Which First?
End of the World has so far been used indifferently to mean the end of mankind and the end of this globe he inhabits. The two are not the same, and except in a case like head-on collision, planet and people vanishing in vapour together, will not be simultaneous.
Either man will predecease his home. One of the great climatic climacteric disasters will suffice to destroy him while hardly more than ruffling the earth’s surface; or quite other factors, of a kind different from any yet alluded to, may, in conjunction with or independently of natural change, sweep life but not earth away.
Or, in certain strange circumstances, the race may outlive the world.
Man
Of Comet’s unlikely chances, those least unlikely—his chances of scorching, poisoning, flooding—are fatal only to life; the mass of him, arguable from comets known, could scarcely demolish the planet. Water or Drought, in drowning or desiccating her inhabitants, will leave the round earth, if discoloured a little for lunar and Martian eyes, all-unperturbed in her course. If Cold for man, Crash for matter, the interval between the end of the world in the one sense and the end of the world in the other is the interval between the millions of years for the sun’s cooling to life’s death-point and the quintillions, ere he encounter some galactic brother, for his crashing to his own.
Whichever the way, Earth’s journey with living passengers is like to be much shorter than her time as a tomb. Even though, through abrupt increase of our sun or premature grazing by some other, the interlude between the two destructions were less than in the likelier instances, it would still be considerable. Literal simultaneousness, crew and the ship down together, is one chance in Brahmanic zeros.
Man going need not mean all life going. Flood will not finish the fishes. Earth has her salamanders if it is Fire; aside from those microbes who riot and revel in the boiling point of water, what mere lizard will not outlive us? She has her parasites who dote on congelation, if it be the Cold; with polar moss and lichen to outstay the last tarrying bacillus. Yet those who could survive us (and most will succumb sooner) would survive for a space so short that here it will be ignored altogether, and human extinction held to imply and include the extinction of every living thing. Both will occur when the Chosen Way imposes them—if not sooner.
Will it be sooner? Without harm from the heavens, will the race fail? Shall we go, without compulsion from outside nature, before we must?
There are borderline cases. Astronomy, returning to the paths of her stepmother astrology, might cast a fatal horoscope; the sun, entering not this sign of the zodiac or that, but some field of unknown matter, could so transform the quality of his radiation as subtly, secretly, to kill the germ-plasm; we should die without will-to-live, without voice or knowledge to call Traitor to the skies. A slight axial shifting could unhinge and convulse the seasons. Then, even as that change in conditions that was the white man’s advent did silently and mysteriously, and more potently than his smallpox or syphilis or gin, deprive red men in North America and brown men in Southern Seas of their impulse to continue, so the advent of changed climate could, without slaughter spectacular, discourage men white and yellow and black, dash their virility, deprive them of all desire of duration.
Exclude such hybrid hypotheses, rule out every reason obliquely astronomical-geological. Will man, left to himself, to his resources biological-psychological, live as long as the earth’s conditions, left to themselves, permit him to?
Facts are here outnumbered by fancies, more fanciful than those of the stargazers or million-mumblers. We know even less of our own nature than of the mystical nature of Number; of our own bodies than of the heavenly; or where they come from, or whither they go. The time element, a large difficulty when treating of suns and planets, becomes a fatal one when seeking to prognosticate for men, who obey less known laws and move at less mensurable speeds, who need smaller time for bigger changes, whose souls elude the clock. The direction factor fails also. The earth’s, and the sun’s tolerably, are known. Man’s, if he has one, is not.
Shall we perish before we must? No answer is available; only strange contending prophecies, sharp rival conjecturalities. …
The race grows ever stronger and more viable.
Physically. With better and more regular food, better and less hostile conditions of every kind, the stamina of the species is constantly improving. Disease is being conquered; one cruel malady after another has been driven from the body, and those still resisting will be broken. In the foulest slum-tenements of this Gilded Age fewer babies now die than in king’s houses three centuries ago—what then of the Golden Age, slumless, soon to follow, when all houses shall be royal, and in none of them, as now, infanticide practised? Nor parricide: the old will live to be older, and happier and healthier and usefuller in their age; the generations will overlap for longer, strengthening the forward rhythm of human continuity. Long ago we got rid of tails, brutish foreheads, simian jaws; next, our absurd hands and feet and genitals, inadequate instruments of infinite yearnings in art and movement and love, in their turn will go or be transmuted. Whatever the future of eugenics, natality controlled and perfected not by blind instinct but by instinct and intellect working wide-eyed together, it will be better than its past. It has no past. Even without it, we’ve come far. When the creature of Piltdown shambled through the Sussex jungles, tiger was no less tiger than today, and the orangutan and the gibbon, who since have learnt no more, had learnt already to stand upright. While they ever since have marked time, the human average of health, beauty and functional fitness has marched on to where we now stand, upright in body and soul, beholding them face to face to love our women, looking no more at the ground but at the sky to know our world. Because conscious, future progress will be swifter, in half the time covering double the distance between Piltdown and Nineteen-Thirty; thence running forward on a swift straight track unto the goal, triune and shining, of perfect health, perfect strength and perfect beauty.
