CHAPTER XVI
CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHER WORLDS?
Vastness of Nature—Star Distances—Problem of Communicating with
Mars—The Great Beyond.
A story is told of a young lady who had just graduated from boarding school with high honors. Coming home in great glee, she cast her books aside as she announced to her friends;—"Thank goodness it is all over, I have nothing more to learn. I know Latin and Greek, French and German, Spanish and Italian; I have gone through Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Conic Sections and the Calculus; I can interpret Beethoven and Wagner, and—but why enumerate?—in short, 'I know everything.'"
As she was thus proclaiming her knowledge her hoary-headed grandfather, a man whom the Universities of the world had honored by affixing a score of alphabetical letters to his name, was experimenting in his laboratory. The lines of long and deep study had corrugated his brow and furrowed his face. Wearily he bent over his retorts and test tubes. At length he turned away with a heavy sigh, threw up his hands and despairingly exclaimed,—"Alas, alas! after fifty years of study and investigation, I find I know nothing."
There is a moral in this story that he who runs may read. Most of us are like the young lady,—in the pride of our ignorance, we fancy we know almost everything. We boast of the progress of our time, of what has been accomplished in our modern world, we proclaim our triumphs from the hilltops,—"Ha!" we shout, "we have annihilated time and distance; we have conquered the forces of nature and made them subservient to our will; we have chained the lightning and imprisoned the thunder; we have wandered through the fields of space and measured the dimensions and revolutions of stars and suns and planets and systems. We have opened the eternal gates of knowledge for all to enter and crowned man king of the universe."
Vain boasting! The gates of knowledge have been opened, but we have merely got a peep at what lies within. And man, so far from being king of the universe, is but as a speck on the fly-wheel that controls the mighty machinery of creation. What we know is infinitesimal to what we do not know. We have delved in the fields of science, but as yet our ploughshares have merely scratched the tiniest portion of the surface,—the furrow that lies in the distance is unending. In the infinite book of knowledge we have just turned over a few of the first pages; but as it is infinite, alas! we can never hope to reach the final page, for there is no final page. What we have accomplished is but as a mere drop in the ocean, whose waves wash the continents of eternity. No scholar, no scientist can bound those continents, can tell the limits to which they stretch, inasmuch as they are illimitable.
Ask the most learned savant if he can fix the boundaries of space, and he will answer,—No! Ask him if he can define mind and matter, and you will receive the same answer.
"What is mind? It is no matter."
"What is matter? Never mind."
The atom formerly thought to be indivisible and the smallest particle of matter has been reduced to molecules, corpuscles, ions, and electrons; but the nature, the primal cause of these, the greatest scientists on earth are unable to determine. Learning is as helpless as ignorance when brought up against this stone-wall of mystery. The effect is seen, but the cause remains indeterminable. The scientist, gray-haired in experience and experiment, knows no more in this regard than the prattling child at its mother's knee. The child asks,—"Who made the world?" and the mother answers, "God made the world." The infant mind, suggestive of the future craving for knowledge, immediately asks,—"Who is God?" Question of questions to which the philosopher and the peasant must give the same answer,—"God is the infinite, the eternal, the source of all things, the alpha and omega of creation, from Him all came, to Him all must return." He is the beginning of Science, the foundation on which our edifice of knowledge rests.
We hear of the conflict between Science and Religion. There is no conflict, can be none, for all Science must be based on faith,—faith in Him who holds worlds and suns "in the hollow of His hand." All our great scientists have been deeply religious men, acknowledging their own insignificance before Him who fills the universe with His presence.
What is the universe and what place do we hold in it? The mind of man becomes appalled in consideration of the question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other bodies which we erroneously call "fixed stars." These stars are the suns of other systems of worlds, countless systems, all rushing through the immensity of space, for there is nothing fixed or stationary in creation,—all is movement, constant, unvarying. Suns and stars and systems perform their revolutions with unerring precision, each unit-world true to its own course, thus proving to the soul of reason and the consciousness of faith that there must needs be an omnipotent hand at the lever of this grand machinery of the universe, the hand that fashioned it, that of God. Addison beautifully expresses the idea in referring to the revolutions of the stars:
"In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth one glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine-
'The Hand that made us is Divine.'"
