) that Mars is
inhabited, (2) that these inhabitants occupy themselves with astronomy,
(3) that they have optical instruments analogous to ours, and (4) that
they carefully observe our planet, which to them is a brilliant star
of the first magnitude, the morning and evening star, and in fact the
brightest heavenly body.
Is this fourfold hypothesis acceptable! If that question were put to
the vote of the citizens of the Earth, without asking the opinion of
the Central African savages or the South Sea Islanders, but only the
numerical majority of the European population, one may safely wager
that they would not even understand the question, for the majority of
mankind does not know that the Earth is a planet and that the other
planets are Earths.
And then there is sound common sense which reasons so justly on
account of the excellence of its education. “We are,” it says, “without
doubt the most intelligent beings of creation. Why should other planets
have the honour of being enriched by intellectual excellence such as
ours? Can we even admit the existence of beings similar to ourselves?”
No doubt one could perhaps remark that the most gifted nations of the
Earth do not know how to conduct themselves, that their intelligence is
chiefly exercised in devouring each other and in ruining themselves,
that they mortgage the future like blind fools, that thieves are not
uncommon, nor even murderers. But apart from that we are obviously very
superior beings, and it is hardly likely that on any of the myriads of
worlds which gravitate in the immensity of space nature should have
given birth to intelligences of our calibre.
Why therefore should we attempt an optical correspondence with the
planet Mars? If it is inhabited, the inhabitants have not our powers,
and our trouble would be thrown away. Even should they see our signals,
they would never think that they were meant for them.
Also, we shall never attempt it.
* * * * *
But is it possible that the inhabitants of Mars have already commenced
and that it is we who do not understand?
According to geological computations, the minimum age of the Earth
as a habitable sphere since the formation of the first dry land is
20 million years: 10 million 700 thousand for the primordial age, 2
million 300 thousand years for the secondary age, 460 thousand years
for the tertiary age, and 100 thousand for the quaternary age. Man has
existed on Earth since the end of the tertiary age, that is over 100
thousand years. Astronomical instruments were only invented in 1609,
and Mars was not observed nor recognised in its principal geographical
details until 1858. Complete observations of Martian geography only
date back to 1862. The first detailed triangulation of the planet, the
first map comprising the smallest objects visible in the telescope
and measured by micrometer was only commenced in 1877, continued in
1879, and completed in 1882. It is therefore only a few years since
Mars entered into the sphere of our practical observations. I may
add that only very few of the Earth’s inhabitants have seen it in
all its details, one of the foremost of these being the astronomer
Schiaparelli, the Director of the Milan Observatory.
According to the most probable cosmogonic theory, Mars is older than
our planet by several million years and much more advanced along
its path of destiny than ours. The inhabitants of Mars may have
been signalling to us for 100 thousand years. Nobody on our planet
would have suspected it. It is only since the seventeenth century
that astronomers may have thought, not of discovering such signals,
for their instruments were not sufficiently powerful, but of the
possibility of some day seeing a little more of what happens on that
neighbouring world. In fact it is only a few years that we have had any
hope of distinguishing these minute details, not to speak of explaining
them.
* * * * *
Now, this is what happened. The map of the planet Mars was made with
infinite care by the able astronomer of Milan. One sees on this chart
in several regions certain points where the observer has found the
presence of luminous patches shining like snow illuminated by the sun.
That these luminous patches are due to snow is not likely, because
some are seen near the equator in the tropics as well as at higher
latitudes. Nor does it seem likely that they are the tops of mountains,
for they are close to the seas and arranged symmetrically to certain
straight canals. Besides, several of them seem to trace out meridians
and parallels of latitude, and on seeing them one involuntarily thinks
of Geodesic signals. One sees triangles, squares, and rectangles.
That these luminous points should have been established by engineers
or astronomers on Mars is not my idea. That the 60 great rectilinear
parallel canals which we admire on that planet and which establish
communication between the Martian seas should be the work of the
inhabitants of this neighbouring planet would be presumptuous to
imagine. That is not the conclusion I would arrive at. Nature is so
rich in procedure, so varied in its manifestations, so multiple and so
complex in its effects, and often so strange and original in its play,
that we have no right to limit its mode of action.
But it is none the less true that if the inhabitants of Mars wished
to send us any signals, that method of procedure would be one of the
simplest and it is in fact the only one which has been devised among
ourselves. They could not do better than thus dispose luminous points
at certain distances according to geometrical figures. For instance,
one finds the intersection of the 267th meridian with the 14th degree
of northern latitude a region limited by points situated at distances
from each other corresponding to Amiens, Orleans, and Le Mans. If the
inhabitants of Mars wished to send us signals they could not have
chosen better places for their luminous stations.
I am far from saying that this is so and that there is any intention
in this arrangement. Yet if it were so, it would be we who did not
understand.
And there is nothing surprising in this. The inhabitants of the
Earth take no interest in the Heavens. Ninety-nine per cent, of them
among the 1,500 million Earth-dwellers do not know what they walk
on and have no conception of the reality. They are busy with eating,
drinking, and reproducing themselves, with amassing various objects,
with patriotically devouring each other, and with dying. But as regards
asking where they are or what is the universe, that is no concern of
theirs. Their native ignorance suffices them. They live in the middle
of the Heavens without knowing it and without the slightest enjoyment
of intellectual happiness which some select spirits find in the
recognition of truth.
The inhabitants of Mars, on the other hand, being more ancient than
ourselves, can be much more advanced in the way of progress and can
live an enlightened and intellectual spiritual life. We are safe in
supposing that they know our world much better than we know theirs, and
that our astronomical science is only child’s place beside theirs. If,
therefore, the people of Mars, living perhaps for a long time already
in the harmony of a peaceful and intelligent life, had thought of
attempting to send signals to the Earth, with the idea that perhaps our
planet is also inhabited by an intellectual race, then since they have
never received any answer from us they will have concluded that we are
not on their level, that we do not busy ourselves with the matters of
the sky, that astronomy and optics are not very advanced among us, and
that in all probability we have not yet emerged from clumsy material
instincts. Is their conclusion very far from the truth?
Perhaps also the Martian academies declare the Earth uninhabitable and
uninhabited: (1) because it is not absolutely identical with their
planet, (2) because we have only one Moon whereas they have two, (3)
because our years are too short, (4) because our sky is very often
overcast, whereas theirs is almost always clear, (5 and 6) for a
thousand other reasons, each as cogent as the rest.
As we have seen above in the chapter on Mars, one often notices besides
the luminous points we have mentioned certain more extensive brilliant
projections which appear on the terminator and which must be caused by
the reflection of the rising or setting sun on snowy peaks or on clouds
which are certainly not signals. However this may be, of all the bodies
which blaze in the skies on a clear night, and particularly of all
those bodies which gravitate with us round the Sun, there is one which
engages with a captivating interest the attention of astronomers. It is
the singular little world of Mars. But it is not so easy to communicate
with it as was supposed by that good lady of Pau, Madame Guzman, who
left a legacy to the Académie des Sciences in the shape of a prize of
100,000 francs to be given to the first person who should discover a
means of communicating between the Earth and another world--with the
exception of the planet Mars, because it would be too easy! So true it
is that on our planet the best intentions are often mixed up with a few
grains of folly.
After steam, the electric light and the telegraph and the telephone,
the discovery of unmistakable signs of the existence of humanity
inhabiting another region of our solar archipelago, would that not
be the most marvellous apotheosis of the scientific glory of the
twentieth century? And cannot wireless telegraphy be some day applied
to this problem? Electro-magnetism is an immense invisible world still
insufficiently explored. Let us wait, observe, and study.
IX. STARS
AND ATOMS
CHAPTER IX
STARS AND ATOMS
LAST night in the calm silence of midnight, while all nature slept, I
observed in the telescope a small fixed star lost in the multitude of
the heavenly host, a pale star of the seventh magnitude separated from
us by an almost immeasurable distance.
In my thoughts I travelled up to it. I remembered that this star is
not visible to the naked eye; that there are 19 stars of the first
magnitude, 60 of the second, 182 of the third, 530 of the fourth, 1,600
of the fifth, and 4,800 of the sixth magnitude (which gives a total
of about 7,000 stars visible to the naked eye in the case of persons
gifted with acute vision); bub that the stars of the seventh magnitude,
one of which I was observing, are 13,000 in number, and those of the
eighth magnitude 40,000; that the number grows progressively as we
ascend beyond natural vision. I remember that the sum of the stars of
the first ten magnitudes amounts to 560,000, that of the first twelve
magnitudes to 4 million, and that we reach more than 40 millions in
taking the first fifteen magnitudes.
Without losing myself in the profundity of infinite perspectives, I
concentrated my thought as I had already concentrated my gaze upon this
simple seventh-magnitude star of the constellation of the Great Bear,
which never descends below the horizon of Paris, so that we can observe
it almost any night in the year, and I remembered that it shines 200
billion miles from here--a distance which an express train rushing
along at 75 miles an hour would take no less than 325 million years to
traverse.
* * * * *
Transported to such a distance, the glorious sun which illuminates
us would lose its splendour and its glory. Not only would it be
invisible to the naked eye, not only would it fail to contribute to the
brightness of the midnight sky, but it would fall considerably below
the star of the seventh magnitude above mentioned and would only be
discoverable by the most careful telescopic search. That small star,
therefore, which is only a small brilliant point in the starry heavens,
is in reality an immense sun of giant size, greatly in excess of that
on which our planet depends for its light. The latter is already
333,000 times heavier than the Earth and 1,300,000 times more bulky. In
claiming for that small star a weight more than a million times that
of our globe and a volume equalling that of several million Earths we
should be well within the region of possibility.