Intellectually. It is a demonstrable, measurable fact that man’s brain, instrument and symbol of his superiority over his animal forebears and contemporaries, has grown and is growing in size, complexity, adaptability. In power and promise of power it has outdistanced the brain of every other creature and every other organ of man’s own. By it he increases his stock of knowledge and his capacity to hold and use it, his individual memory and the race memory, his personal intelligence and all the people’s. Since the anthropoid parting—nay before—intellect has been curbing instinct, canalizing it, transfiguring it. Inventors, innovators have appeared, challenging the rigidity of ignorant, immovable custom; men with more brain than their fellows, whose brain-average moves at last upward to theirs; great men—and there were no great monkeys. Through great men the race grows greater; as it grows greater, the proportion of great men grows also. The good movement gathers momentum. If the peaks of intelligence are higher, much more so, in comparison, the plains. If civilization levels, it levels up. And when at last the chemical causes of cerebral energy are fully understood, and the brain can be improved at will, then the rate of intellectual augmentation will soar swiftly, and in a few centuries, years, hours—what is time?—carry the race far skyward. Ye shall be as gods.
Morally. Make every admission of present ugliness and evil; how much uglier and eviller the past! Are not the high ideals man today can aspire to, the fair deeds he is capable of, beyond any his forest forebears knew? Who can gainsay that, once beholden, the vision of the beauty of holiness has been driving Satan steadily back; that, through Christ’s example and sacrifice, goodness and mercy have ever since, however slowly, been gaining ground—as, on His death-night, assassins everywhere trembled; as, on His birth-night, every sodomite throughout the world was suddenly cut off? Who can deny that more hopefully than in jungle days, or Jurassic days, the balance between good and evil, happiness and suffering, now tilts? Compare the red tooth and claw of the grey twilight with the warming kindness and comradeship of noonday; caveman culture with Christian civilization; Galilean Man with the Man of Galilee. Consider Tertiary ethics, the dinosaur comity of nightmare; consider the loveliness of poetry, of aspiration, of altruism—of Love—at their present loveliest. Only a fool or a knave or a traitor to humanity in its slow but glorious upward march can deny that the march is upwards.
And if so much has been done in the little time since men were upon the earth, what shall not be achieved in the unfolding aeons ahead? At the worst, our far-off descendants—our measureless superiors in bodily vigour and bodily cunning, in will and brain, in moral courage and moral worth, in gladness and grounds for gladness—will be able to postpone almost indefinitely the end, then radiantly to live the last ounce and instant that cosmic conditions permit; at the best, able to create cosmic conditions of their own which shall make temporal life eternal and human life divine. …
The race grows ever weaker and less viable.
Physically. That better and more regular food exists only in the imagination of those few (one in six, is it, of the earth’s inhabitants, or eight?) who have it also in their bellies; over the crawling plains of the East, over the swollen stone agglomerations of the West, famine and undernourishment gauntly reign, a monarchy almost absolute. Conditions of life, as each year life moves to the million-cities, get each year worse. Disease more than keeps pace with the doctors, who less than keep pace with the germs and the rats. Little babies, brought forth on bare garret floors in the starving cold and cruel squalor of twentieth century night, die faster than the rats or the germs. Biologically we are retrograde, and soon will be degenerate; our fur has gone, our hair is going, our toes are numbing and our teeth dropping out. The look of age is upon us; compared to the proud races of prehistory, we are a decaying, doddering stock. What biological progress have we marked this last ten thousand years? What shadow of a sign of any such progress is there? Physique may be improving among the well-to-do, numerically insignificant, nuptially sterile; stamina is declining in all classes. Civilization is sapping man’s vigour, blunting his senses, always reducing the scope for his endeavour. He no longer needs strong right arm nor mental resource, no longer need fend for himself; the tribe, the State, the super-State is his protector, his poisoner, according him cheap survival for an ever smaller expenditure of brain and brawn. State and faculty have joined their murderous hands. Medicine, while saving the individual, enfeebles the race; the proportion of weaklings is mounting like a tide of death. If Adam was not the largest man, nor all the old Rabbinical estimates true, nor only giants in the land in those days, nor all men more splendid—if, in deference to the dogma of the literal and inspired untruth of every word in the Bible and the legends, these things must be denied, what then of the Crô-Magnon fossils? Surely geology, which routed Genesis, surely geology must speak the truth? But behold those skeletons and ours. Confront the old Magdalenes and their frail sisters of today. Compare the vanishing Highlanders and advancing Keelies, the yeoman of Middlesex and their Cockney supplanters, the Romans and the Romans, the men of tribal Manhattan and tumescent New York. Beauty? Consider the lilies of the field.