Our sun, the centre of the small system of worlds of which the earth is one, is distant from us about ninety-three million miles. In winter it is nearer; in summer farther off. Light travels this distance in about eight minutes, to be exact, the rate is 186,400 miles per second. To get an idea of the immensity of the distance of the so-called fixed stars, let us take this as a base of comparison. The nearest fixed star to us is Alpha Centauri, which is one of the brightest as seen in the southern heavens. It requires four and one-quarter years for a beam of light to travel from this star to earth at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, thus showing that Alpha Centauri is about two hundred and seventy-five thousand times as far from us as is the sun, in other words, more than 25,575,000,000,000 miles, which, expressed in our notation, reads twenty-five trillion, five hundred and seventy- five billion miles, a number which the mind of man is incapable of grasping. To use the old familiar illustration of the express train, it would take the "Twentieth Century Limited," which does the thousand mile trip between New York and Chicago in less than twenty-four hours, some one million two hundred and fifty thousand years at the same speed to travel from the earth to Alpha Centauri. Sirius, the Dog-Star, is twice as far away, something like eight or nine "light" years from our solar system; the Pole-Star is forty-eight "light" years removed from us, and so on with the rest, to an infinity of numbers. From the dawn of creation in the eternal cosmos of matter, light has been travelling from some stars in the infinitude of space at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, but so remote are they from our system that it has not reached us as yet. The contemplation is bewildering; the mind sinks into nothingness in consideration of a magnitude so great and distance so confusing. What lies beyond?—a region which numbers cannot measure and thought cannot span, and beyond that?—the eternal answer,—GOD.
In face of the contemplation of the vastness of creation, of its boundlessness the question ever obtrudes itself,—What place have we mortals in the universal cosmos? What place have we finite creatures, who inhabit this speck of matter we call the earth, in this mighty scheme of suns and systems and never-ending space. Does the Creator of all think us the most important of his works, that we should be the particular objects of revelation, that for us especially heaven was built, and a God-man, the Son of the Eternal, came down to take flesh of our flesh and live among us, to show us the way, and finally to offer himself as a victim to the Father to expiate our transgressions. Mystery of mysteries before which we stand appalled and lost in wonder. Self-styled rationalists love to point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all the unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, inhabiting such an infinitesimal speck of matter as the earth, which depends for its very life and light upon a second or third-rate or hundred-rate Sun.
From the earliest times of our era, the sneers and taunts of atheism and agnosticism have been directed at the humble believer, who bows down in submission and questions not. The fathers of the Church, such as Augustine and Chrysostom and Thomas of Aquinas and, at a later time, Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, and Newman, despite the war of creeds, have attacked the citadel of the scoffers; but still the latter hurl their javelins from the ramparts, battlements and parapets and refuse to be repulsed. If there are myriads of other worlds, thousands, millions of them in point of magnitude greater than ours, what concern say they has the Creator with our little atom of matter? Are other worlds inhabited besides our own. This is the question that will not down—that is always begging for an answer. The most learned savants of modern time, scholars, sages, philosophers and scientists have given it their attention, but as yet no one has been able to conclusively decide whether a race of intelligent beings exists in any sphere other than our own. All efforts to determine the matter result in mere surmise, conjecture and guesswork. The best of scientists can only put forward an opinion.
Professor Simon Newcomb, one of the most brilliant minds our country has produced, says: "It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that beings, not only animated but endowed with reason, inhabit countless worlds in space." Professor Mitchell of the Cincinnati Observatory, in his work, "Popular Astronomy," says,—"It is most incredible to assert, as so many do, that our planet, so small and insignificant in its proportions when compared with the planets with which it is allied, is the only world in the whole universe filled with sentient, rational, and intelligent beings capable of comprehending the grand mysteries of the physical universe." Camille Flammarion, in referring to the utter insignificance of the earth in the immensity of space, puts forward his view thus: "If advancing with the velocity of light we could traverse from century to century the unlimited number of suns and spheres without ever meeting any limit to the prodigious immensity where God brings forth his worlds, and looking behind, knowing not in what part of the infinite was the little grain of dust called the earth, we would be compelled to unite our voices with that universal nature and exclaim—'Almighty God, how senseless were we to believe that there was nothing beyond the earth and that our abode alone possessed the privilege of reflecting Thy greatness and honor.'"
The most distinguished astronomers and scientists of a past time, as well as many of the most famous divines, supported the contention of world life beyond the earth. Among these may be mentioned Kepler and Tycho, Giordano Bruno and Cardinal Cusa, Sir William and Sir John Herschel, Dr. Bentley and Dr. Chalmers, and even Newton himself subscribed in great measure to the belief that the planets and stars are inhabited by intelligent beings.
