Chapter 11 Chapter 10 Planets Are Like Seeds

Of the nine planets orbiting the sun, only one is the abode of a sentient life form.Yet our sun is but one of trillions of suns in countless galaxies.Nature is so generous that there must be many suns with planets.Wouldn't some of these planets be Earths, Earths other than ours, inhabited by other humans?Is it possible that one day our people on earth will encounter people of other races from another solar system? A few years ago, a science fiction writer wrote an interstellar adventure, in which it was said that the various races on the earth planned to hold an expedition to go deep into space in order to discover another race with knowledge.The people of the world resolved to do their best to find a race that understood the creation of the world as well as they did.This expedition is to go far beyond the confines of our solar system, within which only Earth is known to be the home of intelligent beings.

This fictional event takes place in the distant future, when almost all the difficulties of interstellar travel have been solved.The spaceship used was a kind of machine which solved with great ingenuity all the technical problems which the voyage might encounter.But the sailors are still ordinary people of flesh and blood.Their physical conditions are still the same as those of today's people; people's life expectancy is still basically the same as it is now, no more than seventy years old.This finite lifespan becomes the subject of the story, as it takes an interstellar spacecraft an enormous amount of time to travel across the nearly endless expanse of space from our sun to the other stars of our galaxy.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, which is an extremely high speed, so it only takes a little more than a second for light to travel the distance between the earth and the moon.It takes light eight and a half minutes to travel from Earth to the sun, and about six hours to reach the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet in our solar system.After the light crosses the orbit of Pluto, it enters the infinitely vast field of interstellar space. Even though it flies forward at an undiminished speed, it will take more than four years to reach the star closest to the sun. The expeditions described in the above-mentioned novels are directed not at the nearest stars, but at stars many times farther away, and it will take hundreds of years to reach them.To solve this problem, those who planned this expedition came up with a brilliant idea.They recruited a hundred young men and women, all of whom volunteered to spend their lives on spaceships.After these volunteers die of old age, their sons and daughters will take over; but before the end of the journey, these sons and daughters will also die of old age, and even their grandchildren will die of old age!Generations of people locked in a lonely metal box continue to drift in space, and the goal of this terrible journey is always only an indifferent and non-flickering point of light seen in the distance ahead.This group of people enclosed in the spaceship, even though they have been flying all their lives, are still far away from that point of light. All of them will never see the little light in front of them until they die.

The foregoing episodes might make for a moving novel, but such an expedition is simply inhuman as an act beyond human capabilities.How can man entrust his children and grandchildren with such a difficult and inescapable task?They are the last generation imprisoned in the spaceship, but they don't know what the blue sky of the earth where their race came from is like. Even if they reach their destination, what will they find?At the end of this inhumane expedition, what are their chances of finding another Earth?In the infinite depths of the universe, are there other blue and green planets that house races of beings like those on Earth?

In the Milky Way alone, there are millions of suns like our own, and in the space seen by the most powerful telescopes, there are more than tens of millions of other galaxies scattered.But these suns are too far away for us to observe their planets directly.All we can do is to study the great forces and events which formed our own planetary system in the beginning of chaos, and thereby try to find out what the ordinary planets might have been like. Until recently most astronomers believed that planets were created by cosmic upheavals.This view holds that the planets are formed by the hot gas that was wiped out of the sun by a second-magnitude star that almost collided with the sun.However, the distance between the stars is extremely great. If it is said that two stars will pass close to each other, it is very unlikely to happen. Even if such a thing happens, it can only explain that there are only two planetary systems in the entire Milky Way galaxy. The solar system, the origin of the existence of the system led by the star that has scratched the sun, still cannot explain the origin of many other planetary systems in the universe.

We now know that the chemical composition of the sun is vastly different from that of the planets, and therefore the theory of two stars colliding to produce planets must be discarded.Ninety percent of the sun's mass is composed of hydrogen and helium, while planets contain very little of these airy gases; most of their bodies are made of heavier elements such as oxygen, silicon, and various metals.Simply digging a chunk of material out of the sun and letting it cool would not have produced the Earth. The matter on the sun seems to be typical of matter in the universe in general.The thin matter in the gaseous state of all the stars and the spaces scattered in the galaxies is composed for the most part of hydrogen and helium, with only traces of the heavier elements of which the planets and the bodies of living beings are composed. .How, then, could planets emerge with this seemingly inappropriate cosmic matter as their mass?

