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The Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of Other Solar Systems  by Sylvia Engdahl (1974) ~ Page 7 of 8 |
Chapter Six
(Please read the Introduction
if you haven't yet seen it.)Many factors may have contributed to the decline of belief in extrasolar worlds, but not all can be positively identified. The scientific issues are easiest to define. In the first place, the 1870s marked a shift in scientific interests. Something happened that made astronomers—and also laymen who were enthusiastic about astronomy—forget other solar systems to concentrate on ours. The planet Mars was in an unusually favorable position for observation in 1877, and in that year the famous “canals” were seen. The man who observed them, an Italian, used the word canali, which means simply “grooves” or “channels,” but English-speaking people quickly adopted the word “canals” with its unmistakable implication of an engineering feat of intelligent beings. Naturally, the supposition of a nearby, visible extraterrestrial civilization far outshone conjectures about distant, invisible ones. The controversy continued for many years. Not all observers could see the markings, and not all scientists thought that they were artificial even when they did see them. Still, the attention of those concerned about plurality of worlds was thoroughly occupied.
Another reason astronomers began to lose interest in extrasolar worlds was their increasing knowledge of conditions on our own solar system’s planets. This knowledge, combined with growing knowledge of biology, tended to discourage the idea that all planets were habitable—although many still maintained that forms of life unlike Earth’s might exist in alien environments. Moreover, it led to a feeling that declarations not based on solid evidence were unjustified.
That, of course, was exactly what William Whewell had insisted long before. Before, however, there had been little more evidence about the observable planets than about invisible ones. This was no longer true. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century science of all types had become so excited by its recent discoveries that it held there could be few discoveries left to make. The prevalent opinion was that all that could ever be known was already known, and that nothing remained but to fill in details. In medieval times there had been a similar reaction to Aristotelian science; just as had happened then, people turned away from the thought of a realm beyond the knowable.
In 1882 the American astronomer Simon Newcomb, in a book called Popular Astronomy, wrote: “Many thinking people regard the discovery of evidences of life in other worlds as the great ultimate object of telescopic research. It is, therefore, extremely disappointing to learn that the attainment of any direct evidence of such life seems entirely hopeless—so hopeless, indeed, that it has almost ceased to occupy the attention of astronomers. The spirit of modern science is wholly adverse to speculation on questions for the solution of which no scientific evidence is attainable.”
In Newcomb’s case, this simply introduced speculation of his own. He himself was willing to state in conclusion, “The probabilities are in favor of only a very small fraction of the planets being peopled with intelligent beings. But when we reflect that the possible number of the planets is counted by hundreds of millions, this small fraction may be really a very large number, and among this number many may be peopled by beings much higher than ourselves in the intellectual scale.” That, like some of Richard Proctor’s statements, could as well have been said today as nearly a hundred years ago. However, reluctance of professional astronomers to give opinions was common during most of the interval.
One major cause of this was that astronomers, like other scientists, stopped explaining their theories in religious terms. Always before, when they lacked observational data, scientists had not hesitated to discuss religion. There had been no distinction between “science” and “natural philosophy;” the word “scientist” had not even existed until William Whewell invented it in 1840. But near the end of the nineteenth century science became fully established as a limited field kept separate from other forms of theorizing.
Experimental and observational science had no need to rely on religious arguments; but the part of “natural philosophy” concerned with plurality of worlds could not employ experimental methods. Observation yielded certain results—especially after the invention of the spectroscope proved that the stars were composed of the same elements as the sun—but it could not give an answer to the question of whether extraterrestrial life did or did not exist. That question had always lain in the province of religion for the very reason that it was unanswerable.
Though like all religious questions, the issue of other worlds had involved controversy, there had been one thing everyone agreed about: the principle of purpose. Nobody had thought of questioning whether such worlds had a purpose; only a few had ventured to suggest that their purpose might be impossible to determine. By and large, it had been believed that the obvious purpose of a planet was to provide a home for inhabitants. But in the late nineteenth century this argument for habitation was abandoned. Scientists abandoned it because of the newly drawn line between science and religion. People in general abandoned it because they were beginning to doubt the whole idea of a purposeful universe.
Back in 1855, the Oxford professor who reviewed William Whewell’s book on the plurality of worlds had made a prophetic remark. He had said, “If the planets are not made for inhabitants, since some of them are of no use to us, and are not likely to be of any, it appears that there are things created without any use at all. And this is a dangerous element to admit upon so large a scale into our calculation of the evidence for design.”