Those who deny the possibility of other worlds being inhabited, endeavor to show that our position in the universe is unique, that our solar system is quite different from all others, and, to crown the argument, they assert that our little world has just the right amount of water, air, and gravitational force to enable it to be the abode of intelligent life, whereas elsewhere, such conditions do not prevail, and that on no other sphere can such physical habitudes be found as will enable life to originate or to exist. It can be easily shown that such reasoning is based on untenable foundations. Other worlds have to go through processes of evolution, and there can be no doubt that many are in a state similar to our own. It required hundreds of thousands, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, before this earth was fit to sustain human life. The same transitions which took place on earth are taking place in other planets of our system, and other systems, and it is but reasonable to assume that in other systems there are much older worlds than the earth, and that these have arrived at a more developed state of existence, and therefore have a life much higher than our own. As far as physical conditions are concerned, there are suns similar to our own, as revealed by the spectroscope, and which have the same eruptive energy. Astronomical Science has incontrovertibly demonstrated, and evidence is continually increasing to show that dark, opaque worlds like ours exist and revolve around their primaries. Why should not these worlds be inhabited by a race equal or even superior in intelligence to ourselves, according to their place in the cosmos of creation?
Leaving out of the question the outlying worlds of space, let us come to a consideration of the nearest celestial neighbor we have in our own system, the planet Mars: Is there rational life on Mars and if so can we communicate with the inhabitants?
Though little more than half the earth's size, Mars has a significance in the public eye which places it first in importance among the planets. It is our nearest neighbor on the outer side of the earth's path around the Sun and, viewed through a telescope of good magnifying power, shows surface markings, suggestive of continents, mountains, valleys, oceans, seas and rivers, and all the varying phenomena which the mind associates with a world like unto our own. Indeed, it possesses so many features in common with the earth, that it is impossible to resist the conception of its being inhabitated. This, however, is not tantamount to saying that if there is a race of beings on Mars they are the same as we on Earth. By no means. Whatever atmosphere exists on Mars must be much thinner than ours and far too rare to sustain the life of a people with our limited lung capacity. A race with immense chests could live under such conditions, and folk with gills like fish could pass a comfortable existence in the rarefied air. Besides the tenuity of the atmosphere, there are other conditions which would cause life to be much different on Mars. Attraction and gravitation are altogether different. The force with which a substance is attracted to the surface of Mars is only a little more than one-third as strong as on the earth. For instance one hundred pounds on Earth would weigh only about thirty-eight pounds on Mars. A man who could jump five feet here could clear fifteen feet on Mars. Paradoxical as it may seem, the smaller a planet, in comparison with ours and consequently the less the pull of gravity at its centre, the greater is the probability that its inhabitants, if any, are giants when compared with us. Professor Lowell has pointed out that to place the Martians (if there are such beings) under the same conditions as those in which we exist, the average inhabitant must be considered to be three times as large and three times as heavy as the average human being; and the strength of the Martians must exceed ours to even a greater extent than the bulk and weight; for their muscles would be twenty-seven times more effective. In fact, one Martian could do the work of fifty or sixty men.
It is idle, however, to speculate as to what the forms of life are like on Mars, for if there are any such forms our ideas and conceptions of them must be imaginary, as we cannot see them on Mars we do not know. There is yet no possibility of seeing anything on the planet less than thirty miles across, and even a city of that size, viewed through the most powerful telescope, would only be visible as a minute speck. Great as is the perfection to which our optical instruments have been brought, they have revealed nothing on the planet save the so-called canals, to indicate the presence of sentient rational beings. The canals discovered by Schiaparelli of the Milan Observatory in 1877 are so regular, outlined with such remarkable geometrical precision, that it is claimed they must be artificial and the work of a high order of intelligence. "The evidence of such work," says Professor Lowell, "points to a highly intelligent mind behind it."
Can this intelligence in any way reach us, or can we express ourselves to it? Can the chasm of space which lies between the Earth and Mars be bridged—a chasm which, at the shortest, is more than thirty-five million miles across or one hundred and fifty times greater than the distance between the earth and the moon? Can the inhabitants of the Earth and Mars exchange signals? To answer the question, let us institute some comparisons. Suppose the fabled "Man in the Moon" were a real personage, we would require a telescope 800 times more powerful than the finest instrument we now have to see him, for the space penetrating power of the best telescope is not more than 300 miles and the moon is 240,000 miles distant. An object to be visible on the moon would require to be as large as the Metropolitan Insurance Building in New York, which is over 700 feet high. To see, therefore, an object on Mars by means of the telescope the object would need to have dimensions one hundred and fifty times as great as the object on the moon; in other words, before we could see a building on Mars, it would have to be one hundred and fifty times the size of the Metropolitan Building. Even if there are inhabitants there, it is not likely they have such large buildings.
