THE WASTES OF THE UNIVERSE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 41, 17 July 1874, Page 2

THE WASTES OF THE UNIVERSE.

[From the “Spectator.”] Mr Proctor, our well-known astronomer, after delivering above a hundred astrononomical lectures in the United States, has been summing up in New York the general lessons which astronomy teaches as to the divine methods of creation, in a somewhat remarkable lecture on the principle of what would seem to men, judged by human standards, as divine waste. By “waste” he

means, of course, not absolute fruitlessncas, but the lavish employment of forces acting on an immense scale, to produce results which seem very infinitesimal and very short-lived. When we say “to produce,” we assume, perhaps, that what we regard as the end of creation is the cud, simply because it is nearer akin to human ends. But what Mr Proctor refers to is something of this sort:—ln the first place, if life of any kind at all resembling our own, is supposed to be one of the ends of physical nature, then it must be admitted that the spots in the universe where such life is possible are infinitely small, as compared with the spaces where such life is not possible. Concede, for instance, that such life cannot exist, except on the surface of solid worlds, and you admit at once not only that the subterranean interiors of all these worlds is, as far as such life is concerned, wasted, but that the vacuum of the intermundane spaces, of course far more vast than the infinitesimal continents of the globes scattered about amongst them,is for the same purpose “wasted,” But Mr Proctor goes much further. Assuming that, ns far as we know anything whatever of the laws of physical life, a certain amount of heat and a tolerably dense atmosphere are necessary to it, while any very considerable excess of heat and any great deficiency of atmosphere would be fatal to it, Mr Proctor at once excludes the great central suns from the class of habitable worlds, as being centres of heat far too intense for anything like such life; while at the other extreme of the scale, he excludes a burnt-out ash like the moon, which has neither atmosphere nor water, from the category of worlds fit for any organization known to us. And even be- . tween these limits Mr Proctor finds but few planets which he thinks fit for such life as ours at the present moment. Venus and Mercury are both too much scorched up by the sun’s rays, he holds, for any organization we know. Mars, if not already too cold, is fast becoming so, with his comparatively email supply of watery vapour, and his immense fields of winter snow. Jupiter and the other known major planets arc still, says Mr Proctor, glowing masses of detached solar fire, not sufficiently cooled down for their surface to be the abode of life of our sort. In short, except the planet Mars, which Mr Proctor thinks nearly, if not quite, past the stage at which there is sufficient heat to support life like ours, and one of the satellites of Jupiter, and possibly an asteroid or two, Mr Proctor docs not hold it possible that any life of the kind we know now exists elsewhere in the solar system. As for the other stellar systems, the stars themselves are centres of heat far too great for the existence of such life, and of their planets we know nothing. And he argues from analogy that but a very few even of the planets can be under the conditions which render organic life, as we know it, possible. At any one moment the vast majority of physical worlds in existence are, in Mr Proctor’s belief, unfit to support life, though each one of them may be, or may have been, for some small fraction of its career, the theatre’of such life. The earth, for instance, must have been unfit to support life for ages before it had cooled down sufficiently for the purpose, and, for ages after it shall have shrunk into the condition of the moon, it will again be unfit for the support of life. In a word, not only is the proportion of space devoted to organised life at any one moment un infinitesimal one, but if you take the career of any single world separately, you will find that its period of waste is an infinitude, in the midst of which its little age of habitability resembles a mere island in the wide and barren ocean of its desolation. The proportion of space utilised (if the support of organic life be the definition of “ utilisation ”) to waste space is infinitesimal ; and the proportion of time utilised (in the same sense) to waste time, in the history of any one among the material worlds, is infinitesimal also. For the most part—this is Mr Proctor’s inference from his astronomical surveys — the map of the physical universe is a map of vast solitudes, most of which —namely, the insterstcllar and intermundane spaces—were never adapted for organised life at all ; while of the spots which are so adapted, the time during which there is a capability of supporting life is a mere narrow strip of isthmus between two infinite oceans of perpetual solitude, the infinite antecedent history of .gradual preparation, and the infinite subsequent history of exhausted powers. According to this view, if life in any way like ours is the end of the material universe, almost the whole universe is either a blank, or a becoming, or a passing-away, and the portions of time and space in which organic life has appeared, but not yet passed away, count but for a few drops in the ocean of perceivable space and recordable time. To an imagination bewildered, as human imaginations so often are, not with the infinite repose of the universe, the lavish expen. diture of time and force on apparently small results, but rather with the hurry, the crowding, the human frettings and turnings, of this vivid little world of misery and joy, there is something at first rather resting and solemn in thus realising for ourselves the infinite tracts of space and time which seem secure from the invasions of the swarms of organic life. A fanciful mind might even expect the earth herself to feel as if relieved of something of a fever fit, after the comparatively short period during which she is fit for the support of organic life shall have elapsed, and the passionless calm of the lunar solitudes shall have succeeded to the tread of busy feet and the crush of eager appetites. But that, of course, would be the mere fancy of minds solicited by too many competing interests, and yearning for a better adjustment between their thirst for peace and their impulses to action.