Mars/Chapter 1
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| 1895 |
- Chapter 1
- I. As a Star
Once in about every fifteen years a startling visitant makes his appearance upon our midnight skies,-- a great red star that rises at sunset through the haze about the eastern horizon, and then, mounting higher with the deepening night, blazes forth against the dark background of space with a splendor that outshines Sirius and rivals the giant Jupiter himself. Startling for its size, the stranger looks the more fateful for being a fiery red. Small wonder that by many folk it is taken for a portent. Certainly, no one who had not followed in their courses what the Greeks so picturesquely called "the wanderers" (hoi planetai) would recognize in the apparition an orderly member of our own solar family. Nevertheless, one of the wanderers it is, for that star is the planet Mars, large because for the moment near, having in due course again been overtaken by the Earth, in her swifter circling about the Sun, at that point in space where his orbit and hers make their closest approach.
Although the apparent new-comer is neither new nor intrinsically great, he possesses for us an interest out of all proportion to his size or his relative importance in the universe; and this for two reasons : first, because he is of our own cosmic kin; and secondly, because no other heavenly body, Venus and the Moon alone excepted, ever approaches us so near. What is more, we see him at such times better than we ever do Venus, for the latter, contrary to what her name might lead one to expect, keeps her self so constantly cloaked in cloud that we are permitted only the most meagre peeps at her actual surface; while Mars, on the other hand, lets us see him as he is, no cloud-veil of his, as a rule, hiding him from view. He thus offers us opportunities for study at closer range than does any other body in the universe except the Moon. And the Moon balks inquiry at the outset. For that body, from which we might hope to learn much, appears upon inspection to be, cosmically speaking, dead. Upon her silent surface next to nothing now takes place save for the possible crumbling in of a crater wall. For all practical purposes Mars is our nearest neighbor in space. Of all the orbs about us, therefore, he holds out most promise of response to that question which man instinctively makes as he gazes up at the stars: What goes on upon all those distant globes? Are they worlds, or are they mere masses of matter? Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life? It is in this that lies the peculiar interest of Mars.
That just as there are other masses of matter than our globe, so there are among them other worlds than ours is an instant and inevitable inference from what we see about us. That we are the only part of the cosmos possessing what we are pleased to call mind is so earth-centred a supposition, that it recalls the other earth-centred view once so devoutly held, that our little globe was the point about which the whole company of heaven was good enough to turn. Indeed, there was much more reason to think that then, than to think this now, for there was at least the appearance of turning, whereas there is no indication that we are sole denizens of all we survey, and every inference that we are not.
That we are in some wise kin to all the rest of the cosmos, science has been steadily demonstrating more and more clearly. The essential oneness of the universe is the goal to which all learning tends. Just as Newton proved all the planets to obey a common force, the Sun; just as Laplace showed it to be probable that we were all evolved from one and the same primal nebula; so more recently the spectroscope has revealed unsuspected relationship betwixt us and the stars. Matter turns out to be but common property; and the very same substances with which we are so familiar on the Earth, iron, magnesium, sodium, and so forth, prove present on those far-off suns that strew the depths of space. Only in detail does everything differ.
So much for matter. As for that manifestation of it known as mind, modesty, if not intelligence, forbids the thought that we are sole thinkers in all we see. Indeed, we seldom stop in our locally engrossing pursuits to realize how small the part we play in the universal drama. Let us consider for a moment how we should appear, or, more exactly, not appear, could we get off our world and scan it from without. If distance could thus reduce for us the scale upon which the universe is fashioned to one we could take in, that on which the Earth should be represented by a good-sized pea, with a grain of mustard seed, the Moon, circling about it at a distance of seven inches, the Sun would be a globe two feet in diameter, two hundred and fifteen feet away. Mars, a much smaller pea, would circle around the two- foot globe three hundred and twenty-five feet from its surface; Jupiter, an orange, at a distance of a fifth of a mile; Saturn, a small orange, at two fifths of a mile; and Uranus and Neptune, good-sized plums, three quarters of a mile and a mile and a quarter away, respectively. On this same scale the nearest star would lie eight thousand miles off, and an average third-magnitude star at about the present distance of our Moon; that is, on a scale upon which the Moon should be but seven inches off, the average star would still be as far from us as the Moon is now. Now when we think that each of these stars is probably the centre of a solar system grander than our own, we cannot seriously take ourselves to be the only minds in it all.
Probable, however, as extra-terrestrial life in general is, it is another matter to predicate it in any particular case. Nevertheless, if it exist it must exist somewhere, and the first place to scan is the place we can scan best. Now the Moon appears to be hopelessly dead. Mars, therefore, becomes of peculiar interest, and it was in hope of learning something on the subject that the observations about to be described in this book were made. Before proceeding, however, to an account of what in consequence we have learned about our neighbor, a couple of misapprehensions upon the subject,-- not confined, I am sorry to say, wholly to the lay mind,--must first be corrected. One of these is that extra-terrestrial life means extra-terrestrial human life. Such an inference recalls to my mind the exclamation of an innocent globetrotter to a friend of mine in Japan once, a connoisseur of Japanese painting, upon being told that the Japanese pictures were exceedingly fine. " What! " the globe-trotter exclaimed in surprise, "do the Japanese have pictures,--real pictures, I mean, in gilt frames?" The existence of extra-terrestrial life does not involve "real life in trousers," or any other particular form of it with which we are locally conversant. Under changed conditions, life itself must take on other forms.
The next point is as to what constitutes proof. Now, between the truths we take for granted because of their age, and those we question because of their youth, we are apt to forget that in both proof is nothing but preponderance of probability. The law of gravitation; for example, than which we believe nothing to be more true, depends eventually, as recognized by us, upon a question of probability; and so do the thousand and one problems of daily life upon so many of which we act unhesitatingly and should be philosophic fools if we did not. All deduction rests ultimately upon the data derived from experience. This is the tortoise that supports our conception of the cosmos. For us, therefore, the point at issue in any theory is not whether there be a possibility of its being false, but whether there be a probability of its being true. This, which is evident enough when squarely envisaged, is too often lost sight of in discussing theories on their road to recognition. Negative evidence is no evidence at all, and the possibility that a thing might be otherwise, no proof whatever that it is not so. The test of a theory is, first, that it shall not be directly contradicted by any facts, and secondly, that the probabilities in its favor shall be sufficiently great.
As to what constitutes sufficiency it is important to bear in mind one point, namely, that the odds that a thing is true from the fact that two or more witnesses agree on the same statement is not the sum of the odds that each tells the truth, but the product of those odds. Note (See Lacroix, Traite Elementarire des Probabilites, p. 220) Therefore, if the chances for the truth of a theory, in consequence of its explaining a certain set of details, be three to one, and because of its explaining another set,--for the purposes of argument unrelated to the first,--four to one, then the chances in its favor from its explaining both sets are not seven to one but twelve to one. If it explains a third set whose independently resulting odds are of five to one, the chances in its favor, from its explaining all three sets, not twelve to one but sixty to one; if a fourth set be added, with further odds of five to one, the sum total from the four becomes not seventeen to one but three hundred to one in favor of its being true. It will be seen how rapidly the probability of the truth of a theory mounts up from the amount of detail it explains. This law is to be remembered throughout the coming exposition, for whatever the cogency of each detail of the argument in itself, the concurrence of all renders them not simply additionally but multiplicitly effective. That different lines of induction all converge to one point proves that point to be the radiant point of the result.
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This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923.
The author died in 1916, so this work is also in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 80 years or less. This work may also be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. |