Like earlier writers, Whewell’s opponents had argued with great vehemence in their effort to avoid this danger. It had not been considered an exclusively religious matter then. As one American magazine put it, “Common-sense, popular instinct, so believes to-day, from its undoubting creed, that all things exist for USE.” Whewell himself had never denied that; he had merely maintained that not all purposes were known. To the science of his time, which was based on the assumption that the universe was well-designed, the thought of things “without any use at all” did indeed seem dangerous.
This danger was a real one, though like all dangers accompanying the advance of human knowledge, it was unavoidable. The progress of science revealed many things that existed without apparent purpose. For instance, theories of organic evolution revealed that some forms of life exist briefly but lack the ability to survive. These theories were also linked with ideas of randomness and of probability expressed in statistical terms. Such concepts were foreign to the mid-century mind, and disturbing to many people who found them in later decades’ discussions about the likelihood of intelligent life on extrasolar planets. It became more and more evident that the moon was not habitable, and there was no assurance that supposedly younger planets in our own system ever would be. Mars offered hope, yet even if Mars were inhabited, some “wasted worlds” would remain.
Richard Proctor, one of the last professional astronomers to consider the question of purpose relevant, wrote, “Recognizing in our own world, in many instances, what to our ideas resembles waste—waste seeds, waste lives . . . waste regions, waste forces—recognizing superfluity and superabundance in all the processes and in all the works of nature, should it not appear at least possible that some, perhaps even a large proportion, of the worlds in the multitudinous systems peopling space, are not only not now supporting life, but never have supported life and never will? . . . May not we without irreverence conceive (as higher beings than ourselves may know) that a planet or a sun may fail in the making?”
It is not possible to say just what role people’s attitudes toward plurality of worlds played in twentieth-century society’s skepticism toward pattern and purpose in the universe. The change was partly a result of such skepticism—but also, perhaps, a partial cause. When people have been told for two hundred years that a cosmos full of perfectly ordered solar systems is evidence of the wisdom of its design, they do not like to hear about planets and suns having failed in the making.
Proctor, unlike many, went on to say that even in the case of “failures” there might be uses he and his contemporaries were unable to conceive. And that, of course, was true. The issue is not a dead one. Proof that it is not can be seen in the following words of Sir David Brewster, who in trying to refute one of William Whewell’s arguments made a point he could never have imagined. Whewell compared planets to islands, saying that if people who lived on one island had never traveled to any others, they could not reasonably assume that the others were inhabited, or that it was an indication of poor design for them to be left uninhabited. Sir David replied: “We know of hundreds of islands without inhabitants. We can assign also a very good reason why they were made, and why they are not inhabited, and if we were to be assured of the fact, it would excite no surprise whatever. We could not say that God therefore made them in vain, because when the art of navigation is discovered, they may be found to contain gold and silver, coal and iron, and excellent harbours.”
Now that the art of space navigation has been discovered—and a means of interstellar travel, though not discovered, is at least within man’s conception—the idea of “wasted” worlds is no longer a valid argument against universal purpose. Many people today, whether they believe in a Creator or not, believe that uninhabited planets will provide rich resources and, eventually, “excellent harbours” for emigrants from this overcrowded island world.
Just after the turn of the century, in 1903, another book appeared that challenged the idea of other inhabited worlds. It presented too extreme a view to gain wide acceptance, but it impressed people because of the reputation of its author. He was Alfred Russel Wallace, a famous naturalist who had developed theories related to Darwin’s. When he wrote Man’s Place in the Universe he was eighty years old. The magazine Scientific American said, “When Dr. Wallace asserts that our earth is the sole abode of life in the universe . . . one school claims that he is old and in his dotage; the other, that he has become wise in his old age.”
Dr. Wallace’s opinion was much the same as Dr. Whewell’s had been fifty years before, although his arguments were different because of the progress of science during these years, and also because he did not base them on religion. “The old idea that all the planets were inhabited, and that all the stars existed for the sake of other planets, which planets existed to develop life, would, in the light of our present knowledge, seem utterly improbable and incredible,” he wrote. He maintained that Earth was probably “the only inhabited planet, not only in the Solar System but in the whole stellar universe.”