* * * * *
These views in connection with a simple star almost forgotten among the
multitude of its sisters bring us face to face with the most formidable
realities of the constitution of the universe. But they do not yet
represent the most interesting aspect of our contemplation. It is a
singular fact, quite unexpected by the ancient philosophers, fantastic
and hardly conceivable to the seeker after truth who endeavours to
comprehend its real value: It is that these suns of the infinite,
far from being fixed as they seem to be on account of their immense
distance, are travelling through space with tremendous speed. The star
in question[2] runs, flies, hurls itself across the immensity with a
speed of about 20 million miles per day!
There are no fixed stars.
Yes, 6,800 million miles per annum! And yet, in ten years, in fifty
years, in one hundred years, this star will be barely displaced in the
sky! The speed of a bullet or a shell fired by one of our most powerful
guns being only 2,340 feet per second and that of this star being a
million feet per second, we see that the speed of the star surpasses
that of the shell in the proportion of 457 to 1! Can the most daring
imagination picture such a flight!
In five days and some hours the star would cover the 92 million miles
which separate us from the Sun, a distance which a gunshot would take
seven years to cover. It is clear that such a speed is marvellous, yet
it exists, and has been measured by delicate and precise operations. It
cannot in any case be less than the figure we have indicated.
* * * * *
This speed is a symbol, and it is as such that I wish to present it
here. All the stars are endowed with such movements more or less rapid,
and not only all the stars--each of them a sun and most of them the
centres of planetary systems, dispensers of light, heat, and harmony,
around which gravitate habitable earths, the present, past, or future
abodes of various beings and terrestrial things--not only, I say, are
all the stars thus driven through the void, but all the planets, all
the satellites, all the worlds and systems, all creation.
The Earth swings round the Sun carried along with a speed of 1,600,000
miles per day, meanwhile rotating on its axis, animated by a dozen
different sorts of movements, lighter and more mobile than a child’s
balloon floating in the air, solicited by the attractions of various
neighbouring bodies, a veritable plaything of cosmic forces which
carry us along in an immense whirlpool. The Moon revolves round the
Earth, constantly deranging us in our progress and subjecting us to
perpetual undulations. The Sun carries us along with all its cortège
towards the constellation Hercules, so that since its very origin our
Earth has never passed through the same place twice, but describes in
space, not closed ellipses, but spirals which roll on without end. The
suns adjoining ours move with their systems in various directions.
The constellations are dislocated from one century to another, each
star being animated by a proper movement which produces a constant
modification of the figures in the sky. In addition to all this, our
whole sidereal system is carried along in space by a joint movement.
And thus everything moves, everything circulates, everything rushes,
with breathless speed, towards a goal which is unknown and which is
never reached.
This is not a romance, a dream of pure contemplation, an outside view
of ourselves: it is our own history, fatal and inevitable. Since an
hour ago, every one of us, reader or writer, rich or poor, wise or
ignorant, infant or greybeard, whether we are active or asleep--since
an hour ago every one of us has described in the sky an invisible track
of more than 60,000 miles, for our planet traces out 580 million miles
per annum merely by its revolution round the Sun, and a centenarian
lives to mark out a distance of 58,000 million miles. Now, it is found
that these speeds are the very condition of the stability of the
universe: the heavenly bodies, the Earth, planets, satellites, suns,
stellar systems, star clusters, galaxies, and remote universes, are
mutually sustained by the equilibrium of their attractions. They are
all suspended in the void and maintain themselves in their ideal orbits
simply because they turn quickly enough to create a centrifugal force
equal and opposite to the attraction exerted upon them, so that they
remain in an unstable but perpetual equilibrium.
Our Sun carries us along towards the constellation of Hercules:
this has been known for a hundred years; but we know now that the
constellation of Hercules forms part of our sidereal universe and that
that universe is travelling in a certain direction. We therefore only
perceive relative movements. Whither are we going? Vain question. We
are going--into infinite space.
Formerly people were troubled, not without reason, concerning the
solidity of the foundations of the world, for before the isolation
of our planet in space and its movement round the Sun had been
demonstrated it seemed indispensable to give to the Earth an unshakable
foundation and an unlimited route. But since the heavenly bodies rise
and set and pass under our feet this foundation had to be given up,
apart from the fact that it did not satisfy the most far-seeing minds.
It is quite impossible for us to conceive a material pile, however
solid or thick, even as thick as the Earth’s diameter and rooted in
infinite space, just as one cannot imagine the real existence of a
stick which has only one end. However far the mind can descend towards
the base of that material pillar, the end must come at last, since
only empty space can be without end, and then that terrestrial pillar
serves no purpose at all since it is itself without a support. Besides,
travellers succeeded one day in voyaging all round the globe, and
nowhere was this imaginary pillar discovered.
The modern conception of force in contrast with the ancient idea of
matter has a philosophical import without precedent in the whole
history of the science. It teaches, proves to us, and convinces us that
the visible, palpable, material universe rests on the invisible and the
immaterial, on imponderable force.
That is a fact against which the misleading testimony of the senses
can no longer prevail. The Earth, which was believed to be the stable
basis of creation, is itself not sustained by anything material, but by
invisible force. The void extends above and below, right and left, and
to infinity in every direction. It is sustained by solar attraction and
by its own movement. The same applies to all worlds, to all heavenly
bodies, to everything which composes the universe, to the intimate
constitution of bodies as well as the sidereal total. The Earth, the
planets, the suns, the stars, the stellar systems, are the mobile atoms
of the grand organism of the universe. The Milky Way is a dust in which
every grain is a sun.
* * * * *
From the infinitely great, let us now descend to the infinitely small
The substances which appear to us most solid and hard are composed of
molecules which do not touch each other. Every one of these molecules
is invisible to the naked eye and is itself made up of still smaller
atoms which do not touch either.
A bar of iron, for example, is composed of molecules which do not
touch, which are in perpetual vibration, which separate under the
influence of heat and close up under the influence of cold. Exposed
to the Sun, the temperature of that bar reaches about 60 degrees
centigrade; cooled by the ice of winter, it descends a few degrees
below zero. Now, the length of that bar varies between the first
condition and the second, and its molecules can be further separated by
heating them to a higher temperature: they can thus be so far separated
from each other that they exercise no further mutual attraction. When
that happens, the bar melts and forms first a liquid and then a gas.
* * * * *
The Eiffel Tower is a little higher in summer than in winter and in the
afternoon than the morning, on account of the variation produced by
solar heat. The difference in height can attain 6 inches.
* * * * *
The smallness of molecules surpasses anything one can imagine. In
the gold-beating industry gold-leaf has been obtained so thin that a
quarter of a million leaves go to the inch. Each gold-leaf, therefore,
has only a thickness of a 1/10,000 of a millimetre. Now, it is composed
of molecules a considerable number of which is required to fill up that
thickness. Two hundred of them arranged in a line and separated by
intervals equal to their own diameters would just fill up the thickness
of a gold-leaf.
In experiments made on the action of oil upon the surface of water for
calming the waves, it has been found possible to cover 400 square yards
on the Lake of Geneva with 20 c.cm. of oil, which reduces the layer
of oil also to 1/200,000 of a millimetre. Supposing that under these
conditions the molecules of oil are in contact and in a single layer,
they would at the most have that diameter.
By mechanical means a millimetre has been divided on a plate of
glass into a thousand equal parts. There are animalculæ so small
that their whole body placed between two of these divisions does not
touch them. These living beings then measure at the most 1/1,000 of a
millimetre, or what is nowadays called a micron. They have members,
organs, muscles, nerves, etc. These organs are composed of cells and
the cells of molecules. If the latter were only a hundredth part of
the dimensions of the body (they are probably much smaller), these
molecules would measure, if separated by intervals equal to their own
size, 1/200,000 of a millimetre as before.
Molecules or atoms, whatever may be the name applied to the ultimate
particles of matter, are declared by present-day science to be equal to
stellar systems or microcosms.
* * * * *
This modern teaching of microscopy was anticipated for a long time by
thinkers.
In his _Commercium Philosophicum_, published in 1745, Bernoulli
wrote to Leibnitz concerning the imaginary inhabitants of a grain of
pepper.
“If these animalculæ had an intelligent mind and were capable of
reasoning, they could flatter themselves that they and the drop of
liquid which they inhabit constituted the entire universe. Imagine that
a small grain of pepper in which under the power of the microscope
we discover a million animalculæ had all its parts proportional to
the corresponding parts of our world, that is to say, its sun, its
fixed stars, its planets with their satellites, its earth, and its
mountains, its fields, its forests, its rocks, its rivers, its lakes,
its seas, and its diverse animals, can one suppose that the inhabitants
of the grain of pepper, these _pipericols_, who would perceive
all objects under the same visual angle and consequently in the same
size as we do, would not believe that outside their grain nothing
exists, and would have the same right to believe it as we believe that
our world includes everything? For, I ask you, what reason or what
experience would they have which would convince them of the contrary
or would show to these poor little animals that there is another world
incomparably greater than their own with inhabitants incomparably
greater than themselves?”
Therefore, concludes Bernoulli, if these _pipericols_ cannot know
that, who is there among us who knows that this whole visible world
is not perhaps a grain in comparison with another world incomparably
greater?
The learned geometrician of Basle summarises his idea as follows: “I
believe that there can exist in nature other animals who are in size
as far above us and ordinary animals as we and our animals are above
microscopic animalculæ, and who observe us in our world with their
microscopes as we observe that infinite multitude of animalculæ with
ours. I go further and maintain that there might be beings incomparably
larger again, and I suppose as many degrees upward as are found in
going downwards, for I do not see why we should constitute the highest
degree.”
