The End of the World

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

Religion has something for both sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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