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Updated: June 25, 2025
In attempting to judge the habitability of a planet such as Venus we must first, as far as possible, generalize the conditions that govern life and restrict its boundaries. On the earth we find animated existence confined to the surface of the crust of the globe, to the lower and denser strata of the atmosphere, and to the film of water that constitutes the oceans.
Fact is admittedly often stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and there are no facts that appeal more powerfully to the imagination than do those of astronomy. Technical books on astronomy usually either ignore the subject of the habitability of the planets, or dismiss it with scarcely any recognition of the overpowering human interest that it possesses.
But what renders this work especially interesting to all intelligent readers is, that the author has here, for the first time, fully set forth his views both as to the habitability of Mars and as to its being actually inhabited by beings comparable with ourselves in intellect.
There has been cumulative evidence that Jupiter's satellites obey the same law that governs the rotation of our moon, viz., that which compels them always to keep the same face turned toward their primary, and this would clearly affect, although it might not preclude, their habitability.
"Oh, yes," replied Thorwald, "we have long had evidence almost as positive as your presence here, fresh from one of our sister planets. It will give me great pleasure to tell you of some of our marvelous achievements in astronomy. The doctor says he would like to believe in the habitability of other worlds; he must believe in it before I am through if he has any faith in me.
It was precisely the same attitude which brought Palestine, once rich and populous, to its present desert condition, and which destroyed the fertility and habitability of vast areas in northern Africa and elsewhere in so many of the older regions of the world. The conservation of our natural resources is a question of primary importance on the economic side.
At any rate there is plenty of material for bonfires. And since other stores are practically unknown above the six-thousand-foot winter limit of habitability, it follows that each lumber-mill is a magnet that attracts its own community of these visitors to the out of doors. As early as the beginning of July the first outfit drifted in.
In truth, those who think that life in the solar system is confined to the earth alone insist upon an almost exact reproduction of terrestrial conditions as a sine qua non to the habitability of any other planet. Venus, they think, is too hot, and Mars too cold, as if life were rather a happy accident than the result of the operation of general laws applicable under a wide variety of conditions.
If I were a naturalist I should tell him, after many illustrious savants, that Nature furnishes us on earth with examples of animals living in very different conditions of habitability; that fish breathe in a medium mortal to the other animals; that amphibians have a double existence difficult to explain; that certain inhabitants of the sea live in the greatest depths, and support there, without being crushed, pressures of fifty or sixty atmospheres; that some aquatic insects, insensible to the temperature, are met with at the same time in springs of boiling water and in the frozen plains of the Polar Ocean in short, there are in nature many means of action, often incomprehensible, but no less real.
When you have demonstrated the suitability of apergy," he continued, "and the habitability of Jupiter and Saturn ,which, with their five and eight moons, respectively, and rings thrown in, must both be vastly superior to our little second-rate globe we will see what can be done towards changing our orbit, and if we cannot swing a little nearer to our new world or worlds.
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