Leibnitz replied to Bernoulli: “I am not afraid of advancing the
opinion that there are in the universe animals that are as much our
superiors in size as we are above the animalculæ which we only
discover by means of a microscope, for nature knows no limits. On the
other hand, it may be and it must be that there are in the small grains
of dust and in the smallest atoms worlds which are not inferior to ours
in beauty and variety.”
The exceedingly small microscopic organisms discovered and studied by
Ehrenberg at the beginning of the nineteenth century seemed to place
this population in evidence.
Pascal had written, as early as 1660, or perhaps even in 1654, in his
_Pensées_:
“What is man in the infinite? Let a flesh-worm offer him in the
smallness of its body parts which are yet smaller. Legs with joints,
veins in those legs, blood in those veins, humours in that blood, drops
in those humours, vapours in those drops. Suppose that in dividing
up these last things he should spend his forces of imagination and
that the last object at which he could arrive be the subject of our
present discussion. He will perhaps think that that is the extreme of
smallness in Nature. But I shall open for him a new abyss. I shall not
only paint for him the visible universe but the immensity of nature
which one can conceive within the range of this small atom. Let him
see in it an infinity of worlds, every one with its firmament, its
planets, its earths, in the same proportion as the visible world, on
that earth animals and finally flesh-worms in which he will find again
what the first flesh-worms presented to him. Let him go on finding the
same thing without end and without rest. Let him lose himself in those
marvels as astonishing in their smallness as the others are in their
size, for who would not be astonished that our body, hardly perceptible
in the universe which itself would be imperceptible in the grand
totality, should now be a colossus, a world or rather a universe in
comparison with the nothingness which we can never arrive at.
“Whoever follows these thoughts will be afraid of himself and,
considering himself sustained by the weight which nature has given him,
between those two abysses of the infinite and nothing, he will tremble
in face of those marvels, and I believe that as his curiosity changes
to admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence
than to seek them with presumption.
“For indeed what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the
infinite, a universe in comparison with nothing, a mean between nothing
and all. Infinitely removed as he is from comprehending the extremes,
the goal and principle of things are invincibly concealed from him
in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing that
nothingness whence he sprang or that infinite which swallows him up.”
More than one of our contemporary savants has republished this
conception of “the atom as a world system,” imagining that it is new
and without appearing to recollect either Bernoulli or Pascal.
* * * * *
As we have seen before, the invisible world is the basis of creation
and the visible universe is composed of invisible bodies. What we see
is made up of things which we do not see.
In the sky every star of the Milky Way being below the seventh
magnitude is quite invisible to our eye. Yet we see the Milky Way.
On the Earth we see and touch crowds of molecules every particle of
which could be neither seen with our eyes nor felt with our touch
nor perceived with any of our senses. And yet one meets very often
so-called scientific men in the world who say peremptorily: “I only
believe what I see.”
A large number of different measurements of the speed of light agree in
proving that this speed is 186,000 miles a second. That is a fact of
observation absolutely proved by astronomy and by physics.
These 186,000 miles amount to 982 million feet or 11,785 million inches.
Now, certain measurements of the same degree of precision show that in
a ray of red light there are 42,300 waves to the inch or 1,666 to the
millimetre.
Each of these waves therefore measures 6/10,000 of a millimetre. Those
of the extreme red measure 7/10,000; beyond the red, wave-lengths of
8 or 9/10,000 are found; the blue waves measure 4 to 5/10,000 and the
violet 4/10,000.
Expressed in millionths of a millimetre, as is usual in spectroscopy,
these wave-lengths are the following:—
WAVE-LENGTHS OF LIGHT
Infra-red 900 or more
Extreme-red (A) 760
Red (B) 687
Orange (C) 666
Yellow (D) 689
Green (E) 617
Blue (F) 486
Indigo (Q) 431
Violet (H) 897
Ultra violet 380 and less
(These figures are those of the solar spectrum, measured for the first
time by Frauenhofer a century ago.)
Those are waves in the ether, which is in perpetual movement.
If we multiply 300,000 million millimetres by 1,666, we find the number
500 billion. That is the number of waves which enter our eye in one
second when we look at red light.
It requires 2,230 waves of violet light to fill up a millimetre and 700
billion shocks per second to give the sensation of that colour.
Between the red and the violet all the other colours range themselves.
The vibrations which give the impression of red are the slowest and
their waves are the longest.
This subtle substance, ether, penetrates all the bodies; it surrounds
the most minute atoms of objects and beings, solids and liquids.
Studies in molecular physics have led to this conclusion, that in a
cubic centimetre of air the molecules which compose it only occupy a
third of a cubic millimetre, that is to say, the 3/1,000 part of the
total volume. It is like a cathedral in which children’s balloons might
float, the remaining space being empty.
All these molecules, all these systems of atoms, are in perpetual
motion like the worlds in space, and the structure of bodies is
organised by invisible force. In hydrogen, at ordinary temperature
and pressure, every molecule is endowed with a speed of translation,
vibration, and circulation, of more than a mile per second.
Every body, organic or inorganic, air, water, plant, animal, man, is
thus formed of molecules in movement.
The analysis of bodies, both organic and inorganic, therefore brings
us into the presence of movements of atoms controlled by forces, and
the infinitely small speaks to us the same language as the infinitely
great.
The powerful microscopes of to-day and instruments of projection show
in these microbian movements in these cells a fantastic life such as
that of organisms which circulate by the thousand million in our own
blood.
The molecule, intangible and invisible, and hardly imaginable by our
minds accustomed to superficial judgments, constitutes the only true
matter, and what we call matter is, singularly enough, the effect
produced upon our senses by the movements of molecules, constituting as
it were an incessant possibility of sensation.
It follows that matter, like the manifestations of energy, is only a
mode of motion. At the temperature of absolute zero, matter, as we know
it, would cease to exist.
* * * * *
The name of materialist, still borne to-day by certain people who see
no farther than the ordinary appearances of things, could only be
considered by the thinker as an outworn expression without meaning. The
visible universe is not at all what it appears to be to our senses: it
is the invisible universe which constitutes the essence and basis of
creation. In fact, this visible universe is composed of invisible atoms
which are not in contact; it hangs in the void, and the forces which
control it are themselves invisible and immaterial. You may look for
matter, but you will not find it; it is a mirage which recedes as we
advance towards it; it is a spectre which disappears whenever we seem
to seize it. It is not the same with force, the dynamic element; it is
invisible and imponderable force that we find in the last analysis and
which represents the basis, the support, and the very essence of the
universe.
In the deep and silent night everything moves driven by the breath of
God. In these hours of calm reflection, do we not hear the voices of
the infinite? Night is the normal condition of empty space, and we
only have day during a half-rotation of the Earth because we dwell in
the immediate neighbourhood of a star. Night fills all; but it is not
darkness; it is the soft light shed by millions of stars. We can thus
better appreciate how everything is in vibration. The movements of
every atom on earth and in the heavens are the mathematical result of
all the ethereal undulations which arrive in time from the abysses of
infinite space. The moon attracts the Earth, the Earth attracts her
sister-planets, these beckon and call her, the stars attract the Sun;
and, like those motes of dust which one sees oscillating and vibrating
in a beam of light, so also glide, turn, circulate, fly, vibrate, and
palpitate all the worlds and all the universes, out to infinity, amidst
limitless and bottomless space.
A geometrician has dared to say that by stretching out his hand he
could disturb the Moon in its course. This is a vivid expression of
the extreme mobility of things intended to show that the feeblest
displacement of the centre of gravity has a far-reaching effect. When
the Moon passes over our heads it raises the whole Earth, displaces the
waters of the ocean, and makes every one of us weigh 18 milligrammes
less than when it is on the horizon. When Venus passes at 25 million
miles from here or when Jupiter passes at 375 million miles, both
displace our whole planet from its normal position.
Have you ever brought a bit of iron near a freely suspended magnetic
needle? What a marvellous spectacle is offered by the mobility, the
oscillations, the mad rushes of the needle under the influence of an
object apparently inert which acts upon it at a distance. We observe
a compass needle at the bottom of an hermetically sealed vessel: a
regiment passes on a neighbouring road and the needle becomes agitated,
influenced at a distance by the steel bayonets. An aurora borealis
appears in Sweden, the compass feels it in Paris; nay, we have seen
above that the fluctuations of the magnetic needle are in relation with
the spots and eruptions on the Sun. The new physics is the proclamation
of the invisible universe.
* * * * *
It is under this aspect which it appeared to me interesting here to
contemplate the visible universe, inviting to this contemplation those
among my readers who wish sometimes to think of profounder truths.
Stars and atoms bring us face to face with an immense symphony. Those
who only see the orchestra without hearing anything are the deaf.
Behind the visible world, our minds must feel the presence of the
invisible world upon which we are based. All that we see is appearance:
the real is the invisible, the force, the energy, which moves all and
carries all through infinity and eternity.
And indeed we are really in the infinite and the eternal. The little
star of which we spoke before, an enormous sun a million times the size
of the Earth moves at such a distance that the fastest express train
would take at least 325 million years to reach it. Yet it is one of our
neighbouring stars. One can go still farther and farther and proceed
with any speed through any number of centuries in any direction of
space without ever coming to an end, without ever advancing a single
pace, since the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere, and
eternity itself does not suffice to vanquish infinity.
[Footnote 2: This star is called “No. 1830 Groombridge.”]
X. ARE OTHER PLANETS
INHABITED?
