That sixty miles an hour is a very great speed any one, I think, will admit who has stood upon the platform of a country station while one of the great mail trains has dashed past. But are not the immensities of space appalling to contemplate, when one realises that a body moving incessantly at such a rate would take so long as 10,000 years to traverse merely the breadth of our solar system? Ten thousand years! Just try to conceive it. Why, it is only a little more than half that time since the Pyramids were built, and they mark for us the Dawn of History. And since then half-a-dozen mighty empires have come and gone!
Having thus concluded our general survey of the appearance and dimensions of the solar system, let us next inquire into its position and size in relation to what we call the Universe.
A mere glance at the night sky, when it is free from clouds, shows us that in every direction there are stars; and this holds good, no matter what portion of the globe we visit. The same is really true of the sky by day, though in that case we cannot actually see the stars, for their light is quite overpowered by the dazzling light of the sun.
We thus reach the conclusion that our earth, that our solar system in fact, lies plunged within the midst of a great tangle of stars. What position, by the way, do we occupy in this mighty maze? Are we at the centre, or anywhere near the centre, or where?
It has been indeed amply proved by astronomical research that the stars are bodies giving off a light of their own, just as our sun does; that they are in fact suns, and that our sun is merely one, perhaps indeed a very unimportant member, of this great universe of stars. Each of these stars, or suns, besides, may be the centre of a system similar to what we call our solar system, comprising planets and satellites, comets and meteors;—or perchance indeed some further variety of attendant bodies of which we have no example in our tiny corner of space. But as to whether one is right in a conjecture of this kind, there is up to the present no proof whatever. No telescope has yet shown a planet in attendance upon one of these distant suns; for such bodies, even if they do exist, are entirely out of the range of our mightiest instruments. On what then can we ground such an assumption? Merely upon analogy; upon the common-sense deduction that as the stars have characteristics similar to our particular star, the sun, it would seem unlikely that ours should be the only such body in the whole of space which is attended by a planetary system.
"The Stars," using that expression in its most general sense, do not lie at one fixed distance from us, set here and there upon a background of sky. There is in fact no background at all. The brilliant orbs are all around us in space, at different distances from us and from each other; and we can gaze between them out into the blackness of the void which, perhaps, continues to extend unceasingly long after the very outposts of the stellar universe has been left behind. Shall we then start our imaginary express train once more, and send it out towards the nearest of the stars? This would, however, be a useless experiment. Our express-train method of gauging space would fail miserably in the attempt to bring home to us the mighty gulf by which we are now faced. Let us therefore halt for a moment and look back upon the orders of distance with which we have been dealing. First of all we dealt with thousands of miles. Next we saw how they shrank into insignificance when we embarked upon millions. We found, indeed, that our sixty-mile-an-hour train, rushing along without ceasing, would consume nearly the whole of historical time in a journey from the sun to Neptune.
In the spaces beyond the solar system we are faced, however, by a new order of distance. From sun to planets is measured in millions of miles, but from sun to sun is measured in billions. But does the mere stating of this fact convey anything? I fear not. For the word "billion" runs as glibly off the tongue as "million," and both are so wholly unrealisable by us that the actual difference between them might easily pass unnoticed.
Let us, however, make a careful comparison. What is a million? It is a thousand thousands. But what is a billion? It is a million millions. Consider for a moment! A million of millions. That means a million, each unit of which is again a million. In fact every separate "1" in this million is itself a million. Here is a way of trying to realise this gigantic number. A million seconds make only eleven and a half days and nights. But a billion seconds will make actually more than thirty thousand years!
Having accepted this, let us try and probe with our express train even a little of the new gulf which now lies before us. At our old rate of going it took almost two years to cover a million miles. To cover a billion miles—that is to say, a million times this distance—would thus take of course nearly two million years. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our earth, is some twenty-five billions of miles away. Our express train would thus take about fifty millions of years to reach it!
This shows how useless our illustration, appropriate though it seemed for interplanetary space, becomes when applied to the interstellar spaces. It merely gives us millions in return for billions; and so the mind, driven in upon itself, whirls round and round like a squirrel in its revolving cage. There is, however, a useful illustration still left us, and it is the one which astronomers usually employ in dealing with the distances of the stars. The illustration in question is taken from the velocity of light.