The End of the World

above the danger line forever. We may feel that one dip in the curve too deep, and life will forever be over. We may take courage from the infinite perils the race has survived and see them as glad augury of perpetuity. We may take terror from the infinite variety and infinite littleness of the changes that could destroy it: one jot of carbon dioxide less or more, one touch of the cold seven miles above or the heat seven miles below. We may remember that the shears which would snap the thread of our days have failed though they’ve tried since the beginning; we may remember that the doors that lead to death, they are ten thousand, and a thousand times ten thousand. We may hope or fear this or that, work our belief to imagine that or this; but there is no evidence and no presumption of a kind any one of us, hopeful or fearful, would heed in any other matter, great or small, that either our race or any created or descendent race, will in a future, nigh or far, be either much better able or much worse able than at this present instant of time to affront whatever the earth and terrible heavens have in store.

They decree, and we die.

Earth

To live again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the one side:

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

On the other side:

The material conditions under which the mystery called life can evolve form an infinitesimal fraction of the infinite range of material conditions in the universe. The earth happens to coincide with that fraction. Hence⁠—though another world so coinciding could conceivably, theoretically exist⁠—on the earth alone there is in fact the mystery. Among the planets she alone is the right distance from the sun, has the due allotment of water, heat and light, the requisite mass, the suitable density of air. The moon is too cold,