CHAPTER X
ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED?
WE have a tendency to remain geometric and anthropocentric and to
believe that everything is created on the terrestrial model. Not long
ago, at one of the scientific soirées of the Solar Festival which I
founded in 1904, and which is almost always illustrated by a conference
of learned men of philosophical attainments, I requested my eminent
friend Edmond Perrier, Member of the Institut and Director of the Paris
Museum, to discuss the question of the population of the planets in
the light of the latest achievements of science, in which he is past
master. His reasoning was, that the same matter, the same forces, the
same laws, exist on the Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc., and that
therefore the evolution of life is everywhere the same, arrested in
one place and developed in another according to the conditions and
circumstances, and that all organisms on all the planets can only have
terrestrial forms. Our palæontology would be repeated everywhere.
It seems to me that this idea, shared, by the way, by other learned
naturalists, is really too “naturalist,” too terrestrial, too
classical, too professional, too narrow, too little in harmony with
the grandeur of the universe, with the immensity of its energy and
the variety of vital manifestations found on our small planet. On
the contrary, the diversity of beings, already so prodigious on our
little globe, must be, so to speak, infinite, and the extra-terrestrial
living forms cannot be cast in the same mould. There is no reason, for
instance, why all the beings of the universe should be limited to our
five senses. There are inevitable differences: gravitation, density,
food-supply, atmosphere, temperature, light, the years, seasons and
days, etc., etc.--causes so different cannot fail to produce absolutely
different effects.
A savant is a man accustomed to discussions and delighted to provoke
them, because he knows that they contribute to the advancement of
science; the naturalists whose views I dispute will not bear me any
ill-will, and this is not the first time that they will pardon me for
being a recalcitrant microbe.
The philosophers who teach that the universe is both infinite and
homogeneous resemble microbes who think that their cell is the
universe. Let us imagine the microbes in a particle of rust attempting
to reason on the life of iron according to their own observations. For
them, the world is a bit of iron attacked by oxygen. There is nothing
else in nature. All their science leads them to conclude that the
universe is made of iron. If they could have any vague notion about
the existence of grass, insects, men, the sun, Jupiter or Sirius, they
would be firmly convinced that they were all made of iron. If, in
their particle of rust, they had observed the movements of translation
and rotation in the constituent atoms of iron and could have risen
to astronomical notions beyond their sphere, they would conclude
that the other planetary systems are also made of iron and that none
but iron-dwellers can exist. If we suppose that not only our own
solar system but our visible universe and the other universes which
succeed each other without end in the depths of infinite space are all
constructed on the same zoological plan, we reason like these microbes.
Since the publication, a long time ago (1862), of my first work,
entitled _The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds_, in which I expounded
and discussed the conditions of habitability of the planets of our
system as known, to science at the time of publication, several
astronomers and philosophers have taken up the same question of the
different aspects. Among these studies there is one which seems
particularly worthy of attention, recently written by Professor
Scheiner, Director of the Potsdam Observatory. I here offer my readers
a condensed translation, asking them to excuse the Germanisms which
render the style a little rough. But however bitter the rind, the
fruit is good.
GENERAL REMARKS
“The aspect of the starry heavens during a clear and calm night gives
a joy which only superior souls can feel. In the bosom of the general
silence of nature and in the calm of all our senses our immortal soul
whispers an undefinable language and forms conceptions which are
difficult to express. If among the thinking beings of our planet there
are vulgar spirits which remain slaves to vanity, this globe is to
be pitied for having given birth to such creatures, but its value is
enhanced by bearing on its surface intelligences capable of rising to
the highest contemplations of the spectacle of nature.”
It is with these words that Kant in his _Natural History of
the Heavens_ terminates the last chapter, which treats of the
habitability of the planets. They come from the soul of every thinking
man who has preserved the spark of the ideal. The aspect of the starry
sky awakens all those who are not among these vulgar spirits the same
sensations which manifest themselves in various ways according to the
education of him who experiences them and according to his momentary
disposition. The astronomer also is delighted by this spectacle in
spite of his regular observation of the sky. The astronomer sees
farther and clearer into the celestial spaces than the ordinary man,
his knowledge leads him by rapid deductions to vast considerations
until he suddenly reaches a point where, for the time being at all
events, an insuperable barrier presents itself to the human spirit, and
where an imperious halt reminds him of the truth that all science is
incomplete. The ordinary man looks upon the sky in quite a different
way, and so does a woman. To both, the spectacle of the starry sky
offers an enjoyment independent of all research and all preoccupation.
A purely æsthetic pleasure.
Are these stars inhabited? Are they inhabited by thinking beings? Do
love and hate reign there as they do here? Such are the questions
which occur at once. Afterwards, in hours when the need for hope and
consolation is felt, the desire arises to contemplate some day with our
own eyes the splendours of those other worlds and to be able to soar
up to them. The most brilliant stars are the special objects of such
wishes, and if they could be fulfilled a population of loving souls
would reside on these same stars: Sirius, Vega, Venus, and Jupiter.
The question of the population of the celestial bodies is as ancient
as the discovery of the individual existence. It has always occupied
thinking humanity, and many have sought to raise the veil which
hides the answer. We, also, should like to take a step towards this
solution, and it is with that object that we propose to quote here
the actual facts bearing upon the conditions of habitability of the
celestial bodies and to draw the most probable conclusions. We can
combine the astronomical data with the most recent use of physics, and,
thanks to the progress recorded by these two sciences in the last ten
years, we may be able to draw some new conclusions.
(Here the author passes in review the older writers, Huygens, Kircher,
and Fontenelle, which I have summarised in my two books called _The
Plurality of Inhabited Worlds and Imaginary Worlds_. He arrives
eventually at the nineteenth century and at Gruithuisen, whom my
readers know less.)
HISTORICAL
Huygens, the most celebrated mathematician and physicist of his epoch
(1629-95), takes it for granted that all the planets are inhabited (he
does not speak of the Sun or stars), and that consequently all of them
offer the conditions vital and essential to us, that is to say air and
water. He easily refutes the objections based upon the distance of the
planets from the Sun. He supposes that the water on the other planets
will have quite other qualities than ours; on Mercury, for instance,
it would only boil at a very high temperature, and on Saturn--at his
time the outermost planet known--it would not freeze at the lowest
temperature then conceivable. The mass of Jupiter compared with that
of our own globe would suggest that its air must be very dense and
that its inhabitants could swim in it; but the Jovians would easily
accommodate themselves to this state of things. He supposed that the
mind of the inhabitants of the other planets was about the same as
ours and that their organism was analogous to our own; for what would
be the object of the Sun illuminating those other planets if their
inhabitants had no eyes? One might indeed think that different species
of reasonable beings might exist, but not on the same planet, for they
would be in mutual conflict, would struggle for supremacy, and do each
other every kind of harm.
He gives a very naïve refutation of an opinion given before him that
the height of the inhabitants would have to be inversely as the volume
of the planet and consequently the men on Jupiter would not be bigger
than the mice on the earth. This, he says, is not possible, because
such small beings would not, as astronomers, be capable of using large
telescopes.
An important question, according to Huygens, is whether the
intelligence of the inhabitants has any relation to their distance
from the Sun. He inclines to believe that the inhabitants of Mercury
are much more intelligent than we on account of the greater force and
vitality of their spirit due to the greater heat of the Sun, but this
is not confirmed by what happens on our own globe. The same reason
would lead one to believe that the inhabitants of Jupiter are much less
intelligent than ourselves, although its four satellites would offer to
the mind material for profitable astronomical studies.
What is also evident is the small value of a purely logical and
philosophical reasoning based on insufficient premises. We see how a
man of sense and judicious spirit can be led to absurd conclusions when
he is burdened with preconceived ideas and incomplete knowledge. We
shall have several more occasions to bring out this fact, and that is
why we have avoided pretending to resolve the question we have put. The
deductions which we formulate to-day may be reversed to-morrow by new
discoveries furnished either by experience or by theory.
Apart from his decided opinion concerning the habitability of all the
planets, Huygens draws his conclusions logically enough, inasmuch as he
bases his affirmations on the knowledge of his time.
An entirely opposite method is used by the Jesuit Father Kircher.
He starts from the point of view that the principal object of nature
is man and that all the rest is created for him. The planets are
uninhabited because, apart from man, there could be no reasonable
beings. But since they have upon man an influence determined by their
astrological value, he finds the planets to be such as astrology
represents them to be in their action upon us without considering their
position with regard to the Sun.
On Mercury, everything takes place gaily and joyously, since all
those who are born under its influence are inclined to lightness and
mischief. On Venus, everything is even better--or worse: he finds
everything gracious and charming; a soft rosy light is spread over the
planet, perfumes are wafted about everywhere, zephyrs mingle their
murmurings with those of the brooks, and gold and precious stones
sparkle everywhere. Jupiter having, like Venus, a beneficent influence
upon man, everything there is perfect: the air is pure and wholesome,
the waters crystal-clear, and the soil itself as bright as silver.
On Mars, on the other hand, everything is of a warlike roughness,
forbidding and terrible, rivers of boiling pitch overflow their banks
and envelop the country in thick and suffocating smoke. Saturn, as a
planet, is particularly accursed; everything looks like a deserted
grave. The planets are not inhabited by human beings, but by angels or
genii who rule them.
(All these arguments of Kircher are not less infantile than those
of Huygens, but they have left distinct traces in astrological
literature, and even Victor Hugo reflects them eloquently.)
