Garrett Putman Serviss

“ And not only Mars, but Venus—the beauteous twin sister of the earth, who, when she glows in the evening sky, makes everybody a lover of the stars—and even Mercury, the Moor among the planets, wearing "the shadowed livery of the burnished sun," to whom he is "a neighbor and near bred," and Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon itself—all these have their advocates, who refuse to believe that they are lifeless globes, mere reflectors of useless sunshine. ”

“ Looking at Jupiter in this way, it interests us not as the probable abode of intelligent life, but as a world in the making, a world, moreover, which, when it is completed—if it ever shall be after the terrestrial pattern—will dwarf our globe into insignificance. That stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes. The telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the spirit upon the face of the great deep. ”

“ It is open, at least to the writers of the interplanetary romances now so popular, to imagine that on Venus, life, while encompassed with the serenity that results from the circular form of her orbit, and the unchangeableness of her climates, is richer, warmer, more passionate, more exquisite in its forms and more fascinating in its experiences, keener of sense, capable of more delicious joys, than is possible to it amid the manifold inclemencies of the colder earth. ”

“ But the mere existence of the atmosphere is, in itself, a strong argument for the habitability of the planet, and as to the temperature, we are really not compelled to imagine special adaptations by means of which it may be brought into accord with that prevailing upon the earth. As long as the temperature does not rise to the destructive point, beyond which our experience teaches that no organic life can exist, it may very well attain an elevation that would mean extreme discomfort from our point of view, without precluding the existence of life even in its terrestrial sense. ”

“ When we are thinking of worlds, and trying to exalt the imagination with them, it is well to turn to Jupiter, for there is a planet worth pondering upon! A world thirteen hundred times as voluminous as the earth is a phenomenon calculated to make us feel somewhat as the inhabitant of a rural village does when his amazed vision ranges across the million roofs of a metropolis. Jupiter is the first of the outer and greater planets, the major, or Jovian, group. His mean diameter is 86,500 miles, and his average girth more than 270,000 miles. ”

“ As she emerges periodically from the blinding glare of the sun's immediate neighborhood and begins to soar, bright as an electric balloon, in the twilight, she commands all eyes and calls forth exclamations of astonishment and admiration by her singular beauty. The intervals between her successive reappearances in the evening sky, measured by her synodic period of 584 days, are sufficiently long to give an element of surprise and novelty to every return of so dazzling a phenomenon. ”

“ When seen low in the twilight, at evening or morning, it glows with the brilliance of a bright first-magnitude star, and is a beautiful object, though few casual watchers of the stars ever catch sight of it. When it is nearest the earth and is about to pass between the earth and the sun, it temporarily disappears in the glare of the sunlight; and likewise, when it it is farthest from the earth and passing around in its orbit on the opposite side of the sun, it is concealed by the blinding solar rays. ”

“ In truth, those who think that life in the solar system is confined to the earth alone insist upon an almost exact reproduction of terrestrial conditions as a sine qua non to the habitability of any other planet. Venus, they think, is too hot, and Mars too cold, as if life were rather a happy accident than the result of the operation of general laws applicable under a wide variety of conditions. All that we are really justified in asserting is that Venus may be too hot and Mars too cold for us. ”

“ In order to bring the situation home to our experience, let us, for a moment, imagine the earth fallen into Mercury's dilemma. There would then be no succession of day and night, such as we at present enjoy, and upon which not alone our comfort but perhaps our very existence depends, but, instead, one side of our globe—it might be the Asiatic or the American half—would be continually in the sunlight, and the other side would lie buried in endless night. ”

“ Even the light of the full moon silvering the tree tops does not exercise greater enchantment over the mind of the contemplative observer. In either of her rôles, as morning or as evening star, Venus has no rival. No fixed star can for an instant bear comparison with her. What she lacks in vivacity of light—none of the planets twinkles, as do all of the true stars—is more than compensated by the imposing size of [Pg 49] her gleaming disk and the striking beauty of her clear lamplike rays. ”