Though Alfred Wallace claimed that this was the logical result of the latest astronomical theories, most astronomers did not agree with him. His views were “received with general surprise and considerable disfavor,” for he attempted to prove that Earth really was in the physical center of the universe after all—that is, that Earth’s solar system was. He held that only in the approximate center could conditions be right for intelligent life to evolve, a theory for which he had no evidence. There was no wide concurrence that our sun was as close to the middle of the universe as he thought, or that it would stay there long even if it were.
As usual, however, readers got sidetracked by the matter of life on the other planets within our solar system, an issue that Dr. Wallace, as an authority on organic evolution, was better qualified to discuss. He pointed out reasons why they were not only uninhabited at present, but could never become inhabited. Although by no means everyone accepted his conclusion, the trend of scientific progress was in its favor. And on the whole, people who were attracted by the thought of beings on other worlds wanted to envision them on the nearby ones; evidence against that was discouraging to them. This may have led some to go along with Wallace when he said, “It may, and I believe will, turn out, that of all the myriad stars, the more we learn about them, the smaller and smaller will become the scanty residue which, with any probability, we can suppose to illuminate and vivify habitable earths. And when with this scanty probability we combine the still scantier probability that any such planet will possess simultaneously, and for a sufficiently long period, all the highly complex and delicately balanced conditions known to be essential for a full life-development, the conception that on this earth alone has such development been completed will not seem so wildly improbable a conjecture as it has hitherto been held to be.”
There was resistance to such pronouncements even among those who accepted them. “We must make the best of it, even if we are doomed to undergo the worst of it,” wrote one reviewer. “It must be said, however, that this book . . . is not a cheerful message, and we could wish it had been briefer. As one reads along its clear pages, and between the lines finds not only the doom of mankind, but the universe vacant of life . . . one asks why the proof is piled so high . . . So intolerable is the despair that settles upon us that we instinctively protest against Mr. Wallace’s limitation within the Milky Way, and assert that every system, in its evolutionary process, must produce a planet that repeats every physical and human phase of our own. A planet may die, but a lifeless universe!— ‘that way madness lies.’”
The idea that suns change, and planets do become unable to support life, had been discussed for some time; during the early twentieth century it became a basic part of people’s thinking about astronomy. The prospect of doom for our solar system was, of course, a distant one—millions of years in the future—that nobody actually worried about. Yet combined with the increasing reluctance of scientists to affirm the existence of better and happier civilizations in other systems, its implications were definitely not cheerful.
Most astronomers continued to state that extrasolar worlds probably existed, though they felt, more and more, that not all stars were accompanied by them. A 1903 article in Popular Astronomy declared: “It is unreasonable and illogical to say that matter operated upon by a universal law will produce results that are substantially different. . . Assuming for the average of all other suns visible in the universe but one dark body each, and the result will be to people space with a hundred million other planets. It is equally unreasonable and illogical to say that not one of that mighty array, in the process of its physical development, has produced a single instance of germ life. Let us rather nourish the belief, the hope, that there are other eyes than ours to view the splendors of this universe, other intellects to grapple with its profound problems, other hearts to pulsate and joy under the kindly influences of love.”
That was still the orthodox opinion at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a lecture for children given at Christmas of 1913, a professor of astronomy from Oxford University said, “All the thousands of millions of stars in the sky may be suns like ours, and each of them may have many planets circling round it as we circle the sun, and yet Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace sincerely believes that there is not a sign of life on one of them!”
The professor was talking to the children about life on Mars; he said there was evidence on both sides of the question and he had not made up his mind about it. “At least I have not made it up about Mars,” he continued. “On the big question raised by Mr. Wallace, whether our little Earth is the only place for life, I have made it up; I don’t think for a moment that it is. I have read his book carefully, but cannot see that he makes out a case for so strange an idea. That there is plenty of life elsewhere seems to me practically certain.”
But major changes were beginning to shake the realm of science. Its neat, orderly mechanical cosmos had been upset in the late nineteenth century by the concept of evolution. More recently, concepts of a still more startling kind had been introduced. Newton’s laws had been found not to embody the last word on the structure of the universe; the theory of relativity had revolutionized the field of physics. Soon to come was something called the Uncertainty Principle, which, though connected with atoms rather than cosmology, had the effect its name suggests.
Science no longer assumed that there was nothing knowable left to determine. Nor was it at all sure what was knowable. Only things that could be verified seemed worth studying. Astronomers built more powerful telescopes and found new techniques of observation, through which they were able to gain a great deal of information about stars and galaxies. They could gain no more information about planets. So speculation about planets was, for the most part, abandoned.
