IS HUMAN LIFE' POSSIBLE ON OTHER PLANETS?

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 129, 1 June 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

IS HUMAN LIFE' POSSIBLE ON OTHER PLANETS?

Tn reply to the above query a correspondent of "Knowledge" says "Probably not," for the following1 reasons: First—There is not one chance in a million that any two planets among the unnumbered myriads that probably exist in space utterly unknown to us have, in the course of evolution, become so similar in their physical conditions as to be sufficiently fitted for the inhabitants of each other to be able to continue to maintain their existence if they interchanged worlds. Secondly—Granting that the physical conditions of two planets may be sufficiently similar to enable most of the forms of life on the one to exist on the other, yet the chances against identical or even similar forms being found on both are immense. The almost infinite complexity of circumstances which, in the long course of evolution, has moulded living organisms on our earth to what they are will have acted equally on every other planet, and effectually precluded any two forms being similar except in the remotest sense of the term. No doubt such planets as Mars are teeming with life, but each one with life peculiar to itself, fitted by Nature to the surrounding- conditions, and no others. Looking to man, we see. as Sir Robert S. Ball remarks, that "he is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature, more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, make all the difference between health and sickness, between life and death.", Intelligence may—nay probably has—a home on distant spheres,but in forms stranger than have ever been imagined by us.