A contemporary of the two authors we have just mentioned is the
Nestor of French writers, Fontenelle, who lived from 1657 to 1757,
exactly a century. He described with much detail the inhabitants of
the planets, and, like Huygens, he starts from the basis that they
are all inhabited, and inhabited by beings formed according to the
circumstances. On Mercury, according to him, the heat is so great
that the rivers contain fused metals instead of water, particularly
gold and silver; the inhabitants of this planet can therefore not
imagine that there are worlds like the Earth, where gold and silver are
solid and serve as money. Besides, the inhabitants of Mercury could
not support the excessive heat if their planet was not animated by a
movement of rotation so rapid that they are only exposed for a short
time to the rays of the Sun. They are all inclined to be hot-heads and,
like fools and infants, live without reflection and enjoy themselves
in anticipation of the coolness of the night. Littrow remarks on
this subject that Bode, the translator of Fontenelle and at one time
Director of the Berlin Observatory, is seriously astonished by this
opinion of Fontenelle and exclaims: “Very strange! for with us in
Berlin we find that a great heat makes people lazy and sleepy instead
of lively and active.”
The inhabitants of Venus only render homage to the goddess of love.
They are not interested in philosophy or mathematics, read no books
or journals, pass the whole day in their flirtations, and practise in
a superior manner the arts which appertain to them, music, poetry,
dance, etc., but they are not adept at cookery, for they live almost
entirely on air. They are not beautiful, but their amorous character
prevents them being influenced by their ugliness; they are Celadons and
Sylvanders. Wieland certainly did not know the works of Fontenelle, or
he would probably have located one of his romances or his love-stories
on Venus as depicted by that author.
Fontenelle’s procedure with regard to Mars is rather singular. He
declares that that planet does not merit any attention. Our imaginative
savant hardly wants to say anything about Jupiter either. He gives a
description of the aspect offered by the whole solar system as seen
from that planet. He explains how Venus and Mercury are invisible there
without the aid of a telescope, and that the Earth only appears as a
point. The volume of Jupiter causes him some embarrassment, for whereas
the inhabitants of Mercury on account of the small dimensions of that
planet nearly all know each other, those of Jupiter cannot possibly do
so.
On account of the extreme cold, the life on Saturn is still more
disagreeable than that on Jupiter. If the Saturnians were brought
to the Earth they would certainly die of heat even in Lapland. If
the water on Saturn is of the same nature as ours, it must look like
our polished stones, and spirits of wine must resemble diamond.
In consequence the inhabitants of Saturn cannot but be slow and
phlegmatic; they know no gaiety and remain like oysters in the place
they were born in.
Fontenelle continues in this way without attaining any depth, under the
impression that our planet is the type of the universe. Let us now pass
to the nineteenth century.
Graithuisen, the Director of the Munich Observatory, published his
chief works in the first thirty years of this century. His researches
relative to the habitability of the planets were, therefore, made at
an epoch when we already possessed important data on their physical
constitution, an epoch when, thanks to the work of Bessel, the golden
period of astronomy had already begun. One may therefore take it that
the work of Graithuisen marks a real progress beyond his predecessors,
as indeed he says himself without ceremony. But as a matter of fact
he is rather fruitless, as is shown by the strange manner in which he
deals with the earth-light on Venus.
He already knew of the phenomenon, which is insufficiently explained
even in our day, that during the phases of greatest visibility of
Venus the dark side appears to have a faint luminosity. “The simplest
explanation to give of this,” he says, “is that at the epochs when this
faint light on Venus is visible, the inhabitants of the planet organise
festivals and general illuminations, which are the easier to arrange on
account of the vegetations of Venus being incomparably more luxuriant
than even the virgin forests of Brazil. These festivals are probably
celebrated on the occasion of political changes or according to
religious periods. Now, the principal observations of the ashen light
on Venus are those of Mayer in 1759 and of Harding in 1806.” Whence he
draws the following conclusion: “Between the observation of Mayer and
that of Harding 76 years of Venus and 47 Earth years have elapsed. If
this period has a religious character, we cannot see a justification
for that number of years, but it becomes more comprehensible if we
assume that some Alexander or Napoleon then attained universal power.
If we assume that the ordinary life of an inhabitant of Venus lasts 130
years of Venus, which amount to 80 terrestrial years, the reign of such
an autocrat could easily last 76 years as reckoned on Venus. I have
no intention to press this opinion and do not claim its credibility,
even should it appeal to the reader’s imagination; but if my hypothesis
is correct, we at least receive direct testimony to the existence of
inhabitants on Venus. Even if the period were shorter, the phenomenon
might still be due to some other observance. One could celebrate all
the great festivals by similar illuminations which would sometimes
follow close upon one another. The fires would serve another purpose,
inasmuch as they would thin out the forests and provide fresh arable
ground for an increasing population. Large migrations of people would
be prevented, and the consequent wars would be avoided and the race
would remain united.”
One must acknowledge that these ideas of Gruithuisen are most
fantastic. I have frequently observed this unilluminated hemisphere of
Venus, notably in September 1895 and in April 1897: it appeared to me
of a violet colour, and the idea of illuminations by the inhabitants is
pure romance.
He also then passes in review the ideas of Kant which one finds
expounded in the two works cited above and which therefore I need not
quote. We know that for the Philosopher of Königsberg the intelligence
and the degree of perfection of the inhabitants of the planets is in
proportion to their distance from the sun.
We may add to the remarks of M. Scheiner that the writers who have
dealt with the question of the plurality of worlds have nearly all
judged the planets from the appearances they present to us from our
point of observation, and have assumed the harmony of nature according
to the manner of Bernardin de St. Pierre. For this occasion I have
re-read his hook with some interest. To this very simple member of the
Institut, Venus is a bright world peopled by amorous natives “who give
themselves up to dance, festivals, and songs, or compete for swimming
prizes, like the happy islands of Tahiti”; the inhabitants of Mars are
warlike, “resembling the northern Germans, their forests and hills,
their atmosphere resounding to the warlike sound of their horns and
that of drums and trumpets which announce the spilling of blood”; on
Jupiter “they resemble the Dutch, being industrious, patient, wise,
reflective, and tending their numerous herds in their vast fields,”
etc., etc.
The author of _Paul et Virginie_ remains purely terrestrial in
these descriptions, which he believes to be astronomical.
But let us return to the dissertation of M. Scheiner. He passes on to
the purely scientific aspect of the question, which is the only one
which interests us here.
THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
The problem of knowing if worlds other than the Earth, being habitable,
are really inhabited, depends really upon this question: How did life
appear on this Earth?
It is irrefutable that there was a time when the Earth was not
habitable in the usual sense. Therefore life necessarily had a
commencement. “This can have taken place in three different ways,
either by a special act of creation, in which case it is of little
importance to our problem to know whether this act was accomplished
in a complete manner as taught by the Bible or whether it was limited
to the creation of the inferior forms of life; or by spontaneous
generation; or, lastly, by the importation from space, in which we can
just as well imagine germs of life as gases and inorganic substances.
“From the philosophical point of view, these three hypotheses are
equally well-founded, for none is more easily conceived than the other
and observation has not yet confirmed any of them.
“If we admit the first hypothesis, a creative act, such a manifestation
of the will of a Supreme and Impenetrable Being is beyond the laws of
nature. In this case we have no means of reasoning on the purpose of
the Divine Will. We do not know if the creative act has been exercised
duly once in favour of the Earth, or whether it is renewed on various
occasions, or whether it takes place in the same manner every time
a heavenly body becomes fit to act as an abode of living beings. We
cannot express any opinion on that and therefore our initial question
remains open. In the narrow Biblical sense the Earth and mankind must
be considered the last word in creation and the idea that other
reasonable beings might exist is necessarily eliminated.” It seems to
me that in our times none of the readers of this book need consider the
first hypothesis as admissible. Everything shows us that living beings
have not been directly created by a Supernatural Will, but that they
have slowly and gradually evolved during the geological periods which
are known to us. Scheiner then passes on to the second hypothesis. “By
spontaneous generation,” he says, “is meant the formation by material
molecules of an organism of the most rudimentary species, which
involves our attributing to an inorganic substance properties which end
in the production of life.
“The adoption of these properties is possible in two ways: by a sudden
coincidence of favourable circumstances, or by a continuous process
which, thanks to a gradual development, fills up the gap of continuity
which at present appears to exist between inert matter and living
matter.
“If circumstances on our earth have favoured spontaneous generation,
there is no reason why they should not have done the same on other
celestial bodies having a similar constitution, and one may deduce with
certainty that all the heavenly bodies which are in this condition are
provided with similar organisms.” The author then examines the third
hypothesis.
Space can be filled with organised matter or matter capable of life
distributed almost uniformly, without being specially destined for any
particular body, since we must assume a commencement for each. The
surface of the heavenly bodies receives the organisable matter which,
when its finds the necessary conditions, develops and forms living
beings. It is clear that in this case the presence of organised beings
on all the heavenly bodies capable of entertaining life is not merely a
probability but a certainty.
Scheiner considers the three hypotheses as equally acceptable. The
first, he says, is a matter of sentiment. It does not solve the
question, since it would involve a Divine Will. Out of the three
hypotheses the last two would solve our problem in an absolutely
affirmative manner, whereas the first leaves it undecided.
“We only wish to prove one thing by our argument, and that is that the
opinion that habitable heavenly bodies are really inhabited is much
more probable than the contrary opinion, and this authorises us to
continue to develop our thesis.”
THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE
The author here puts a fundamental question. What is life and what is
living matter! Libraries have been written on this subject but all to
no purpose, for we are as unable to seize the essence of life and of
living matter as that of gravitation, for instance, though the latter
appears to us infinitely simpler in its manifestations than what has
been called vital force.