One question concerning planets did receive attention, however, and that was the problem of their origin. From the late eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, the nebular hypothesis of planetary formation had been generally accepted by science. According to that theory, solar systems were formed when gaseous nebulae condensed. But there were mathematical difficulties with the nebular hypothesis. In the early twentieth century increased knowledge made it impossible to ignore those difficulties, and a new theory was developed. The new theory declared that planets were formed only when two stars passed very close to each other, so close that matter was pulled out of one sun by gravitational tides. It was calculated that such an event could occur in our galaxy no more frequently than about once in five thousand million years.
This calculation, which “proved” planetary systems to be extremely rare, was based upon the laws of chance. Planets had previously been thought to come into being as a normal step in the development of stars. That idea was given up; it seemed self-evident that they were the result of unlikely accidents. Stars were obviously too far apart to have near-collisions very often. At least once, someone suggested that the meeting of two stars might not be a chance occurrence, but there was no evidence for thinking it was anything else. The only grounds for such a belief were those associated with purpose, and discussion of purpose had become—as one writer put it—“largely taboo in science to-day.”
Though such discussion was no longer within the scope of science, no more revealing methods had yet replaced it. And “chance” was a convenient explanation for anything that could not be explained by scientists’ current theories. Biologists as well as astronomers asserted that the chance of intelligent life having evolved elsewhere was so slight as to be almost negligible. They did not know the origin of life. Some tried to explain it by saying that living spores were carried from one planet to another by meteorites, or that such spores simply came out of space; but the assumptions this theory demanded were debatable. Moreover, it merely put the problem back a stage, for how had the living spores originally come to be? Many concluded that the evolution of life on a world was wholly accidental. Sometimes the word “freak” was used.
The theory that planets were produced by the near approach of two stars was the accepted one in astronomy from the first decade of the twentieth century until about the time the Second World War ended. The statistical probability of there being planets circling any given star was therefore judged to be slight. That alone, however, was not enough to account for the decline of belief in existence of other solar systems. All the astronomers who wrote about the subject admitted that in view of the millions of stars in our galaxy, and the countless other galaxies in the cosmos, statistics made plain that there must be a great many planetary systems despite the supposed infrequency of their formation. In 1939 the magazine Scientific Monthly said: “The question, you will note, centers upon the probable number of planetary systems per million or billion of suns rather than upon the likelihood that our particular system has no near-counterpart in space. Most astronomers to-day are inclined to think that a planetary family is a comparatively rare phenomenon in space; but probably no one would make the statement stronger than that. Certainly the whole burden of proof would rest upon the rash theorist who would make our solar system unique in the universe.”
Yet several well-known astronomers had already made their statements about the rarity of planets stronger—at least, they had given the idea a stronger impact in their writings. For this among other reasons, the majority of people discounted the number of solar systems still thought probable; they were overwhelmed by the huge proportion of stars considered planetless. Such a reaction seems to have been shared by scientists themselves.
A factor in this may have been that they felt disillusioned, and perhaps a bit sheepish, on account of the failure to discover any intelligent life on Mars. From the time of the first observation of the so-called “canals” until the close approach of Mars in 1924, some had great hopes of really finding evidence of Martians. When no evidence appeared, they turned away from the thought of extraterrestrial life altogether, though there were no real grounds for doing so on that basis. “The little planet Mars is seen to have been given undue significance,” the Scientific Monthly article went on. “It seems to have life, but if this is a mistake, it doesn’t much matter after all . . . If Mars is as dead as the proverbial doornail, we can still look outward with confidence that blind chemical forces have not cast us up as living accidents on the huge dead banks of eternity. Somewhere in space are many, many fellow-travelers on the brief but hopeful trek of life.”
Nevertheless, hope was not a fashionable outlook at that time. The nineteenth century had been a predominantly optimistic period, but during the first half of the twentieth, there were disillusionments far worse than those connected with Mars. The First World War and the Depression did not leave people in a hopeful frame of mind. It was common for the universe to be thought unfriendly, and the views emphasized by the most popular scientific writers were grim.
