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.