[2] This star is called “No. 1830 Groombridge.”
X. ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED?
CHAPTER X
ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED?
WE have a tendency to remain geometric and anthropocentric and to believe that everything is created on the terrestrial model. Not long ago, at one of the scientific soirées of the Solar Festival which I founded in 1904, and which is almost always illustrated by a conference of learned men of philosophical attainments, I requested my eminent friend Edmond Perrier, Member of the Institut and Director of the Paris Museum, to discuss the question of the population of the planets in the light of the latest achievements of science, in which he is past master. His reasoning was, that the same matter, the same forces, the same laws, exist on the Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc., and that therefore the evolution of life is everywhere the same, arrested in one place and developed in another according to the conditions and circumstances, and that all organisms on all the planets can only have terrestrial forms. Our palæontology would be repeated everywhere.
It seems to me that this idea, shared, by the way, by other learned naturalists, is really too “naturalist,” too terrestrial, too classical, too professional, too narrow, too little in harmony with the grandeur of the universe, with the immensity of its energy and the variety of vital manifestations found on our small planet. On the contrary, the diversity of beings, already so prodigious on our little globe, must be, so to speak, infinite, and the extra-terrestrial living forms cannot be cast in the same mould. There is no reason, for instance, why all the beings of the universe should be limited to our five senses. There are inevitable differences: gravitation, density, food-supply, atmosphere, temperature, light, the years, seasons and days, etc., etc.—causes so different cannot fail to produce absolutely different effects.
A savant is a man accustomed to discussions and delighted to provoke them, because he knows that they contribute to the advancement of science; the naturalists whose views I dispute will not bear me any ill-will, and this is not the first time that they will pardon me for being a recalcitrant microbe.
The philosophers who teach that the universe is both infinite and homogeneous resemble microbes who think that their cell is the universe. Let us imagine the microbes in a particle of rust attempting to reason on the life of iron according to their own observations. For them, the world is a bit of iron attacked by oxygen. There is nothing else in nature. All their science leads them to conclude that the universe is made of iron. If they could have any vague notion about the existence of grass, insects, men, the sun, Jupiter or Sirius, they would be firmly convinced that they were all made of iron. If, in their particle of rust, they had observed the movements of translation and rotation in the constituent atoms of iron and could have risen to astronomical notions beyond their sphere, they would conclude that the other planetary systems are also made of iron and that none but iron-dwellers can exist. If we suppose that not only our own solar system but our visible universe and the other universes which succeed each other without end in the depths of infinite space are all constructed on the same zoological plan, we reason like these microbes.
Since the publication, a long time ago (1862), of my first work, entitled The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, in which I expounded and discussed the conditions of habitability of the planets of our system as known, to science at the time of publication, several astronomers and philosophers have taken up the same question of the different aspects. Among these studies there is one which seems particularly worthy of attention, recently written by Professor Scheiner, Director of the Potsdam Observatory. I here offer my readers a condensed translation, asking them to excuse the Germanisms which render the style a little rough. But however bitter the rind, the fruit is good.
GENERAL REMARKS
“The aspect of the starry heavens during a clear and calm night gives a joy which only superior souls can feel. In the bosom of the general silence of nature and in the calm of all our senses our immortal soul whispers an undefinable language and forms conceptions which are difficult to express. If among the thinking beings of our planet there are vulgar spirits which remain slaves to vanity, this globe is to be pitied for having given birth to such creatures, but its value is enhanced by bearing on its surface intelligences capable of rising to the highest contemplations of the spectacle of nature.”