Intellectually. Punier in body, above all in brain. It is a demonstrable measurable fact that the great primitive peoples had more grey matter than we; the brain of Crô-Magnon woman equals that of modern man, and is much larger than that of her voting daughters. Are we a higher type than the citizens of Periclean Athens—or than his slave? Art, poetry and music are corpses. Tools do our “manual” work for us; the hand is losing its cunning, and with it a rich area of the brain its cunning also. When tools for mental work soon appear, the brain’s brightest regions will follow little toe and little finger into atrophy. The mind that looks to chemical aid to improve itself will be beyond improvement; monkey tricks with monkey glands will not seat us on God’s throne. Birth control is reducing the proportion of the mentally fittest and, allied with the doctors, though for the moment they are its foes, will hasten the decline and the fall; hastened also, from all sides the bad movement gathering momentum, by the brain-wear and nerve-strain of the coming centuries of nightmare speed, noise and number. Card-index will not save, nor catalogue. Accumulated facts and pigeonholed experience are not intellectual progress; they weaken not strengthen the racial memory and mind. Wisdom Peak was in Palaeolithic. The downward slope will be peopled with madmen, and cretins, and ghosts.
Morally. If Buddha walked again on the Kapilavastu road, he would meet the same Four Signs of misery, now as then; and none caring, less now than then. That every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart is ever more evil continually, that the frost ahead like the flood before is due reward for a race unworthy to have lived, has not less witness to call than that pale doctrine of moral progress, whereby “good” is something positive and cumulative, growing in quality and quantity, whereby men are always better, relatively and absolutely, moving forwards and upwards—intrepid heavenly walkers—to heights of supernal worth by virtue whereof they shall have everlasting life. Where are they better? In which land of which sea? Not, assuredly, in the two great Messianic empires that today divide between them the adoration of the world—the tumbrils roll through Moscow, the death-pyres blaze through Texas. Assuredly not elsewhere: in which realm of which hemisphere holds not Inhumanity the sceptre of humanity, wears not Unrighteousness the crown royal? Look into all lands, and behold sorrow; look for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry. Than when are they better? Even our teachers are wavering; at last anthropology, turning from Tennyson to the truth, begins sulkily to allow that the common tradition of the race is right, that Arcadia long ago existed, that the Golden Age once was, that everywhere there is less liberty, less equality, less fraternity among the civilized nations of the present than among the uncivilized nations of the past, that every year, since in that fateful hour by the fruitful River civilization was first invented, injustice everywhere has waxed: from class to class, colour to colour, sex to sex, man to unbrothered man. Oppressions multiply, and on the side of the oppressors there is power. The spoilers shout for battle: 1914 outshone its predecessors, but will look dim beside its successors, now being made ready by patriotism run to paroxysm (fair pollen turned to foul poison), soon to triumph with the deadly formulae of electrochemistry and electrophysics instead of mere tomahawks and tanks, by and by to exterminate us altogether. Harlotry, crueller than of old, marks progress organizational, orgiastical, on the sporadic sexual injustice of earlier tribes; in greater ease and security men trample on the broken vessels of their pleasure; with sweeter joy of contrast women contemplate women less fortunate. Neo-Croesus, propped up by children’s skeletons, riding high upon the neck of the afflicted in luxury old shahs and satraps would have trembled at, blinks down on a world of antlike toil without the ant’s rewards, secure in his weapons of steel and starvation, parchment and parliament, there at his whim to crush those who cry out for bread. There is no wickedness or wretchedness in the long dolorous human past that is not outmatched by the wickedness and wretchedness of today; that, ever uglier against the new background of ethical pretence, shall not seem virtue and joy compared to the monstrous wickedness and wretchedness of tomorrow. Only a fool or a knave or a traitor to the truth can gainsay the doleful failure of humanity, its biological degeneracy into a type not capable, its moral degeneracy into a type not worthy of survival; its certainty to succumb, if to the evil in its body and heart it has not succumbed already, at the first advance signal from the sky.
