The Colfax chronicle. [volume] (Colfax, Grant Parish, La.) 1877-1981, 1883-07-28
The yalus II Life.

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ours" has long been fascinating spec
ulation. Gazing into unfathomable
space, sparsely lit by its stellar lamps,
no thoughtful person can but question
its mystery and wonder if there beings
of like passions as ourselves suffer,
struggle, toll and enjoy the same that
we do on this planet. There is some
thing overwhelming in the thought that
our little ball is the sole and solitary
home of organized life, and that the
sun lights and warns for our exclusive
benefit the space through which we
swing and spin. The feeling is akin to
solitude of the forest, or upon the sum-
NIT of a mountains sense of desola-
ton, desertion, loneliness and awe.
Even the teeming millions which swarm
upon the earth seem few and solitary
when we conceive of them as the only
conscious inhabitants sailing through
everlasting depths. The ark and the
eight souls saved therein, with the
beasts and the birds, floating upon the
flood which hid all signs of existence,
or the balloon disappearing in infinite
depths is not picture of intenser soil
tude than the earth swimming in
shoreless ocean, broken only by planet
airy islands wholly deserted.
Yet if we may truss writer in the
Popular Science Monthly, such. or near
ly such are the conclusions of science.
The great planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
are lit by their own and not by reflected
light. Hence, like the sun, they must
be incapable of sustaining any life con-
ceivable to us. And should they ever
become fit for it, life there will have to
submit to conditions which would render
existence on the earth quite impossible.
The attraction exerted by Jupiter is
three hundred times that of the earth.
A man of average weight here would
there have ponderous tread of more
than twenty tons; his own weight would
crush him into pulp; falling hickory
nut would whiz through him like rifle
ball; wave would shiver an iron-clad
to pieces; a riyulet cut mile-deep can
yons, and moderate breeze sweep
away the hills and mountains. In
some points, however, this description
is exaggerated; for were man to be
weighted to the earth by pressure of
twenty-five tons he could not-easily be
moved by water, and the hills and
mountains would be so firmly fixed by
their own grayitation that the weight of
the moving atmosphere could not dis
place them. In other words, every
thing on the planet of Jupiter would be
adjusted to its new conditions.
On Mars the conditions would be re-
versed There, man would weigh only
two and a half pounds. 1t would be
easy to fly, but an eighty-ton locomo-
tive could not draw train of empty
cars; Niagara Falls would furnish
scarcely power enough to turn mill,
and rifle ball might be caught in the
hand without harm. In an atmosphere
even as dense as our own, all animal
and vegetable forms would there be the
merest gossamer, blown to pieces by
every breeze. But no such an atmos-
phere as ours is possible in Mars. Its
pressure would be less than that of our
atmosphere on the tops of our highest
mountains, rendering existence an inn
possibility. Moreover, Mars has less
than half the heat from the sun which
the earth enjoys. On his torrid zone
the thermometer would never rise above
fifty degrees, and even that is made inn
possible by the thinness of the atmos-
phere. Nothing can be more certain
than that there is no liquidin Mars and
no lifen On the moon the conditions
are even worse than in Mars; while its
day and night, each two weeks long,
utterly forbid the presence of life there.
Mercury, with its temperature of boil
ing water at the poles and red-hot iron
at the equator, cannot sustain life.
Beside the earth, therefore, Venus is
the only member of the solar system
which science declares can preserve life,
and on it life, though in lower forms
than those. of the earth, probably does
exist; but this insignificant little globe
is the only one on which there are any
probabilities of life, SO that if the inhab-
itants of the earth were equally dis
tributed through solar space, all per-
sons would be thousands of miles apart.
Moreover. life has existed on the earth
for thousands of years. The time that
it has taken to ripep our highest civil
ization, which is an eternity of itself,
has been necessary to give birth to a
Shakespeare and to develop intellect
capable of glimmering comprehension
of what has created them. Life is far
more rare and far more costly in our
solar system than diamonds in the
earth. All else is waste space, heat,
energy, except as it is being used for
the production of life in eternities
beyond.
Considering this as fact, if it be one,
how little value is placed upon life.
Destruction by war, by slaughter. by
mems own appetites and passions, by
plague, pestilences. fevers and other
agencies, to degree at least under
mems control, is never ceasing. In
crowded cities and provinces human
life is the cheapest of all commodities;
in great manufacturing communities, it