Page Content (OCR)
our standards and systems of thought when viewing the universe. Teilhard de Chardin, the epoch- making thinker, suggested that only the fantastic has a chance of being real in the cosmos! If our way of thinking worked the other way round, it would mean that intelligences on another planet took their living conditions as a criterion. If they lived at temperatures of minus 150-200° C, they would mink that those temperatures, which are destructive to life as we know it, were essential for life on other planets. That would match up to the logic with which we are trying to illuminate the darkness of our past. We owe it to our self-respect to be rational and objective. At some time or other every daring theory seemed to be a Utopia. How many Utopias have long since become everyday realities! Of course the examples given here are meant to point out the most far-fetched possibilities. Yet once the improbable things that we cannot even conceive of today are shown to be true, as they will be, barriers will fall allowing free access to the impossibilities the cosmos still conceals. Future generations will find all kinds of life that have never been dreamt of in the universe. Even if we are not there to see it, they will cosmos. The universe is estimated to be between eight and twelve milliard years old. Meteorites bring traces of organic matter under our microscopes. Bacteria millions of years old awake to new life. Floating spores impelled by the light of a sun traverse the universe and at some time or other are captured by the gravitational field of a planet. New life has gone on developing in the perpetual cycle of creation for millions of years. Innumerable careful examinations of all kinds of stones in all parts of the world prove that the earth's crust was formed about 4,000 million years ago. Yes, and all that science knows is that something like man existed a million years ago! And out of that gigantic river of time it has only managed to dam up a tiny rivulet of 7,000 years of human history, at the cost of a lot of hard work, many adventures and a great deal of curiosity. But what are 7,000 years of human history compared with thousands of millions of years of the history of the universe? We—the paragons of creation?—took 400,000 years to reach our present state and our present stature. Who can produce concrete proof to show why another planet should not have provided more favourable conditions for the development of other or similar intelligences? Is there any reason why we may not have 'competitors' on another planet who are equal or superior to us? Are we entitled to discard this possibility? We have done so up to the present. How often the pillars of our wisdom have crumbled into dust! Hundreds and hundreds of generations thought that the earth was flat. The iron law that the sun went round the earth held good for thousands of years. We are still convinced that our earth is the centre of everything, although it has been proved that the earth is an ordinary star of insignificant size, 30,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way. The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos. Only then shall we realise that we are nothing but ants in the vast State of the universe. And have to accept the fact that they are not the only, and certainly not the oldest, intelligences in the yet our future and our opportunities lie in the universe, where the gods promised they would.