From such shrill bandying of total prejudice, assertion and bland counter-assertion of progress or decay integral, small help is to be had.
The dourer optimists shift their ground. Life, they say, may not be in any clear sense on the upgrade, but it is the most adaptable thing in the universe. Plants have weathered the dank warmth of the Coal Age and the hard cold of the Ice Age; while pole has swung to equator and equator to pole, they have flourished like the bay tree or Arctic shrub, becoming deciduous or evergreen, evergreen or deciduous, as the fashion vagaries of the climate demanded. Microbes take potluck; whether it freezes or boils over. Fishes are at home in the pilchard shallows of Cornwall or the one-foot tarns of Cumberland, and in the abysmal depths of the unplumbed Pacific. They have passed from water to land and land to air, putting off fishhood for snakehood and then birdhood; or, remaining fish, bird or mammal, have suited their fins, wings or coats to the requirements of each changing age. Just now the elephant is hairless, but (if we spare him so long) will turn hairy again when the next ice age counsels a coat. Man their slaughterer is the supplest. That he ever evolved, that he survived the wild beast rivals of his long childhood, with only his brain to defend him and defy them till he ruled them all, that he surmounted every change of cold and heat, damp and drought, dearth and plenty, is itself the chief miracle of the past, chief earnest of the ascendant future. The hardest days are over; but should the planet turn Eskimo snowfield or Dyak forest again tomorrow, that will suit him, and he survive them. The wild creatures will be gone in another century, the tame ones are our slaves, and now we have made us new creatures, steel children of our brains, who will help the children of our bodies to new heights of resistance and new depths of subtlety against the worst that the stars and the years can do.
Life is not the most but one of the least adaptable of phenomena. The stones have survived; how many of the beasts? Where, for all his name, is Titanotherium Robustum? Or Diplodocus Carnegii? Where now is Pterosaur, flying reptile with massy head, bone-cased eyes and hopeful leer; made cunning enough, one would have thought, for victory over time? Where is Pythonomorph, sea-serpent double the size and horror of all silly-season and all silly-sailor tales? Ichthyosaurus, giant ocean-lizard; Iguanadon, giant ostrich-reptile; Clepsydrops, Dimetrodon; Mylodon, Megatherium, Glyptodon? Or, in ascending Jurassic rhythm of towering horror, where Brontosaurus, Megalosaurus, Gigantosaurus, Atlantosaurus? All went. They were herbivorous; Tyrannosaurus the flesh-eater devoured them. Where is he? Arch-rodent has shrunk from nine feet to not nine inches; Taxodon is become rat. Labyrinthodont or mastodont, dinosaurs or dromosaurs, all are gone, those mighty beasts are gone; as extinct as the dodo, if far longer ago than she. Who should believe in that delirium world of bird-dragons, elephant-tigers, fish-lizards, rhinoceros-seals, armadillo-monkeys, were it not for beholding their skeletons, their footprints, their dagger-like dragon-like teeth that fastened into the writhing frames of our own fathers and mothers and of those who might have been fathers and mothers of a higher race than ours? Pithecanthropus might have done better than Homo Sapiens; but he died, as all but a tiny minority of species died or are dying. All are gone; not only they whom for bulk and terror we gape at, but hundreds of thousands of species less spectacular—insects, fishes, mammals, primates—have gone with them. Lemuria is lost; the Missing Link is missing. Man has contrived to hold out for one or two brief geological periods. But the higher the organism, the harder its survival; whom the gods love die young. Now, become stereotyped and lazy, a degenerate who has specialized in a few nerves and a few brain-tracks as the dinosaurs specialized in this or that piece of defensive armour or in size or amphibian aptitude, like them, decayed and dislaurelled, he will go. Who will observe his human skeleton in what inhuman South Kensington of the future?
The survivalists try again. Man, they say, unlike all other phenomena, is moving in a known direction. His road may show ups and downs, yield stretches of hard going, moments even of standstill, lead now and then sheer backwards through countries of failure and evil; sometimes he loses his way, sometimes the guides go wrong, anon the standard-bearer fainteth. But the drift and net movement is onward—each heart of us knows it, kowtow to the darkness how we will. Man, unlike his ignorant forebears, himself knows it. He has glimpsed the goal, and he believes it good; which, consciously desiring, he at last will attain. … Man’s, unlike that of those perished species, is the right direction. They overspecialized in wrong directions. He alone has concentrated on brain, which has empowered him to outlive or to master his fellow-animals and to subdue the world inorganic, and which will enable him, when needs be, to face final destiny. The Chosen Way, it is he who has chosen it. Evolution is creative, not passive; Man makes, not encounters, the circumstances before him; makes, not suffers, himself. He is the path and the pathfinder; they are one; they lead to Paradise.
