Life on Other Worlds

We have already seen that the planet Mars may possibly have some kind of plant life. Some people thought that intelligent beings lived there, too, and had built canals to carry water from the melting snows of the polar regions to the dry, desert parts of the planet.

Although this was a most interesting idea it is unlikely to be true.

Regarding the possibility of life on the other planets, Mercury is too hot on one side and too cold on the other, and it has no atmosphere. We know little of Venus, but apart from Mars all the other planets seem certain to be far too cold for life. What can we say about other stars?

The stars themselves are very hot bodies like the sun and nothing could live on them. There may, however, be some which have planets like those which travel round our sun. An American astronomer has said that one of the nearer stars certainly has a large planet, bigger than Jupiter, revolving round it.

In our great Milky Way system, or galaxy, there are about one hundred thousand million suns. If we suppose that planets are very rare, belonging only to one in a million stars, it seems that there could still be many thousands of planets. Some of these might have life like that of our own world. It is also possible, of course, that in other parts of the universe there may be living things quite unlike us. One thing we do know is that the materials of which our world is made, the elements as they are called, seem to be much the same in every part of the universe.