We only know that on our Earth vital force is united to a special
form of matter called organised matter, and that when this organised
matter disappears it ceases to exist as vital force and transforms
itself--since energy is indestructible--into other forms of energy.
It is not of material importance whether vital force is regarded as
a special force or a special aspect of a known force, _e.g._
electricity. It follows from this intimate association of vital force
with living matter that the vital manifestations (nutrition, growth,
reproduction, etc.) can only take place under conditions in which
living matter can exist; in all other cases the manifestations of
life cease and death ensues, or the vital force becomes latent until
favourable conditions return.
Our problem of the habitability of heavenly bodies is therefore limited
to the question of celestial bodies on which conditions are such that
living matter can exist in a permanent form. We must therefore enquire
first of all what those conditions are, after which we shall be able
to use our astronomical resources to find whether these conditions
are represented on the other centres of condensation of matter in the
universe.
The conditions necessary to life are the more numerous the more
complicated the structure of organic matter. The maximum of
requirements is therefore attained in the higher animals and in man.
The simpler the organism, the simpler are its conditions of existence
and the greater are in general the possibilities of supporting
unfavourable conditions.
Animals and plants living in caves or at great depths under water are
deprived of light; they have accommodated themselves to that privation
and do not suffer by it. Animals require oxygen in air and in water;
plants also require a small quantity of carbonic acid for building
up their tissues. There are even animalcule in existence for whom
oxygen is a poison. As a general rule, temperatures above 50 degrees
centigrade are insupportable.
This is due to the fact that at that temperature albumen, one of the
most important substances in the animal organism, coagulates. Inferior
beings can resist higher temperatures and even for a short time 100
degrees centigrade, which is the boiling-point of water, but they could
not live long. In its liquid form water is indispensable to organic
life; life of any duration below zero is impossible because the water
contained in every organism would solidify and the parts composing
the organism would lose their mobility. Lack of water does, however,
not inevitably imply death, and plants particularly can preserve
for a long time a latent vitality while deprived of water. Cereals
furnish a striking example, for when dried they can preserve their
germinating power for years. Although living matter can preserve its
vitality so long, it is none the less true that during that period
all manifestations of life cease. If therefore the lack of water is
perpetual, life must be considered as really suppressed.
Even for the lowest forms of life three conditions must be regarded as
essential: water, an atmosphere containing oxygen and carbonic acid,
and a temperature between the limits indicated above.
It is therefore really from these three points of view that we must
study the heavenly bodies in order to be in a position to judge whether
organic life as we know it is possible on them or not. As regards
knowing whether that life presents itself under forms comparable to
those which we see here, whether there are, for instance, beings
analogous to humanity, that is quite another question.
The means at the disposal of astronomy for determining the constitution
of the heavenly bodies are of various kinds. We can take into account
phenomena which at first sight do not seem adapted to that end.
Direct observation with the help of the telescope enables us to
discover the surface details of the planets and any changes which
take place in them. Such changes in most cases imply the existence
of an atmosphere. Observations of occultations of stars by the Moon
or the planets lead to the same result. Theoretical astronomy tells
us the distance between the planets and the Sun; physics tell us the
quantity of light received by each planet from the Sun; and the period
of revolution and the inclination of the planet’s axis tell us about
the course of its seasons. Photometry gives us the amount of sunlight
reflected by the surface of the planet, and thus furnishes indications
concerning certain properties of the planetary surface, properties
which permit us to decide with certainty, for instance, whether light
is reflected by a solid surface such as the ground or whether the rays
do not penetrate so far and are sent back in the upper parts of the
atmosphere by lays of clouds.
It is spectrum analysis which furnishes, as we know, the most important
auxiliary information; it presents the heavenly bodies to the eye of
the mind as the microscope unveils to the eye of the body the marvels
of the infinitely small. The rays of light are messengers who, having
passed through the spectroscope, bring to us news of the most distant
worlds and tell us of the temperature of the fixed stars, of the metals
volatilised in their atmospheres, of the incredibly low temperature of
the nebulæ and of the gases which envelop the planets.
We do not here wish to intone a hymn to spectrum analysis; we only wish
to report briefly and simply what we know of the physical nature of the
celestial bodies. But we must admit that the greatest amount of that
knowledge is due to the spectroscope.
THE PLANETS OF OUR SYSTEM
(We continue the translation of the essay of the Potsdam astronomer.)
In the light of contemporary astronomical knowledge let us make a rapid
survey of the other worlds.
_The Moon_
Our lady readers will not raise any objection if we occupy ourselves
at first with the Moon, this confidante of every heart, either happy
or unhappy. The most important thing about her for the moment can
be put into one sentence: she has neither air nor water, and her
temperature oscillates between extremes separated by more than 200
degrees centigrade. None of the conditions stated above is therefore
fulfilled, and accordingly no organic life could exist on her. It is
also interesting to see how the cessation on the Moon of one of these
vital conditions has entailed the cessation of the two others. There is
no occasion to doubt that the Moon formerly possessed an atmosphere;
by analogy with the planets this must indeed be assumed as altogether
certain. The feeble mass of our satellite which, on the one hand, has
been the cause of its rapid cooling, has, on the other hand, brought
about the dissipation into space of its atmosphere, which was probably
always of small density.
But the smaller the pressure of the air the more rapid is the
evaporation of water, and this is why its disappearance coincides with
that of the atmosphere. Besides, the complete absence of air allows the
rays of the Sun to penetrate without hindrance to the ground and to
heat it to a high temperature during the 14 times 24 hours of duration
of the lunar day. During the night, which is of equal duration, there
is radiation of heat into celestial space, and the soil cools down to
a temperature which cannot be very different from the absolute zero of
the temperature of empty space.
(I cannot entirely accept these allegations with regard to the
habitability of our satellite. The absence of air and even of water is
pot proved. The variations actually observed even prove that the moon
is not altogether a dead world. But let the author continue.)
Such a fate is also in store for the Earth, and nothing can save
it. Our Earth will also one day become a barren body, incapable of
supporting organic life, a deserted grave of the civilisation created
by the human spirit. Just as the isolated individual disappears, so
will humanity one day disappear entirely. In a limited domain death
is always finally victorious; but, on the other hand, a new life
flourishes elsewhere, and when that new life is developed, some day
perhaps on another planet of our system a scientific article will be
written on the question whether the Earth is still habitable.
_Mercury_
Our knowledge of the physical constitution of Mercury is very slight.
It seems to be surrounded by a light atmosphere which contains
water-vapour. Since the solar heat on Mercury is about seven times
stronger than on us, the extreme limits of temperature above indicated
must here be very considerably surpassed, and water can hardly exist
except in the form of vapour. But the argument is entirely changed if
we accept the recent discovery of Schiaparelli, according to which the
duration of rotation of Mercury would be identical with its period of
revolution, so that, like the Moon to the Earth, Mercury would always
turn the same face to the Sun. On that side the temperature would
naturally be very high, while the most intense frost would reign on the
other side. But between these two extremes there ought to be a mixed
zone in which our three conditions might possibly be realised, so that
we may assume for Mercury a limited habitability.
_Venus_
On Venus the Sun’s heat is still very considerable, and in the torrid
zone it would be insupportable to us. But, on the other hand, this
planet is surrounded by a dense atmosphere, which on account of the
presence of water-vapour proves the existence of water on the planet.
The higher regions of the atmosphere are occupied by a thick layer
of clouds which hardly ever allows our gaze to reach the ground, but
which is equally opposed to the passage of the Sun’s rays. Much more
than half the solar radiation is reflected by that layer of cloud,
and we can suppose, on the whole, that the upper limit of a tolerable
temperature is not passed at the surface of this planet. And as we have
already said, since there is water and an atmosphere, we have no reason
to doubt the habitability of Venus.
_Mars_
As regards Mars, which commences the outer series of planets, we
obtain a still more satisfactory result. We can clearly recognise the
subdivision of the surface into water and dry land. Its atmosphere
has properties which agree with those of our atmosphere. Not only
is there certain evidence of the existence of water-vapour, but
spectroscopic studies have proved also that the principal components of
the atmosphere are the same as those of the Earth’s atmosphere--that
is to say that there is oxygen and nitrogen. Sometimes the soil is
hidden by groups of clouds, sometimes they disappear to appear again
in other places. Its poles are encased in snow and ice, the white
area of which varies in extent according to the seasons. Besides a
number of enigmatical facts--we need only refer to the canals and
their doubling--there are numerous meteorological phenomena on Mars
which frequently occur in our own atmosphere. Although the temperature
of Mars is, on account of its farther distance from the Sun,
sensibly below that of the Earth, the difference is not sufficiently
considerable to oppose a serious obstacle to the stable existence of
organised matter in the torrid or temperate zone. The torrid zone of
Mars must correspond approximately in climate to our temperate zone.
We can therefore finally declare with entire conviction that the
conditions offered by Mars are suitable for life as we know it on Earth.
_Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune_
With the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune we enter a region
quite different from the preceding one. These bodies all possess
atmospheres of great density in which, on Jupiter for instance, we can
observe immense revolutions and violent cataclysms. They also contain
water-vapour, but besides that they contain a substance characterised
by a strong absorption of certain red rays. This gas is found in a
small quantity on Jupiter, but in much greater quantities on Saturn
and Uranus. On the latter planet the atmosphere, apart from the
water-vapour contained in it, does not seem to have any analogy with
ours; strong absorption-bands show in the less refrangible portions of
the spectrum. As we have seen that oxygen is not absolutely necessary
to organic life, the single fact that the outer planets have an
atmosphere may suffice to show that our first condition is fulfilled.
