EARTH AN INFANT

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 207, 21 November 1927, Page 12

EARTH AN INFANT

ONLY 2,000.000.000 YEARS SOLID SUN A YOUNGSTER. TOO That the earth is still in its infancy and that we are living not at the end of time but at the very beginning, are among the conclusions reached by Dr. J. H. Jeans in a fascinating article in Part I. of Harmsworth’s Universal History, a new and intensely interesting survey of human progress. Dr Jeans is the distinguished astronomer and secretary of the Royal Society, t 0 whom Sir Oliver Lodge recently ’referred as one of the six greatest men in the world. The earth. Dr. Jeans believes. solidified about 2,000 million years ago, having in its liquid, or partially liquid, state given birth to the moon, under the tidal influence either of the sun or of the wandering star which in a similar way was responsible for the birth of the earth itself: “There is a large chance that the youngest solar system in the whole colony of stars is our own. . . . Present disharmonies in our planet are not to be compared to the pains which presage senile decay; compare them rather to the pains of the infant cutting its first teeth.” Compared with the sun, some seven million million years old, the age of the earth is negligible. The sun is a youngster compared with the 200 million million years of the oldest known stars. What are the chances of life on other planets? "Civilisation on earth is, let us say, 10,000 years old. If solar systems (as has been calculated) come into being at the rate of one every 6,000 million years, and if each contains ten planets suitable for life and destined ultimately to be the abode of life, then civilisations come into existence at an average rate of one every 600 million years.” If there is civilised life in any other planet it must, therefore, be many times older than our own. Astronomical figures dazzle. Light, for example, from the nebula Andromeda, takes a million years to reach tho earth. It started, in fact, when our remote ancestors of 30,000 generations ago walked the earth.