“ The inhabitants of Mercury in those six pregnant weeks see the sun expand in the sky to more than two and a half times its former magnitude, while the solar heat poured upon them swiftly augments from something more than four and a half times to above eleven times the amount received upon the earth! Then, immediately, the retreat of the planet begins, the sun visibly shrinks, as a receding balloon becomes smaller in the eyes of its watchers, the heat falls off as rapidly as it had previously increased, until, the aphelion point being reached, the process is again reversed. ”

“ All this variety of tone and color makes of a telescopic view of Jupiter a picture that will not quickly fade from the memory; while if an instrument of considerable power is used, so that the wonderful details of the belts, with their scalloped edges, their diagonal filaments, their many divisions, and their curious light and dark spots, are made plain, the observer is deeply impressed with the strangeness of the spectacle, and the more so as he reflects upon the enormous real magnitude of that which is spread before his eye. ”

“ Enough seems now to have been said to indicate clearly the hopelessness of looking for any analogies between Mercury and the earth which would warrant the conclusion that the former planet is capable of supporting inhabitants or forms of life resembling those that swarm upon the latter. If we would still believe that Mercury is a habitable globe we must depend entirely upon the imagination for pictures of creatures able to endure its extremes of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of instability, swift vicissitude, and violent contrast. ”

“ Granted the existence of such a race as is thus described, and to them it might not seem a too appalling enterprise, when their planet had become decrepit, with its atmosphere thinned out and its supply of water depleted, to grapple with the destroying hand of nature and to prolong the career of their world by feats of chemistry and engineering as yet beyond the compass of human knowledge. ”

“ Mercury, the first of the other worlds that we are going to consider, fascinates by its grotesqueness, like a piece of Chinese ivory carving, so small is it for its kind and so finished in its eccentric details. In a little while we shall see how singular Mercury is in many of the particulars of planetary existence, but first of all let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the actual size and mass of this strange little planet. Compared with the earth it is so diminutive that it looks as if it had been cut out on the pattern of a satellite rather than that of an independent planet. ”

“ The spectacle of our great planet, glowing in its fullest splendor in the midnight sky, pied and streaked with water, land, cloud, and snow, is one that might well excite among the astronomers of another world, so fortunately placed to observe it, an interest even greater than that which the recurrence of total solar eclipses occasions upon the earth. ”

“ No doubt the natural tendency of the [Pg 9] mind is to regard all the planets as habitable worlds, for there seems to be deeply implanted in human nature a consciousness of the universality of life, giving rise to a conviction that one world, even in the material sense, is not enough for it, but that every planet must belong to its kingdom. We are apt to say to ourselves: "The earth is one of a number of planets, all similarly circumstanced; the earth is inhabited, why should not the others also be inhabited?" ”

“ In attempting to judge the habitability of a planet such as Venus we must first, as far as possible, generalize the conditions that govern life and restrict its boundaries.
On the earth we find animated existence confined to the surface of the crust of the globe, to the lower and denser strata of the atmosphere, and to the film of water that constitutes the oceans. It does not exist in the heart of the rocks forming the body of the planet nor in the void of space surrounding it outside the atmosphere. ”

“ The cloudy aspect of Jupiter immediately strikes the telescopic observer. The huge planet is filled with color, and with the animation of constant movement, but there is no appearance of markings, like those on Mars, recalling the look of the earth. There are no white polar caps, and no shadings that suggest the outlines of continents and oceans. What every observer, even with the smallest telescope, perceives at once is a pair of strongly defined dark belts, one on either side of, and both parallel to, the planet's equator. ”

“ Our imaginary visitor upon reaching Jupiter would, under the influence of the planet's strong force of gravity, drop out of sight, with the speed of a shot, swallowed up in the vast atmosphere of probably hot, and perhaps partially incandescent, gases. When he had sunk—supposing his identity could be preserved—to a depth of thousands of miles he might not yet have found any solid part of the planet; and, perchance, there is no solid nucleus even at the very center. ”

“ We can not imagine any form of life that has ever been presented to our senses as existing in the sun.
But this is not generally true of the planets. Life, in our sense of it, is a planetary, not a solar, phenomenon, and while we may find reasons for believing that on some of the planets the conditions are such that creatures organized like ourselves could not survive, yet we can not positively say that every form of living organism must necessarily be excluded from a world whose environment would be unsuited for us and our contemporaries in terrestrial life. ”

