Man is a very local species, due to very local conditions on the earth, made up of certain proportions of C and N and H and O, and clearly unable to breed, if even to breathe, in a world where the proportions of these elements would be different, as in every other known world they are. He would fall under the weight of his skeleton, choke through the lightness of his lungs. Transplantation is not probable, and not possible; we shall die where we were born.
The worlds to be colonized, being the habitable ones, may be inhabited already; not desolate heritages for our seizing. On his Itinerarium exstaticum the old Jesuit Father found lovely angels of silver on Venus, great angels of fire on the sun, angels everywhere and everywhere the friendliest reception. His experience may be repeated; shamefaced, we shall find each fresh world we alight on to be a land of brothers and of beauty, an abode of perfection and holiness:
Each of those stars is a religious house;
I saw their altars smoke, their incense rise,
And heard Hosannahs ring through every sphere.
Or, by Kant’s theory that the planets furthest from the sun (having, by Kant’s theory, had more time) have developed the highest organisms, we might expect a different reception according as we moved in towards the sun or out; under the latter alternative either a more intelligent welcome or a bitterer resistance, according as further physical evolution is held to imply higher ethical evolution or not. The treatment the so-called higher races down here have meted out to the lower; the story, earth’s blackest story, of white man’s wickedness to black, is no happy augury for the Martians’ treatment of ourselves, a race more alien and kithless. Why should they treat us kindly? Why should the war of the worlds be merciful? Why should it bring victory for us?
The war may be fought here. We may be fated to be the colonized conquered planet, wiped out within our own trenches by the Silenians or Silurians or Saturnians. By when things here were getting unfavourable, on Mars they would be worse. Migration hither is in plain fact the likelier. Next week the first man from Mars may be landing.
Time would defeat us again if our hopes flew further afield. Saturn and Jupiter have no hope of a habitability phase. Uranus and Neptune have long been too cold. By the time we shall need a world for escape, there will be none to escape to.
In the solar system, at least; the chance in the stars is beyond all statable conjecture. A few may possess cool-surfaced satellites; life, by some path incredible, may one day reach and, by some chance improbable, be able to continue there—thence, post-deceasing it, to watch the old home flare.
If the life germs are everywhere; if the Universe is sown with them, is them; if from eternity to eternity they are spilt and spread from system to system by comets, by stellar dust, by radiation, by the secret ether, by ordered mutations, by methods mechanical or mystical we know not of, by high cosmic perpetual xenogamy; if, though some germs die of the inter-sidereal cold, others are better preserved by it to flourish and wander and found nations of people whenever they arrive at a world where the outlook for vivification is favourable—like ours—then we are migrants already, and shall be again; then life will last while the Universe lasts.
While the Universe lasts. …
Another world is at best a remand; on it also the sun will cease to shine. Could we fly further, to the planet of some other star—this too must one day die. From dying worlds can life migrate forever?
Dead suns crash into dead suns, creating new great stars, which become new spiral nebulae, new masses of smaller stars, new hot sun, new cooling sun, new dead sun: the old titanic round. The materials being always the same and the conditions often similar, life in certain favoured corners of certain favoured new systems will begin all over again from the lowest forms: to die all over again as the circle wheels round again to death. Can this go on forever?
Or is there, end of all worlds, a Universe-end?
What After?
For terrible multitudes of years the stars have been pouring forth their light; the Universe has been melting away.
Since energy turns always into heat, and since heat passes always from a warmer body to a colder, there is always available less energy in the Universe, whose temperature is always levelling up.
In the end no lucid atoms will be left; the transmission of energy will have ceased; entropy, the final equalization of temperature, will be accomplished; the clock will have run down. All life, light, movement, vibration will be over, in soundless motionless eternal total night: the calorific death of the Universe: the Wärmetod.
The mind rebels.
Could not the cyclic collisions, systole and diastole of worlds, release fresh energy forever?—They are mere accidents, incidents, powerless to stem or deflect the stream ineluctable of sidereal evolution. They are dying flares, each time paltrier.
Could not inequality—movement—life—in some way start again, some cosmic accident after untold ages somehow, as a spark dead gunpowder, fire the dark equilibrium?—Entropy is irreversible. There is no opposite process. The universe is a mechanism transforming energy into heat, never to the same extent heat back into energy. Matter turns into light, not light into matter; life into death, not death into life.
Heat is only one source and mode of movement; why should temperature equilibrium spell total equilibrium? Why, life being a mystery beyond mechanics, must physical death spell psychical death?—If heat goes, existence goes, spiritual and material, in this world and other worlds.
Irreversibility, if true of finite systems, why true for infinite space?—Space is not infinite. Leave Neptune behind and, cutting a path through the void, strike for the nearest star: Proxima Centauri, but twenty-six million million miles away,