In the seventeenth century, also a time of upheaval, people had believed that the earth was slowly but surely decaying. In the early twentieth century a great deal was said about “heat death,” or the ultimate “running down” of the universe as a result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. “A running-down universe—a universe inevitably and irrevocably deteriorating and we men as utterly insignificant in comparison with its immensities and hopelessly impotent to stay the impending doom—it is of such a universe that we form a picture in our minds as we read the latest pronouncements of astronomy,” declared one magazine.
This, like the seventeenth-century belief in decay, may have something in common with today’s fears about Earth being permanently ruined by pollution. Science cannot predict the future; it can only form theories based on the facts at hand. During eras of change and discouraging problems, pessimistic theories have generally spread more widely than optimistic ones.
Among the originators of the theory that planets form only after a close encounter between two stars was the eminent astronomer Sir James Jeans. He had a high reputation as a scientist, but he was best known to the general public as the author of best-selling books for laymen. The science in his books was accurate, although it is now outdated. But the impression people got from them was less accurate. Sir James presented personal feelings along with information, and readers did not always distinguish between these feelings and proven scientific facts. “Above all else, we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own,” James Jeans wrote. “Perhaps indeed we ought to say it appears to be actively hostile to life . . . Into such a universe we have stumbled, if not exactly by mistake, at least as the result of what may properly be described as an accident.” Since on the pages immediately following, he went on to discuss the rarity of planets in scientific terms, many people naturally assumed that the first statement represented the official opinion of scientists.
The books and articles of James Jeans were full of phrases like, “We, the only thinking beings, so far as we know, in the whole of space,” and “At the best, life must be limited to a tiny fraction of the universe.” Nor was he the only notable astronomer to make such statements. Sir Arthur Eddington, another distinguished scientist who wrote for the general public, said in a 1928 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “If the planets of the solar system should fail us, there remain some thousands of millions of stars which we have been accustomed to regard as suns ruling attendant systems of planets. It has seemed a presumption, bordering almost on impiety, to deny them life of the same order of creation as ourselves. It would indeed be rash to assume that nowhere else has Nature repeated the strange experiment which she has performed on the earth. But there are considerations which must hold us back from populating the universe too liberally . . .
“The solar system is not the typical product of development of a star; it is not even a common variety of development; it is a freak . . . I do not think that the whole purpose of the Creation has been staked on the one planet where we live; and in the long run we cannot deem ourselves the only race that has been or will be gifted with the mystery of consciousness. But I feel inclined to claim that at the present time our race is supreme; and not one of the profusion of stars in their myriad clusters looks down on scenes comparable to those which are passing beneath the rays of the sun.”
He “felt inclined to claim” earth’s supremacy; he made no claim that scientific evidence demanded such a view. Yet from the 1920s until quite recently, that was the view that predominated.
Nevertheless, proof that many qualified astronomers continued to assume sentient life must exist beyond our solar system can be found in scientific journals of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in the earlier ones. In 1921, for example, a debate was carried on in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There were letters to the editor on both sides of the question, but even the most vehement opponents of extrasolar life maintained only that no evidence for it had been obtained. They did not say that the existence of any inhabited planets besides Earth was improbable.
The general public, however, did not read scientific journals. It may be that there were people who did not like to express their opinions for fear of being thought “unscientific.” They may have heard the statements of men like Sir James Jeans second or third hand, and missed the statistics that showed our solar system was considered a rare phenomenon rather than a unique one.
Certainly there was public interest in plurality of worlds during the period when the idea lacked general scientific support. That may have been part of the problem. Among the most ardent defenders of extrasolar life, once scientists stopped committing themselves to unprovable details, were people interested in spiritualism and extrasensory perception: areas that in the early twentieth century had no scientific approval at all. In the popular mind, “guilt by association” may have reduced plurality of worlds to the same category. It came to be viewed as a subject fascinating for fiction, but not quite respectable if taken seriously—as some tend to view it even now.
Therefore, far fewer respected writers published nonfiction about other solar systems than had done so in previous eras. One was the French author Camille Flammarion [pictured above], who wrote many such books in the last decades of the nineteenth century but also some in the twentieth. He was an extreme enthusiast who believed passionately in innumerable worlds and described their environments in somewhat more detail than was wise from the scientific standpoint, especially the many-colored suns—but the public loved his work. It was widely read and some was translated into English.