He has no direction, or it is the wrong one. Evolution is decreative. The trend of the heavens, as of radioactivity, as of every ultimate thing and process, is from elaborate to less elaborate, from complex to simple, from changeable to changeless. Evolution on the earth, being the other way, is swimming against the tide of the universe; like walking along a corridor train in the opposite direction to its motion, along a travelling ship from prow to stern. Cosmically considered, life is a perversion. … He has no direction, or it is the wrong one. The road? It has brought him from Arcadia to Armageddon, and now is shooting to the Abyss. The drift and net movement is downward—each heart of us knows it, wallow in make-believe how we may. At the best, the graph of man’s history, switchback Spenglerian rhythm of civilizations that rise and fall, leaves each new downward dip no higher than the dip before; at the fond fantastic best, no higher. A goal? It is the song of fools. A standard-bearer? He fainteth not; he is not. We poor perishing people have no leader; no light, no faith, no Lord. Christ is dead in His tomb, not risen; Christ is worms and clay. Where is an ensign to the nations? Where is a banner upon the mountains? Where, to guide us through a world now pushed past the stars, where now is a Star? Horrible infinite world, by the mirage of knowledge stretched out through space and through time unto eternity. Where is a Jesus for eternity? Where is Immanuel of the Infinite?
The optimists’ last bid for human victory is also their boldest. Even if it so be that man must go under, he will have found replacement by a tribe of gods; whether the children of his body made more than human by untold centuries of the work of his brain, or whether children of his brain alone, a triumph-people, raised artificially. Paracelsus first tried his hand. Put so much sperma viri in an alambic; stir, keep warm. After forty days you will see a tiny creature moving about in the bottom of the still. Keep him there for forty weeks at the temperature of a horse’s belly; feed him on human blood; at the end of the forty weeks he will have developed into a small but perfect human being. Whether or no the great magician himself succeeded with his recipe, Homunculus certainly had no children, started no rival race. Far other will be the expectations of the later life makers. Cyanic acid is an odd new name, and there are newer and odder, for Jove or Jehovah; but he—it—or someone much like her—seems to have been our first parent. Somehow, by the cyanogen bridge or some such other, the gulf incredible between inorganic matter and the lowest organism, between the dead and the living, was crossed. Crossed once, it will be crossed again. If, despite a thousand experiments as strange as the homuncular, no one yet has made life in the laboratory, success one day will come; and then, under man’s guidance, a type of life will, through millions of years, though needing less millions than blundering nature, be evolved along new lines until in the fullness of time it reaches new heights, there at last to supplant its humbler creator and inherit the earth forever.
Humanity, answers the soul of our sadness, far from fooling with cyanogen or semen, with biochemical blasphemies of creation or prolongation, far from seeking to make other life, will, long ages before the astronomical limit, have likelier made away with its own. Ages earlier the creatures of dust will, of sad choice, have returned to the earth as they were; and the spirit, if there be spirit, unto God Who gave it. Increased awareness of the inevitable will, as the ice rises (water goes, star comes) decide man not to fight. Realizing that no schemes can avert or avail, that all he has laboured for, great works and great estate, wisdom and empires, visions social and celestial, blood flowing through veins eternal, is to end only in this, in a Last Man who must lay himself down to die, then he will say: Why tarry? There is a time to be born, it is Never; there is a time to die, it is Now. Reproduction then will appear a heartless crime, saving sons from life the one good, and the far-off Malthusians and perverts and contracepts of the earth’s dawn-time halo’d sages and heroic forerunners, and statues—oh Thomas! oh Oscar! oh Marie!—will be set up to you in every snow-fast city of the dying world. … Gainsaying life to his children, man will deny it at last to himself; a universal felo-de-se of the soul forestalling the fading sun, death from within the death from without. Desire shall fail; he shall desire but to die, and death shall not flee from him.