The presence of water-vapour in their atmosphere proves the existence
of water and fulfils the second condition. As regards the third
condition, Jupiter also seems to satisfy that, at least in equatorial
regions, especially if we take into account that radiation of heat
into space is much limited by the thick atmosphere filled with clouds.
The farther we go away from the Sun the more does the third condition
become precarious, and while we may have some doubt concerning Saturn,
it cannot be denied that on Uranus and Neptune the solar heat is
insufficient to support organised life in a durable way.
* * * * *
(The atmospheres might be formed of gases which would make the
radiation almost zero and would produce a relatively high temperature.
This certainly happens in the case of Mars, whose temperature is not
lower than that of our globe, where the polar snows are less dense
than ours and melt more completely in the course of the summer.)
* * * * *
But another peculiarity presents itself which may reverse all our ideas
relative to the planets from Jupiter outwards. Certain observations
tend to show that Jupiter is not yet cooled down, that its real nucleus
is still fused or perhaps even in the gaseous state, and that it has
not yet formed a solid crust upon which life might develop. Besides
the phenomena directly observed or revealed in the spectroscope,
the very small specific gravity of these planets also supports that
hypothesis--the density of Saturn is about the same as that of cork. It
is very difficult to form an exact idea of the constitution of these
planets. On the other hand, it is possible to believe that one of the
extreme planets, Uranus for instance, is sufficiently cooled to possess
at least a liquid surface which, on account of the internal heat of
the planet, may have preserved for a certain period a temperature
sufficient to entertain life even after the solar heat is no longer
sufficiently powerful But these are only hypotheses.
* * * * *
Let us summarise in a few words the results of this chapter.
On the Moon no organic matter can exist; we may suppose living beings
to exist in a small zone of Mercury; the surface of Venus is very
probably habitable in most of its regions; Mars is certainly habitable
and probably under such conditions that certain species of our plants
and animals could, if transported to that planet, continue to live
there.
For the other planets the possibility of habitation cannot be entirely
denied, but the existence of living beings on their soil is not
probable. Let us add, for the sake of completeness, that on the Sun,
which radiates the most intense heat, and on those innumerable other
suns which we call stars and which the telescope reveals to us, living
matter certainly does not exist.
It follows that of the millions of stars visible to us in the universe
there are only two or three which we could consider with any certainty
capable of being inhabited as we conceive it. That seems a rather
unsatisfying result, which allows an icy sentiment of loneliness in
infinite space to take possession of our souls.
We have seen in the first part of our work how the speculations of
those who formerly discussed the habitability of the planets not only
raised the question whether such and such a planet was inhabited, but
also tackled the much vaster problem of the particular characters
of the beings which lived there. After attentively following the
discussion, nobody should ask to penetrate further into this question.
It has indeed been a great effort to obtain a positive result at all,
even while restricting the population of the planets to the simplest
forms of organised matter. The number of forms under which it shows
itself on the Earth is so considerable that we can only be dazed by its
abundance, and this impression must be even increased if we remember
that the possible forms are far from being exhausted and that we only
know those which, satisfying terrestrial conditions, have been able
to survive by adapting themselves to their surroundings. We do not
exaggerate in declaring that Nature recognises no limit to the number
of forms which can harbour life, and this observation is an argument
in favour of those who desire to find reasonable or superior beings in
distant worlds. It indicates that as soon as the first germs of life
exist, the possibility of a complete development is there, and that
however different the external conditions may be, Nature is not at a
loss for varieties of forms of life. That is why we have the right to
hope that on Mars, for instance, there are beings who not only show
manifestations of animal life, but who are endowed with intellectual
faculties. That, however, is all we can acknowledge: the right to hope
and not to a certainty.
Yet at the risk of exposing ourselves to a criticism similar to that
which we have in the first part directed against other authors, we
would now invite the reader to follow us for a moment into the domain
of speculation and hypothesis.
THE POSSIBILITY OF BEINGS OF DIFFERENT CHEMICAL CONSTITUTION
In this chapter Scheiner develops the idea indicated above (page 127)
on the possibility of the existence in other worlds of living beings
entirely different from ourselves.
We have up to now (he writes) understood by organised matter something
of which _carbon_, combined with hydrogen, nitrogen, and other
elements, is the principal chemical component. Carbon is the essential
constituent; organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon. We do
not know any other substance which would allow of such an array of
combinations, but the possibility of such a body cannot be denied.
While on Earth all life is bound up with carbon compounds, one may
suppose that in entirely different circumstances another element
might show itself capable of supporting the conditions of life in
combinations which might resist greater heat without decomposition or
greater cold without becoming torpid. A few years ago we seemed to be
on the track of something like that. _Silicon_ is the element
which has the greatest chemical analogy to carbon, and in combination
with oxygen it is found in enormous quantities in the form of silica,
and all its combinations have very characteristic properties. Just as
in organic matter every being forms itself into cells by fission or
conjugation, so also can we produce from combinations of silicic acid a
cell from which under our eyes an object develops which has a vegetable
appearance. This experiment, easy to make, is perhaps unknown to many
of our readers, and therefore we must say a little more about it.
Most combinations of silicic acid with metals are insoluble in water.
Some, however, and especially a combination with potassium known by the
name of water-glass, occurs in a soluble form. If into such a solution
we introduce a small quantity of any soluble metallic salt such as
chloride of copper or silver nitrate, decomposition takes place and the
chloride of copper is converted into silicate of copper and chloride of
potash. A very curious phenomenon then takes place. At the moment when
the first traces of the metallic salt are dissolved, the decomposition
mentioned above takes place and the molecule of salt is covered with
an extremely fine skin of insoluble silicate. It is across this skin
that the liquids are then exchanged by a process of osmosis which, as
we know, plays a great part in the life of plants and animals and which
here takes place as follows:
More liquid enters the membrane than issues from it; consequently
the internal pressure increases until it is great enough to break
through the membrane, somewhere allowing a drop of the liquid which
is a solution of metallic salt to escape. On account of the chemical
decomposition, this drop immediately surrounds itself with a new skin,
and the process of rupture and reformation is repeated until the
metallic salt inside the membrane is completely decomposed. We thus
see arising under our eyes in a few minutes a marvellous arborescent
structure which could at first sight be taken for some plant of
inferior order. The rupture of the membrane always takes place in
the most recently formed portion, because there the membrane, which
thickens gradually, has as yet the least thickness; that is generally
the upper portion, so that this offers another analogy to plant life.
The coloration of the cells differs with the nature of the metallic
salt, but we cannot trace any influence upon the forms obtained. By
throwing into the solution several different metallic salts, one can
form a many-coloured garden in a small bottle.
We are far from seeing in this experience anything but a quite external
resemblance to the phenomena of living matter. Yet it leads us to other
reflections, especially as we do not yet know anything concerning the
real nature of living matter.
Among plants and inferior species of the animal world we cannot imagine
a life conscious of itself. But in common with our silica creature they
show growth and the consumption of chemical substances. In both cases
that growth is arrested wherever and whenever the food gives out. This
happens in the silica solution when the provision of metallic salt is
exhausted; and these are not the only analogies which one can find.
But it will be said that there is in reality a capital difference: in
one case we have to do with real life for which we have no explanation;
in the other we have to do with a simple chemico-physical phenomenon.
We reply that a few centuries ago this chemical vegetation would have
been an enigma as life itself is still to us, and nobody would then
have doubted that he was observing the development of some strange
plant. Would they not then have taken the silicon cell for an organic
cell? What follows? That the idea of living nature is quite relative,
that it changes with our knowledge, and that an imaginative spirit is
quite at liberty to endow the stare which we just excluded from life
with a life quite different from ours.
Apart from these possibilities, the somewhat discouraging result of
our previous study was that of all celestial bodies visible to us only
two or three could be described with any probability as fit to support
something resembling our terrestrial organic life. We cannot object to
this conclusion so long as we take it literally, but we wish to point
out that all depends upon the little restriction contained in the words
“visible to us.”
We must therefore include the heavenly bodies which we cannot see and
concerning which we know very little. But here we encounter a very
peculiar paradox. We know nothing about these invisible stars, and yet
as far as our interests are concerned we know more about them than
the others. For mathematics comes to our aid, and if we rely on the
calculus of probabilities we arrive, as we shall see, at very clear
results.
Our Sun has created for itself, without counting the asteroids,
a retinue of eight planets, which on account of their respective
distances from the central body are placed in the most diverse
conditions as regards temperature. Out of these eight planets one, the
Earth, is undoubtedly inhabited, and two others, Mars and Venus, very
probably. From the fact that the Sun has produced not one planet but
eight, we can conclude that very probably the other suns or fixed stars
have also produced one or several planets, and that those which escape
from that law are the exception. We must also admit that among these
stellar planets there may be some in such a condition and at such a
distance from their central sun that organic life is possible on their
surfaces.
We shall make this calculation with figures so modest that we shall
obtain results obviously below the truth.
The number of stars revealed by a telescope of moderate power amounts
to 10 millions. If we suppose that every star only has on an average
one planet, we obtain already the considerable number of 10 million
planets. It is true that with us three planets out of eight may be
considered habitable, but let us suppose the proportion in the universe
is only one in a hundred. We shall still have no less than a hundred
thousand habitable planets.
This number, evidently falling short of reality, makes already quite
another figure compared with the three habitable worlds we had before.
After that the universe no longer appears such a desert. There is
nothing to hinder us from giving rein to our fancy and imagining on
the one hand the strangest forms of life among the innumerable planets
gravitating round the stars, and on the other hand thinking beings
which surpass us considerably in intelligence and to whom our most
difficult problems are as transparent as self-evident truths. The
conclusion is that in all sorts of degrees we must see Life radiating
into space and lighting up Infinity.