Some process must have been at work in the formation of the solar system to sort out the heavier elements and collect them into the cooling planetary body.It's not a cosmic explosion or something catastrophic; there must have been some slow process of evolution that produced the sun and the planets at the same time. When the sun was still in the process of formation, its original mass of gas must have formed a mass whose surface was as large as the entire solar system now.The substances contained on this surface are hundreds of times more than those contained in the bodies of these planets today; but most of these substances are hydrogen and oxygen, and the heavier elements account for only one percent.This surface is cold, unheated by the young sun.The heavier elements in this large, rather dense, cold cloud are assembled by chemical affinity to form numerous compounds, which condense into small particles and mix with the crystals of snow and ammonia.In the following millions of years, this chaotic mass of matter rotated around the sun, forming countless vortices and orbits, and gradually formed a concentrated point of denser matter in this great rotation.Gravity pulls more and more matter to these denser spots, and in the future, these spots will become planets.Finally, the sun also shrunk into a smaller sphere, became hotter and began to emit intense light.The light became so intense that it created pressure that pressed the thinnest gas in the planetary clouds, flushing them out of the solar system and into the boundless expanse of space.Larger particles of heavier matter still linger in their own orbits.The gravitational force made these particles gather together, and in this way, planets were born one by one.The planets have been orbiting the sun since their formation. The planets are huge balls made of heavy elements, rare and precious substances that made up only a tiny fraction of the initial chaos of hydrogen and helium in the universe. serving size.

The above theory seems to hold that every sun in the universe must be embellished with a group of planets, which were created together with the sun itself.But the vast majority of stellar evolution cases will result in the formation of two or more stars, without planets, except by chance.Perhaps only a few out of every hundred stars have planets.But nature is so generous that our galaxy alone must have millions of planetary systems, and our galaxy is but one of millions of equal galaxies.In a living and boundless universe, the number of planets must be incalculable. In fact, the formation of millions of planetary systems is probably still in progress even today, because the process of creation is endless.Many other planetary systems must have collapsed because of their inherent instability; in a system, individual objects attract each other, requiring a delicate balance to maintain stability.Since so many planetary systems have formed, this suggests that there are already millions of planetary systems that can survive, outweighing the possibility of collapse.There seems to be an excellent chance for life to emerge, so we must assume that there are an infinite number of planets in the universe.

But planets are like seeds, and the ruthless laws governing beings and planets are very similar.Nature selects only a few seeds out of millions and follows them to blossom and bear fruit.There are thousands of ways a plant or a seed can die young.A seed may fall on dry ground, may be eaten by birds and beasts, may freeze to death, or rot long before it has a chance to germinate.But every autumn, there are always many seeds produced, so the earth is green again in the next spring, which is the surviving seeds germinating.Likewise, a planet has only a slim chance of producing life; it is likely to remain a barren world forever.There must be millions of planets in countless galaxies that are barren, because they have no air, or no water.Many planets are so close to their hot suns that their surfaces are oceans of molten magma.Many more planets were too far from their suns to be buried forever under ice and snow.Many planets do not have atmospheres because their gravitational pull is too weak to hold a gaseous envelope.There are millions of planets no longer revolving on their own axes, so that they are divided into two hemispheres, with one side as hot as fire and the other as cold as ice.

The odds of a planet becoming barren are enormous.But living beings and planets also arose in enormous numbers, so that it was probable that nature would have almost entirely discarded them soon after they had come into being.Desolation is only a human concept.When nature completely abandoned the planet, it spread out an enormous amount of material and energy resources, allowing them to form countless blazing suns.Millions of suns are lifeless and alone, and millions of other suns are surrounded by planets of all kinds, large and small, which are also lifeless.But among the thousands of desolate planets, there are a few that allow life to grow on them.There must be many planets bathed in benign sunlight that possess the elements of life, that is, water, oxygen and carbon dioxide in their mild gaseous and liquid shells.Some of these planets can only support primitive plants, like the inferior plants that may exist on Mars, gathered into a few green areas.But there must be a plethora of living species on many other planets.We may safely assume that some of these planets are home to intelligent races.There must be people in those places looking at the starry skies around their planets and thinking.Some may still be primitive races, only aware of the universe around them.But there are races on other planets that may have cultures far superior to ours.These advanced races would see us as primitives!