Another European speculator about extrasolar worlds was Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote serious nonfiction but is now best known to the public as the author of The Blue Bird. Maeterlinck discussed superior civilizations in several essays. He felt that beings far in advance of man must surely possess the ability to become disembodied spirits in order to travel from world to world, and he was convinced that any such being who came to Earth and observed the suffering of its people would do something about it. “Having for centuries surpassed what our medical science has not yet even begun to discover, he knows all the sovereign remedies,” Maeterlinck declared, “and he has only to say a word in order to abolish all these torments . . . If we were in his place, should we hesitate a moment?” Then, pointing out that no intervention from another world ever had abolished suffering on this planet, he asked despairingly, “Is there not reason to fear that we are for ever alone in the universe, and that no other world has ever been more intelligent or better than our own?”
These are legitimate questions, and timely ones. They are being asked today by those who envision travel by means of starships as well as by believers in disembodied spirits, and are also being raised in scientific discussions of interstellar communication. There are many possible answers. Maeterlinck himself, in a later essay, said that maybe ancient intervention had indeed occurred, or that spiritual radiations, similar to the physical ones science had discovered, might pass between planets through space. In regard to why suffering on Earth had not been abolished, he concluded, “And even if one of these stars had attained the goal for which we strive, had at last learned all: the laws, the origin, the aim of the universe, the idea that underlies it; what could such a star do, what could we do, were we in its place? Can knowledge of what the laws are bring with it the power to change them? . . . Would victory over time and space give mastery over what inspired them, give the power to modify, the power to change? Perhaps; but then we should be like unto the God whom we glimpse through the semblance of things; and what He has been unable or unwilling to do, we should not do either.”
Others besides Maeterlinck proposed theories of “spiritual radiation,” which was conceived as something like ESP. Prior to the Second World War the idea of physical contacts among solar systems was confined almost exclusively to fiction. Near the end of the nineteenth century there was talk about communication by signals with Martians, but interstellar communication did not enter anyone’s mind. Though travel by spaceship within our solar system began to receive serious attention in the 1920s, only a minority considered it more than a dream inspired by science fiction voyages to the moon and Mars; and physical journeys from system to system were seldom even imagined.
One of the first men to look upon such journeys as feasible was the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who speculated about space travel both in technical articles and in stories that were less fiction than lectures put into the mouths of fictional characters. Tsiolkovsky began writing in the 1890s, though much of what he wrote was not published until later. He believed not only that other habitable solar systems exist, but that man will someday colonize them. He also suggested that the populations of different solar systems unite, and assist each other in migrating when their suns explode or become extinguished. “Is it conceivable for one apple-tree in the infinite orchard of the Universe to bear fruit, while innumerable other trees have nothing but foliage?” Tsiolkovsky wrote. “Spectral analysis indicates that the substances of the Universe are the same as those of the Earth. Life also extends throughout the Universe . . . All the phases in the development of living beings can be seen on the different planets. What humanity was like several thousand years ago and what it will be like in a few million years—all this according to the theory of probability can be found in the planetary world.” And he also said, “We are . . . compelled to take up the struggle against gravity, and for the utilisation of celestial space and all its wealth because of the overpopulation of our planet.”
The American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard thought seriously about travel to extrasolar worlds too, although his speculations on that subject were never published. In 1918 he wrote a manuscript entitled “The Last Migration,” which he enclosed within an envelope bearing a different label and placed in a friend’s safe. Describing this manuscript later, he referred to its suggestions—some of which concerned expeditions “into the regions of thickly distributed stars”—as “extreme.” Evidently he considered them too extreme to be made public; and in fact on the inner envelope he indicated that the contents should be read “only by an optimist.”
Optimism was indeed required by those who gave attention to extrasolar planets in Goddard’s time. The thought of forever-unreachable worlds was more frustrating than it had been when people had not expected science to solve all questions, and had commonly assumed that souls might visit those worlds after death. While exceptional men like Tsiolkovsky and Goddard envisioned eventual interstellar voyages, that vision was not shared by many; no conceivable channel of contact between solar systems was endorsed by science. Speculation about other worlds seemed futile.
All the same, at least some people held to the view expressed in a 1901
issue of The Spectator: “There is a growth in man’s mental
power, slow as it is, and a generation may come, and that speedily, which
realizes the greatness of [the] universe as fully as some now realize that
of the solar system . . . The sense of vastness should be, and is, a
stimulant . . . Ours is a poor little planet, and we are probably low down
in the hierarchy of sentient beings, but we are part of a mighty federation,
and we may rise—we may rise.”
Lots more that I have written, or collected, about space! |
Conclusion
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