EARTH’S BEGINNING.

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18349, 8 June 1931, Page 9

EARTH’S BEGINNING.

LECTURE BY DR. MARSDEN. VASTNESS OF UNIVERSE. Observations on the size of the world as compared with the universe were made by Dr. E. Marsden in the course of a lecture delivered to the Wellington Philosophical Society. His subject was “The Mysterious Universe." “We live in a small planet of an insignificant star—the sun," said Dr Marsden. “The majority of the stars are so large that hundreds of thousands of earths could be packed inside each and leave room to spare; and the total number of stars in the universe probably is something like the total number of grains of sand on all the seashores of the world: such is the littleness of our home in space when measured up against the total space and substance of the universe. Wandering About In Space. “The vast multitude of stars are wandering about In space,” be continued. “Many of them are so far from us that their light lakes 50,000,000 years to reach us .A few form groups which journey in company, and they travel through a universe sn spacious that it. is an event of almost unimaginable rarity for a star to come anywhere near another star. Yet there is good evidence (from the lead uranium ratio in the earth's crust, and the amounts of uranium, thorium and tend) to believe that approximately 2000 million years ago the rare event took place of a second and larger star

blindly wandering through space happening to come within hailing distance of the sun. - “Just as the sun and moon raise tides in the earth, so this second star must have raised tides on the surface of the sun; but they would be very different from the puny tides in the earth. A huge tidal wave must have travelled over the surface of the sun, ultimately forming a mountain of prodigious height which would riso even higher and higher as the cause of the disturbance came nearer; and before the second star began to recede its tidal pull had become so powerful that this mountain was lorn to pieces and threw off small fragments of itself, much as a crest of a wave f throws off spray; and these fragments have been circulating round their parent sun ever since, pulled in the same sense of rotation in approximately the same plane. They are the planets, great and small, of which the earth is one. Tho Planets Cooled. , , "Gradually the planets cooled, until now their surface warmth is received almost entirely from ttie radiation which I he sun pours down upon them In course of time one of these cooling fragments gave birth to life. It started in simple organisms, the vital capacities of which consisted of little beyond ; reproduction and death. Hut. from these humble beginnings emerged a stream of life, which, advancing through ever greater and greater complexity, iias culminated in beings whose lives are largely eenlrcd in their , emotions and ambitions, their aesthetic appreciations, and the religions in which their highest hopes and aspirations are enshrined. And standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the

nature and purpose of the universe that surrounds our home in space and time. “Our main impression from this study is that the universe is so indifferent to life like our own,” he added. “For the most part, empty spaoe is so cold that all life in it would be frozen. Most of the matter in space is s q hot as to make life on it impossible. Space is traversed and astronomical bodies continually bombarded by radiation of a variety of kinds, much of which is inimical to, and even destructive of, life.”