DISTANT WORLDS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 286, 4 December 1933, Page 8

DISTANT WORLDS

PROBABILITIES OF LIFE. LONDON, Oct. 27. The Bishop of Birmingham. (Dr, Barnes), in a lecture at University Col lege, Hull, dealt with the question w’hether there are other inhabited worlds than ours. He said that one of the most significant conclusions of the present con tury was that, iu the depths of space, there were millions of universes similar to ours, in each of which there might be a thousand and a million planetary systems. Was it likely that our earth wat the only member of any planetary system on which intelligent life had appeared! It. was surely beyond the limits of probability that a cosmos so vast should have i n *t but one planer, otherwise in no way exceptional, on

which lif e had appeared. Nature might bo wasteful, but that God had made a cosmos so vast and so meaningless passed belief. He (the Bishop) postulated that, not as a supernatural act, but as the result of a Divine activity which continually created, the Jiving emerged from the non-living when the cooling earth was ready to support life. Material conditions on the cooling earth must hav e been paralleled a vast number of times in the history of tho universe, and on each occasion we might assume that life had been created. There was. therefore, ho thought, good reason to believe that planets on which life had appeared were iu the aggregate numerous, though they must be relatively tparse in any particular region of the cosmos. Many such planets must have been formed thousands of millions of years before our earth, and he judged that elsewhere the mental, moral, and spiritual attainment of living organ isms must far surpass that reached on earth by men. But he doubted whether we had any reason to assume that elsewhere there had nonnalty been a pro cess of physical development para Kiel to that of tho earth. Quite possibly animal types which would appear to us strange and unpleasing carried the highest kinds of intelligence in distant worlds. If intelligent life existed and was progressive elsewhere jo the universe. there was no reason why contact with it should not ultimately be made.