REMARKS
To this interesting study of Monsieur Scheiner we may add in the first
instance that the question is still more complex, that we can consider
the resources of Nature as infinite, and that “positive” science
founded only upon our senses is quite insufficient, though it may be
the only basis of our reasoning. It is through the eyes of the spirit
that we must survey the universe.
As we have seen, this new examination of the question of the
habitability of other worlds by thinking beings presents a new
interest, and the author has been able to escape the usual error
of scientific writers, which consists in supposing that the first
condition of habitability of another world is that it resembles the
Earth. That is always the reasoning of the fish, which would affirm
without an absolutely logical conviction irrefutable to himself that
it is impossible to live outside water. But it seems to us that our
conception of the universe can be even more vast and elevated than that
of the learned German astronomer.
As regards the planetary systems differing from ours, we are no longer
obliged to fall back upon suppositions. We know already with certainty
that our Sun is no exception, as some theoreticians maintained even
quite recently. The discovery is of considerable interest.
It is surely a rather exceptional situation that a sidereal system
consisting of a central sun and one or more bodies gravitating round
it should have its system just in our line of vision so that the
revolution of the bodies which compose it should bring dark bodies
between us and the star and produce a more or less complete eclipse.
Since, on the other hand, such eclipses would be our only means of
proving the existence of these unknown planets (except perturbations
as in the case of Sirius and Procyon), it seems that it would have
been absolutely daring to hope for such a circumstance to discover
solar systems different from ours. Yet this exceptional case occurs in
various parts of the sky. Thus, for example, the variable star Algol
owes its variation of brightness, which reduces it from the second to
the fourth magnitude at intervals of 69 hours, to the interposition of
a body between it and the Earth, and celestial mechanics has already
been able to determine with precision the orbit of this body, its
dimensions and its mass, and even the ellipticity of the Algol sun.
Thus we have here a system of which we know the sun and one enormous
planet whose revolution takes place in 69 hours with a very high
velocity as measured in the spectroscope, a planet still self-luminous,
although less luminous than its sun, as the Earth was long ago, but
a planet in the course of cooling and approximating to the state of
Jupiter.
The star Delta Cephei is in the same case: it is an eclipsing variable
with a period of 129 hours, and its eclipsing planet also revolves in
the plane containing our line of vision. The star U Ophinchi shows a
similar system, and observation has revealed several others.
If therefore chance has brought it about that a certain number of
different solar systems should have been revealed to terrestrial
observation by presenting side views, that is evidence of the existence
of innumerable solar systems disseminated through the depths of space,
and we are no longer reduced to mere conjectures.
On the other hand, the analysis of the movements of several stars,
such as Sirius, Procyon, Altair, and many others, proves that these
far-distant suns have companion planets as yet unrevealed by the
telescope, and which possibly may never be discovered because they are
dark and lost in the radiation of the star. The companion discovered
in the neighbourhood of Sirius is not the only celestial body of that
system. Scheiner speaks of about 10 million stars as constituting the
sidereal universe. But the photographic chart of the heavens which
comprises stars down to the thirteenth magnitude is already expected to
contain 30 millions. If we go down to the lowest magnitudes we reach
the figure of 100 millions. It is therefore not an army of 100,000
worlds which appears before us, but rather of several millions.
Now, this is a point of the greatest importance for the exact
appreciation of the problem.
The terrestrial organisms from the lowest up to man are the result of
forces in action on the surface of our planet. The first organisms
seem to have been produced by combinations of carbon with hydrogen
and oxygen, and their life consisted, so to speak, only in a few
rudimentary sensibilities. Sponges, corals, polypi, medusæ, give
us an idea of these primitive beings. They were formed in the warm
waters of the primary ages. While there were yet no continents nor
islands emerging from the universal ocean, there were no air-breathing
organisms. The first aquatic beings were succeeded by amphibia and
reptiles. Afterwards came the mammalia and the birds. The constitution
of beings stands in close relation with the substances of which they
are composed, the medium in which they live, the temperature, the
light, the density, gravitation, length of day and night, seasons,
etc.--in a word, all the cosmographic elements of the planet.
If, for example, we compare two such worlds as the Earth and Neptune,
which differ very much as regards distance from the Sun, we cannot
imagine for a single instant that the organic forms should have had the
same development. The average temperature must be much lower on Neptune
than on the Earth, and so must the intensity of light. The years and
the seasons are 165 times longer than with us; the density of materials
is three times less, and gravitation, on the other hand, is a little
stronger. Under conditions so different from ours, the activities of
Nature can only have been shown in other forms. The elements also are
not found present in the same proportions, and spectrum analysis has
even shown us that substances which prevail in the atmospheres of
Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, as well as Neptune, are different from
those which constitute our organisms. Lungs functioning in another
atmosphere would have to be different from ours. The same applies to
the stomach and the digestive organs. Chemical constitution is not even
the same. Instead of carbon as a fundamental element associated with
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, we can imagine with Scheiner silicon
and other bodies. We must conclude that the organs and the senses
cannot be the same as they are here. The optic nerve, for instance,
which has been formed and developed here from the rudimentary organ
of the trilobite to the marvels of the human eye, must on Neptune be
incomparably more sensitive than it is in our blinding sunlight and
must perceive radiations which we do not perceive here. It may even
be replaced by another organ. The bodily forms, animal and human, can
resemble nothing on earth.
Certain _savants_ object that, if the conditions are too different
from terrestrial conditions, life cannot exist at all. But we have no
right to limit the powers of Nature by the narrowness of our sphere
of observation, or to pretend that our planet and our human race are
the model for all planets. That is an hypothesis as infantile as it is
ridiculous.
Others go still farther, and imagine that life only appears on Earth,
and that we have no sufficient reason to suppose that on other globes
it has been the result of inorganic evolution. This, as we have often
repeated, would be a strange interpretation of the language of Nature,
considering that our small planet is too small a cup to contain the
whole of life, that that life abounds everywhere, fills the waters,
swarms in the air, covers the entire surface of the globe, and that
the fertility of Nature is such that she multiplies parasitic life
at the expense of life itself, rather than get tired of producing.
And the spectacle is the same for all the immense duration of the
geological eras. Quite lately, noticing a heap of fossils of the
secondary era by the roadside in the country, I took a stone to put
it into a collection, for it was entirely made up of shells petrified
and cemented in a block. In taking it up I exposed a swarming mass
of living beings, small snails, wood-lice, beetles; and I caught two
lizards; while butterflies laid their eggs in the plants around. Life
of former days, life of to-day, life everywhere. Life always!
Certain minds are capable of supposing that for the whole duration of
its existence, for millions of years, a world could come to nothing
but the state of dead and barren rock and that the life which swarms
on the surface of our planet is only a freak due to the fortuitous
combination of elements of fruitfulness, a parasitism of more or less
large fleas which might never have been produced at all. But that is
a hypothesis contrary to the observation of Nature, and difficult to
maintain seriously except as a pure play of the imagination, which does
not satisfy the most elementary logic. And though our logic may not be
that of Nature, yet we must not stray too far away from it if we want
to reason.
But as we have already repeated so often in this book, and what we must
thoroughly absorb, is the importance of time as well as of space. Just
as our world is nothing but a small island, a point in the universe, so
also our era is nothing but a moment in eternity. The present moment
has no more importance than the moments which have preceded or those
which are to come. There is no reason to believe that such and such
other worlds are inhabited at present simply because we live at present
and can observe them. One world has been inhabited in the past, another
will be inhabited in the future. Let us not be personal, like infants
or the aged, who see only their own room. Let us know how to live in
the infinite and in the eternal.
INDEX
Alpha Centauri, 38, 42
Andromeda, 70, 85
Animalculæ, 165
Atmospheres, planetary, 105
Atoms and stars, 157
Aurora Borealis, 175
Bernoulli, 166
Bessel, 100
Bode, 188
Champollion, hieroglyphics, 143
Cherbourg, 97
Communication, interplanetary,
141
Earth currents, 135
Eiffel Tower, 164
Electrons, 137
Fontenelle, 184
Frauenhofer, 171
Galileo, 101
Giacobini, 97
God, 174
Gravitation, 105, 124
Gruithuisen, 100
Guzmann, prize, 153
Habitability of planets, 170
Harding, 101
Hercules, 160, 162
Homer, 95
Huygens, 185
Invisible universe, 175
Jupiter, 23, 41, 123, 125, 187;
(red spot), 126
Juvisy Observatory, 107, 135,
138
Kant, 182
Kircher, 184
Leibnitz, 166
Life, conditions, of, 106
Littrow, J. von, 141, 145
Magnetic variations, 131
Magnetic storms, 134
Mars, 14,105, 111, 145, 187, 204;
communication with, 117;
flashes on, 111; polar snows,
113; rotation, 114
Materialism, 173
Mayer, 101
Mercury, 185, 203
Milky Way, 163, 170
Molecules, 164
Moon, 9, 41, 105, 116, 141, 201
Neptune, 20, 35, 41, 219
Nice Observatory, 97
Pascal, 168
Renan, 88
Saturn, 18, 41, 189
Scheiner, 181, 192, 195, 210, 215,
220
Silicon, 210
Sirius, 47
Spectrum analysis, 127, 200
Stars and atoms, 157
Stars, speed of, 159
Sunspots, 134, 135
Temperature of planets, 127, 197
Venus, 95, 204; rotation, 107
Wavelengths of light, 171
THE END
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