GREAT UNKNOWN

Hokitika Guardian, 11 December 1933, Page 8

GREAT UNKNOWN

OTHER WORLDS IN UNIVERSE LONDON, December 4. One of the most significant conclusions of the present century was "that, in the depths of space, there were millions of universes similar to ours, in each of which there might be a thousand and a million planetary systems, said the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Barnes, in a lecture. Was it likely that our Earth was the only member of any planetary system on which intelligent life had appeared? It was surely beyond the limits of probability that a cosmos so vast should have in it but one planet, otherwise in no way exceptional, on which life had appeared. Nature might he wasteful, but that God had made a cosmos so cast and so meaningless passed belief. He postulated that, not as a supernatural act, but as the resxdt of a Divine activity which continually created, the living emerged from the non-living when the cooling Earth was ready to support life. Material conditions on the cooling .Earth-must have been paralleled a vast number of times in the history of the Universe; and on each occasion we might assume ‘ that life had been created.

There was, therefore, he thought, good reason .to believe that planets on which life < had appeared were in the aggregate numerous, though they might be relatively sparse in any particular region of the cosmos. Many such plftiets... must have been formea thousands of millions of years before our Earth, and ho judged that . elsewhere the: mental, moral and spiritual attainment of living organisms must far surpass that reached on-Earth by men.. But, he doubted whether we had any roason to assume that elsewhere there

had normally been a process of physical development parallel to that of Earth. Quite possibly animal types which would appear to us strange and unpleasihg carried the highest kinds of intelligence m distant worlds. If intelligent life ex Tsted and was progressive elsewhere in the Universe, there was no reason why contact with it should not ultimately be made.