We can now appreciate the longings of those who planned the dreaded space voyage described in the aforementioned science fiction.Humans are social animals with a basic urge to associate with fellow humans.So, since we must believe that we are not the only intelligent species in the vast universe, can we not one day set out to visit our different kind of brethren who live on their own planets as we do on Earth?We already know that we will not find intellectual races on the other eight planets in our own solar system; we will not find congenial minds in our own cosmic realm.But can we reach the vastness of many galaxies and find countless other planets? We already know what a vast gap there is in the empty space that separates the stars.The stars in the immediate vicinity of the Sun are all many times farther away from each other than the distance that light travels in a year, which is about six trillion miles!Light is the fastest of all things, and we may never be able to move with such marvelous speed.Even if we had the power to propel a spacecraft to enormous speeds, it would be impossible to catch up to the speed of light, because the open space between the stars is not completely empty.This space contains extremely fine, thin clouds made of dust and gas.In some places in our galaxy, the clouds are dense enough to block the light from the stars behind them, preventing them from passing through.These places are the large voids, or voids, in the Milky Way as seen from Earth.Although the matter between the stars is extremely thin, it still hinders a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light, making it impossible for the ship to pass.Atoms colliding with a fast-moving spacecraft will produce a powerful particle emission. If the spacecraft passes through this relatively dense region of dust and gas clouds at a speed almost equal to the speed of light, the ship will burn up like a meteor. For a light smoke.Therefore, we can only travel at a speed slower than the speed of light, so the time required to reach other stars must be hundreds of years. Planets that can be habited by living things are extremely rare, and it is impossible to have such a planet in the immediate neighborhood of the sun.We can't expect to find a life-carrying planet anywhere in space that doesn't take thousands of years to travel.Even in the distant future, where technology is extremely advanced and travel conditions are extremely favorable, human beings have little hope of crossing the terrible distances from the earth to the few other life-bearing planets. So what about the races outside?Can we expect that in the future there will be another race of knowledge who may travel across such great distances to visit Earth?Each of these alien races can live for 10,000 years or more, and they may come to visit us.It took almost three years for one of Magellan's small fleets to circumnavigate the Earth for the first time.It was a long voyage, costing almost a tenth of the average human lifespan at the time.If a long-lived alien race had as strong a urge to explore as we do, they might be willing to spend a tenth of their lifespan visiting us. Such a visit may be one of the reasons for the flying saucer.Flying saucers may indeed be spaceships, piloted by an alien race of knowledge, with good or evil intentions, to spy on us.Such an explanation about flying saucers cannot be completely dismissed as absurd, although it is extremely difficult to teach people to believe.During the lifetime of human beings, it will not happen that the races from other stars come to visit.For a foreign race to make such a visit, not only must overcome a great obstacle space, but also must overcome an equally great difficulty time.The alien must find us not only in the right place, but in the right time. The lifespan of our earth has been more than four billion years.Life has existed for about two billion years.Humans have existed for about half a million to one million years.But it was only in the last few thousand years that humans began to think about the nature of the stars; for hundreds of years, humans guessed that there might be other suns besides our own.It is unreasonable to hope that the visits of alien races from other planets will happen during just the short period during which we will be able to learn exactly what kind of race they were and whence they came.Even if there have been such alien visits to Earth in the past (or even if there will be such visits in the future), it is likely that we humans did not exist at that time (or humans were extinct by then).We cannot expect alien races on other planets to find us just here and now; such improbable occurrences are beyond the realm of reasonable hope.The odds of such a visit coming at just the right time are less than one in a million. To show how remote the chances are of two intelligent races on different planets meeting, let us imagine that on some hills in the frozen wilds of Antarctica there existed for a period of a hundred years several species of ants. .And each species of ant only lives for a few hours in a hundred years.There are now several species of ants who have developed powerful means of transport by which they can roam the small areas around their respective hilltops.If any two species of ants are to be taught to meet, they must have arisen on adjacent hills, and must have arisen in the same few hours during a hundred years.It can be seen that the chances of two different ants meeting each other are almost non-existent. We are one of these short-lived races.Our ant nest is the earth, and the Antarctic wilderness is like the boundless space of the universe.So far we are still confined to our own nest, but we are ready to push beyond the confines of the nest.Throughout the ages, up and down, here and there in the universe, other races have spent their short lives on other planets.Most of them are so far away that distance alone would prevent us from ever meeting them.Some races have long since become extinct. When the giant dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, the cultures created by these races had already turned into dust.During our lifetime, some races on other planets may not have become knowledgeable races; by the time they may be able to develop into rational and knowledgeable races in the future, we humans may have disappeared long ago. In the future, we will have the opportunity to encounter races on other planets, and it is inferred that there will be no chance.It will be impossible for us to go to them or expect them to visit.In the vast spaces of the galaxies of the universe lived life; but the life-bearing planets were separated by terrible distances of space and time.We are lost in our little piece of the universe allotted to us in the vastness of space, besieging us and leaving us alone.