“ The constellations in all their splendor would circle before their eyes with the revolution of their planet about the sun, and with the exception of the sun itself—which they could see by making a journey to the opposite hemisphere—all the members of the solar system would pass in succession through their mid-heaven, and two of them would present themselves with a magnificence of planetary display unknown on the earth. ”

“ One of the first things that persons unaccustomed to astronomical observations ask to see when they have an opportunity to look through a telescope is the planet Saturn. Many telescopic views in the heavens disappoint the beginner, but that of Saturn does not. Even though the planet may not look as large as he expects to see it from what he has been told of the magnifying power employed, the untrained observer is sure to be greatly impressed by the wonderful rings, suspended around it as if by a miracle. ”

“ We can picture such a mass, in imagination, tumbling end over end in its orbit so as to present at one moment the broad sides of both bells, together with their connecting neck, toward the sun, and, at the same time, toward the observer on the earth, and, at another moment, only the end of one of the bells, the other bell and the neck being concealed in shadow. ”

“ As the comet drew in nearer to the sun, under the terrible stress of the solar attraction, the meteors seemed to crowd closer, crashing and grinding together, while the whole mass swayed and shrieked with the uproar of a million tormented devils. ”

“ But now it must be stated that no less eminent an authority than Schiaparelli holds that Venus, as well as Mercury, makes but a single turn on its axis in the course of a revolution about the sun, and, consequently, is a two-faced world, one side staring eternally at the sun and the other side wearing the black mask of endless night. ”

“ The secular drying up of the oceans and wasting away of the atmosphere on our little neighbor world involved a vast, all-embracing tragedy, some of the earlier scenes of which, if theories be correct, are now reenacted on the half-desiccated planet Mars—a planet, by the way, which in size, mass, and ability to retain vital gases stands about half-way between the earth and the moon. ”

“ Very naturally the moon has always been a great favorite with those who, either in a scientific or in a literary spirit, have speculated about the plurality of inhabited worlds. The reasons for the preference accorded to the moon in this regard are evident. Unless a comet should brush us—as a comet is suspected of having done already—no celestial body, of any pretensions to size, can ever approach as near to the earth as the moon is, at least while the solar system continues to obey the organic laws that now control it. ”

“ To watch one of them apparently melting, becoming perceptibly smaller week after week, while the general surface of the corresponding hemisphere of the planet deepens in color, and displays a constantly increasing wealth of details as summer advances across it, is an experience of the most memorable kind, whose effect upon the mind of the observer is indescribable. ”

“ But if we accept the theory that Saturn is in an early formative stage, and that, millions of years hence, it may become an incrusted and habitable globe, we shall, at least, follow the analogy of what we believe to have been the history of the earth, except that Saturn's immense distance from the sun will always prevent it from receiving an amount of solar radiation consistent with our ideas of what is required by a living world. ”

“ In short, all observers of Venus agree in thinking that her atmosphere, to a greater or less extent, serves as a mask to conceal her real features, and the possibilities of so extensive an atmosphere with reference to an adjustment of the peculiar conditions of the planet to the requirements of life upon it, are almost unlimited. If we could accurately analyze that atmosphere we would have a basis for more exact conclusions concerning Venus's habitability. ”

“ Indeed, color and motion are so conspicuous in the immense spectacle presented by Jupiter that they impart to it a powerful suggestion of life, which the mind does not readily divest itself of when compelled to face the evidence that Jupiter is as widely different from the earth, and as diametrically opposed to lifelike conditions, as we comprehend them, as a planet possibly could be. ”

“ We come now to a planet which seems, at the first glance, to afford a far more promising outlook than Mercury does for the presence of organic life forms bearing some resemblance to those of the earth. One of the strongest arguments for regarding Venus as a world much like ours is based upon its remarkable similarity to the earth in size and mass, because thus we are assured that the force of gravity is practically the same upon the two planets, and the force of gravity governs numberless physical phenomena of essential importance to both animal and vegetable life. ”