Between these frantic guessed antipodes of perdition and glory we choose as we will or must, as mental bias suggests, as sense of humour or horror allows, as hope or fear of immortality decides. We may feel that, through the unnumbered years Time vouchsafeth, one day the long curve will shoot up above the danger line forever. We may feel that one dip in the curve too deep, and life will forever be over. We may take courage from the infinite perils the race has survived and see them as glad augury of perpetuity. We may take terror from the infinite variety and infinite littleness of the changes that could destroy it: one jot of carbon dioxide less or more, one touch of the cold seven miles above or the heat seven miles below. We may remember that the shears which would snap the thread of our days have failed though they’ve tried since the beginning; we may remember that the doors that lead to death, they are ten thousand, and a thousand times ten thousand. We may hope or fear this or that, work our belief to imagine that or this; but there is no evidence and no presumption of a kind any one of us, hopeful or fearful, would heed in any other matter, great or small, that either our race or any created or descendent race, will in a future, nigh or far, be either much better able or much worse able than at this present instant of time to affront whatever the earth and terrible heavens have in store.
They decree, and we die.
Earth
To live again?
If hardly here; if, following even those rare dooms that do not preclude it, a second start for humanity is scarcely to foresee; if the ashes shall be barren ashes and life, though the earth be, not Phoenix—then elsewhere? on some other world?
Faced with the rope if we stay prisoners here, shall we escape? Is life elsewhere in the universe possible? Possible for us?
Since men first saw the stars, the war of mundane plurality has been raging; and is still undecided. Not perhaps to remain so for long. The first heavier-than-ether machine to tour the seven planets will decide.
Those who will have other worlds inhabited, or inhabitable, recite a great poem of great names. The Vedas, the Zend-Avesta; the Orphic songs, the Ionian sects; priests of Anglesey, priests of Egypt. Thales, Empedocles; Aristarchus, Anaxagoras—though it was less for his men in the moon than for his unpatriotic suggestion that the sun was larger than the Peloponnesus that Pericles’ friend got into trouble with the police. Pythagoras, Parmenides; Heraclitus, Democritus—all the ancient names the modern mind finds most appealing. Xenophanes of Colophon, who also favoured the moon, though he warned against anthropomorphic imaginings. Heraclides of Pontus, who favoured everywhere. Alexander the Great was not sure, but he wanted to hold this view: there would have been more worlds to conquer. Zeno and many of the Stoics here found agreement with most of the Epicureans; Metrodorus of Lampsacus thought it as foolish to have created one living world as one living grain of wheat, and in two famous passages Lucretius endorsed. Then, after the inglorious Middle Ages, brave Giordano Bruno, burnt for this also; Montaigne, Cyrano de Bergerac (a bolder, more proboscidial H. G. Wells), Descartes; Gassendi, Locke, Hevelius; Huygens, whose Cosmotheoros remains the most famous plurality-book published, ingenious Fontenelle, great Swedenborg. … Among the moderns, those who knew heaven best: Kepler, Kant, Laplace, Herschel—to omit the poets such as old Horace and Virgil, and the romancers whose imagination, not to be mocked at, may have hit the heavenly mark.
The anti-pluralists challenge some of these champions as wrongfully claimed, and jeer at some others. Themselves concentrate on quality rather than quantity: the sane sound Romans rather than the romantic Greeks, yet of the Greeks Plato and Aristotle, the two greatest; the glorious Middle Ages, the Saints and the Fathers, the popes of Russia, the Pope of Rome; of the modern astronomers the modernest, the freest from fairytale trammels, sane sound Englishmen rather than frothy Flammarions.
Flourish of nominal trumpets over, real arguments enter the field.
On the one side:
Wherever conditions for the evolution of matter into life obtain, there surely is life. Such conditions obtain in many places besides this tiny planet Earth. Waiving the stars, and considering only her fellow-members of the solar system, these are all more alike than unlike; their differences in shape, size, atmosphere, temperature, are less striking than their resemblances. Commonsense concurs with common modesty that worlds so similar to ours must have produced or one day be producing life. If the moon has little atmosphere, why assume that an atmosphere is necessary to living existence, to anything but the earth’s special form of it? If she is cold, why too cold—with her fourteen generous days of twenty-four hours’ sunshine on end, such as never had Glasgow? In her craters the colours change—sudden green when the sun rises—indicating the presence of vegetation, likeliest in those low-lying places where, should air be needed, some air is likeliest to be left. If not vegetation, what is it? If Venus gets double our quota of sunshine and Mars only half, has not Nature, with her foresight and cunning, counterbalanced these differences by other differences: the Venerean clouds, the Martian cloudlessness? For Mars in particular, the signs of seasonal vegetation are convincing and converging to the point of proof; though no proof will persuade folk vain enough to fancy their own speck of dust unlike any other speck of dust in the universe, will prevent anthropocentric madmen from confining life, as an ant might to her ant-heap, to this one of a million bodies in space whose quality and history and destiny are in every essential the same.