Assuming that there are Martians, and that they are desirous of communicating with the earth by waving a flag, such a flag in order to be seen through the most powerful telescopes and when Mars is nearest, would have to be 300 miles long and 200 miles wide and be flung from a flagpole 500 miles high. The consideration of such a signal only belongs to the domain of the imagination. As an illustration, it should conclusively settle the question of the possibility or rather impossibility of signalling between the two planets.
Let us suppose that the signalling power of wireless telegraphy had been advanced to such perfection that it was possible to transmit a signal across a distance of 8,000 miles, equal to the diameter of the earth, or 1-30 the distance to the moon. Now, in order to be appreciable at the moon it would require the intensity of the 8,000 mile ether waves to be raised not merely 30 times, but 30 times 30, for to use the ordinary expression, the intensity of an effect spreading in all directions like the ether waves, decreases inversely as the square of the distance. If the whole earth were brought within the domain of wireless telegraphy, the system would still have to be improved 900 times as much again before the moon could be brought within the sphere of its influence. A wireless telegraphic signal, transmitted across a distance equal to the diameter of the earth, would be reduced to a mere sixteen-millionth part if it had to travel over the distance to Mars; in other words, if wireless telegraphy attained the utmost excellence now hoped for it—that is, of being able to girdle the earth—it would have to be increased a thousandfold and then a thousandfold again, and finally multiplied by 16, before an appreciable signal could be transmitted to Mars. This seems like drawing the long bow, but it is a scientific truth. There is no doubt that ether waves can and do traverse the distance between the Earth and Mars, for the fact that sunlight reaches Mars and is reflected back to us proves this; but the source of waves adequate to accomplish such a feat must be on such a scale as to be hopelessly beyond the power of man to initiate or control. Electrical signalling to Mars is much more out of the question than wireless. Even though electrical phenomena produced in any one place were sufficiently intense to be appreciable by suitable instruments all over the earth, that intensity would have to be enhanced another sixteen million-fold before they would be appreciable on the planet Mars.
It is absolutely hopeless to try to span the bridge that lies between us and Mars by any methods known to present day science. Yet men styling themselves scientists say it can be done and will be done. This is a prophecy, however, which must lie in the future.
As has been pointed out, we have as yet but scratched the outer surface in the fields of knowledge. What visions may not be opened to the eyes of men, as they go down deeper and deeper into the soil. Secrets will be exhumed undreamt of now, mysteries will be laid bare to the light of day, and perhaps the psychic riddle of life itself may be solved. Then indeed, Mars may come to be looked on as a next-door neighbor, with whose life and actions we are as well acquainted as with our own. The thirty-five million miles that separate him from us may be regarded as a mere step in space and the most distant planets of our system as but a little journey afield. Distant Uranus may be looked upon as no farther away than is, say, Australia from America at the present time.
It is vain, however, to indulge in these premises. The veil of mystery still hangs between us and suns and stars and systems. One fact lies before us of which there is no uncertainty—we die and pass away from our present state into some other. We are not annihilated into nothingness. Suns and worlds also die, after performing their allotted revolutions in the cycle of the universe. Suns glow for a time, and planets bear their fruitage of plants and animals and men, then turn for aeons into a dreary, icy listlessness and finally crumble to dust, their atoms joining other worlds in the indestructibility of matter.
After all, there really is no death, simply change—change from one state to another. When we say we die, we simply mean that we change our state. There is a life beyond the grave. As Longfellow beautifully expresses it:
"Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal,
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul."
But whither do we go when we pass on? Where is the soul when it leaves the earthly tenement called the body? We, Christians, in the light of revelation and of faith, believe in a heaven for the good; but it is not a material place, only a state of being. Where and under what conditions is that state? This leads us to the consideration of another question which is engrossing the minds of many thinkers and reasoners of the present day. Can we communicate with the Spirit world? Despite the tenets and beliefs and experiences of learned and sincere investigators, we are constrained, thus far, to answer in the negative.
Yet, though we cannot communicate with it, we know there is a spirit world; the inner consciousness of our being apprises us of that fact, we know our loved ones who have passed on are not dead but gone before, just a little space, and that soon we shall follow them into a higher existence. As Talmage said, the tombstone is not the terminus, but the starting post, the door to the higher life, the entrance to the state of endless labor, grand possibilities, and eternal progression.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Marvels of Modern Science, by Paul Severing