Valdez daily prospector., 1913-03-20
 Life on the Planets.


 that the planets are inhabited, ,ihe, i, knows that some of them are i'm habited. Animal life, as man knows it, demands oxygen and medium temperature. With the exception of the moon, the visible spheres have atmosphere cnmpar- able to that of the earth. No mental picture of life on Saturn. Uranus or Neptune can be form ed. Saturn has one hundred times less light and heat than the earth, Uranus 360 times less, and Ncp- tune 1900 times less. The sun appears to Neptune like a great star. Saturn's year is 20 tcrres- trial years and iSi terrestrial days long; Uranus's year is 3i trrrcs- trial wears. with winters of 20 wears. Neptune acromplishes it's 1cvolutinn in period rqnal tu '6i terres. .r'al years and 226 ter .rstrial 1aNS. The three surallrt exterior planets are worlds of night and ice, darkness and gla- cial cold, of magnitude and Si- fence beyond the conception of the human imagination. And yet they were com furtablc abiding places. and their thin cruSts permitted the emission of the enhurahlr warmth of their slowly dying 1 hearts and favored the growth of gigantic plants and animals al time when the earth was nothing hut drop of fire.
 The inhabitants of Saturn saw revolving in the sky, $500 leagues above their heads, the luminous rings of the planet, gildcd by the sun, silvered by the changing rays of eight swiftly travelling moons, or darkened by Saturn's shadow. The human mind cannot imagine life on planet of this kind; but as the atmospheres of Mars and Venus are comparable to the at mosphere of the earth, it is within the power of the imagination to picture life on those planets. The temperature of Mars is like that of the terrestrial polar regions: the temperature of Venus is like that of the terrestrial tropics. AL though man could not breathe the atmosphere of the moon OF mair- tain the vital warmth on sphere as cold as Jupiter, he cannot af- firm that nothing could live un- der such conditions of tempera- ture. There are microbes that live without air by borrowing and decomposing oxygen directly from the substances that surround them. Oxygen is found every where. in the form of chemical combinations. metal oxides, salts, etc. IL would be strange could it not be found in the earth of the moon: and possibly there are liv- ing on the planets where there is no oxygen beings that exist by ex- tracting the combinations of 0xy- gen from the minerals known to exist on the planets.
 Nor is the glacial cold of Nep- tune, Saturn and Jupiter a proof that there is no life on those plan cts. A planet dies, as the sun will die, slowly, in measure as the centEai fires died out. During the period when an inhabited planet is dying the super human inge- nuity of the planetary dwelIer finds all the means of producing heat; and as those means are re- duced the generations may be- come habituated to restriction of heat so that every succeeding generation finds it easier to live without it. The species are trans formed to resist the cold. On the planets farthrSt from the sun life ceased long ago, but all the dead planets were at one time warm and in their warmth there prob , ably existed fauna and flora.
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