On the other side:
The material conditions under which the mystery called life can evolve form an infinitesimal fraction of the infinite range of material conditions in the universe. The earth happens to coincide with that fraction. Hence—though another world so coinciding could conceivably, theoretically exist—on the earth alone there is in fact the mystery. Among the planets she alone is the right distance from the sun, has the due allotment of water, heat and light, the requisite mass, the suitable density of air. The moon is too cold, and too small; and too small to have retained an atmosphere. The thing that could exist without atmosphere would, whatever it was, not be life. That instantaneous green is an effect of light; what grass could spring up in a second or two? Mercury and (probably) Venus each turns one side towards the sun and the other forever away; one half is too cold and the other too hot. Mercury’s in any case too tiny. Venus is covered with water, an abode of fishes if of life at all. Mars has not enough water or air, and receives not enough sunlight—if enough limelight from his romantic partisans. Jupiter, covered with cloud, and Saturn, bound fast by the ring, both are molten hot; nor could cool down to permit life on their surfaces until the sun’s radiation would be too feeble to support it. Outside the planetary eight, bodies with solid crusts are a rarity; not one, avers astrophysics, in a thousand. Few suns have planets, few planets air. What other world is like to be made of the right end-atoms (ash-atoms), to have the proper amount of light and the proper temperature, and a regular enough temperature and regular for long enough, and the right size and density and axis and rate of rotation and rate of advance, like to fulfil every one of the narrow and complicated geological and chemical and astronomical conditions, each one of which, present and compresent, is essential to existence? Earthmen are men; but the Neptunians no more real than Neptune’s mermen, the men in the moon mere moonshine. Is there life on the comets, the sun, the burning stars, the dead ones? The miracle of special circumstances has in one special corner allowed the miracle of man; no unreasoning preference for universality of vitality, no vague mixing of spiritual and spatial conceptions, can create it elsewhere.
Religion has something for both sides.
Christianity speaks unequivocally on one. Plurality is blasphemy. Were there a million worlds of people, then God the Father would have had to have begotten a million Sons, or else to send—or to have sent—or be sending—His Only Begotten One to be slain for their sins a million times in a million different places. So it may be—Christ is crucified always—but not by the orthodox doctrine of the Church, which acted if not with love at least with leniency and logic when she burnt her Brunos, made one stake expiate a million crosses, one Campo dei Fiori a million Calvarys.
The religious temper in general, as distinct from Christian dogma, inclines the other way. God is everywhere, and therefore Man. Buddhism, Swedenborgianism, Pantheism, if they do not always posit, do not ever exclude material life on other material worlds.
In the innermost heart also, the irrational corner still inviolate from facts and from faith, stand equally poised the two opposite persuasions. Persuasion, utterly, we are here on earth only; persuasion, innerly, we are everywhere.
The anti-pluralists seem to lose. They make one fatal admission: that the special circumstances could, however improbably, repeat themselves. In a universe of infinite time and therefore of infinite similarities, if they could repeat themselves they must repeat themselves; if they repeat themselves once they repeat themselves forever.
Assume that they do. Assume that life elsewhere is a thing more likely—less unlikely—than life nowhere else. Is it therefore more likely now, at this coincident hour of earthly time?
Soon we shall know. There were folk bold enough through all the centuries—through all the week—before he crossed it to deny the possibility of crossing the Atlantic by air. Crossing interplanetary space will be more difficult, but the technical hindrances will be overcome. Then some celestial but not more charming Lindbergh will wing his way to the Moon. He may find some form of life there, grabbling deep in the Crater of Copernicus, swimming high through the Seas of Putrefaction or Serenity; or he may not. It may be a type of life very unlike ours, the people dark and strange, and hard to communicate with, much as trees and sponges and worms are hard to communicate with. Or very like ours: Judas Iscariot may still be there. More probably the lunar Lindbergh, if he got back to tell the tale, would report a dead world bestrewn with monstrous skeletons of an existence, neither vegetable nor animal, dead millions of years ago; a barren world with no prospects either vital or economic: no more gold for Old Glory, triumphantly planted on Mount Newton or the highest summit of the Leibnitz Hills.
The next expedition would be to Mars, always the most attractive of the neighbours. Those canals! (Is not the very word a mistranslation? By canali Schiaparelli merely meant channels; a translator’s error has largely created in England and America the Martian ideas there so passionately held.) They are vast aqueducts, or other mechanical constructions too geometrical to be accidental, or artificially irrigated scrips of intensive cultivation; the mesh of them, their pattern, their placing, their relation to the Martian equator, their hibernation, with a hundred other Lowell-listed characteristics, all join to proclaim them the work of conscious minds and of mighty. They are chance scratchings, whose Euclidean straightness is an illusion of the telescope, a delusion of its users. The seas! They are not seas. They are vast alluvial plains, that whole planet one vast Holland. They are terrible deserts. …
Life is a possible phenomenon on other worlds; one day we shall travel to other worlds. Could we live there? Other earths are habitable; are they habitable by man?
By the time he needed new worlds to conquer, his brain, his forethought, the subtlety and subservience of science his slave, would have increased beyond present understanding. Colonization of another planet would by then be an easy affair; and a well planned affair, slow, selective, scientific. There would be a restriction-of-immigration bill stricter than proud America’s, keeping out undesirables (perhaps proud Americans), imposing some aerial Areal Ellis Island. There would be time for and method in acclimatization. Transplantation, through ages prepared for, is a possible—the probable—future of this race.
Man is a very local species, due to very local conditions on the earth, made up of certain proportions of C and N and H and O, and clearly unable to breed, if even to breathe, in a world where the proportions of these elements would be different, as in every other known world they are. He would fall under the weight of his skeleton, choke through the lightness of his lungs. Transplantation is not probable, and not possible; we shall die where we were born.
The worlds to be colonized, being the habitable ones, may be inhabited already; not desolate heritages for our seizing. On his Itinerarium exstaticum the old Jesuit Father found lovely angels of silver on Venus, great angels of fire on the sun, angels everywhere and everywhere the friendliest reception. His experience may be repeated; shamefaced, we shall find each fresh world we alight on to be a land of brothers and of beauty, an abode of perfection and holiness:
Each of those stars is a religious house;
I saw their altars smoke, their incense rise,
And heard Hosannahs ring through every sphere.
Or, by Kant’s theory that the planets furthest from the sun (having, by Kant’s theory, had more time) have developed the highest organisms, we might expect a different reception according as we moved in towards the sun or out; under the latter alternative either a more intelligent welcome or a bitterer resistance, according as further physical evolution is held to imply higher ethical evolution or not. The treatment the so-called higher races down here have meted out to the lower; the story, earth’s blackest story, of white man’s wickedness to black, is no happy augury for the Martians’ treatment of ourselves, a race more alien and kithless. Why should they treat us kindly? Why should the war of the worlds be merciful? Why should it bring victory for us?
The war may be fought here. We may be fated to be the colonized conquered planet, wiped out within our own trenches by the Silenians or Silurians or Saturnians. By when things here were getting unfavourable, on Mars they would be worse. Migration hither is in plain fact the likelier. Next week the first man from Mars may be landing.
Time would defeat us again if our hopes flew further afield. Saturn and Jupiter have no hope of a habitability phase. Uranus and Neptune have long been too cold. By the time we shall need a world for escape, there will be none to escape to.
In the solar system, at least; the chance in the stars is beyond all statable conjecture. A few may possess cool-surfaced satellites; life, by some path incredible, may one day reach and, by some chance improbable, be able to continue there—thence, post-deceasing it, to watch the old home flare.
If the life germs are everywhere; if the Universe is sown with them, is them; if from eternity to eternity they are spilt and spread from system to system by comets, by stellar dust, by radiation, by the secret ether, by ordered mutations, by methods mechanical or mystical we know not of, by high cosmic perpetual xenogamy; if, though some germs die of the inter-sidereal cold, others are better preserved by it to flourish and wander and found nations of people whenever they arrive at a world where the outlook for vivification is favourable—like ours—then we are migrants already, and shall be again; then life will last while the Universe lasts.
While the Universe lasts. …
Another world is at best a remand; on it also the sun will cease to shine. Could we fly further, to the planet of some other star—this too must one day die. From dying worlds can life migrate forever?
Dead suns crash into dead suns, creating new great stars, which become new spiral nebulae, new masses of smaller stars, new hot sun, new cooling sun, new dead sun: the old titanic round. The materials being always the same and the conditions often similar, life in certain favoured corners of certain favoured new systems will begin all over again from the lowest forms: to die all over again as the circle wheels round again to death. Can this go on forever?
Or is there, end of all worlds, a Universe-end?