Is Venus inhabited by people or is it Mars? This article, published in 1911, seems to favor the idea that Venus is inhabited because so many leading astronomers at that time were also humoring the idea of happy Venusians awaiting some sort of friendly signal from the Earthlings.
Ancient Quarrels Over Venus Repeated
What do you know about Venus?
No, not the ancient goddess who was long on good looks and short on clothes, if her current pictures be authentic. Nor yet the famous lady from Milo, she of the perfect proportions, whose arms were stretched out so long across the centuries before she was found that the limbs broke off under their own weight and have never been recovered. Venus, the planet Venus, the bright star of the heavens, is the subject of the query with which this story begins.
Confess, now, you don’t know much about Venus. Unless you are an amateur or professional astronomer you probably don’t know much more about Venus than the fact that there is such a star and that it is mentioned sometimes in the patent medicine almanacs as being the morning or the evening star of some day in particular. But you need not feel ashamed. Most of your fellow citizens don’t know much more about Venus than you do.
Sisters and brothers, it behooves us to read up on Venus. Professor Thomas Jefferson Jackson See says there are or may be folks on Venus waiting for us to send them greetings or trying in their Venusian way to communicate with us. Peering through his big telescope, Professor See has noted on Venus conditions which make him think and declare boldly that the planet is not only habitable, but is probably inhabited by some sort of intelligent beings. Professor See has embodied or imbedded his views on Venus in a volume recently issued on “Researches on the Evolution of the Stellar Systems.” This is asserted to be “the only great standard treatise on cosmogony ever published and one of the most epoch making works on astronomy that has appeared since the age of the Greeks.” So you see it is a great work, and it is attracting much attention among the wise men whose business it is to study the heavens and tell us the latest news from Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and the other planets.
Professor See’s standing in the scientific world is high, so high that his work has commanded the most respectful attention among astronomers and other learned folk. He is a master of arts, a master of literature, a master of science and a doctor of philosophy, and he has charge of the United States naval observatory at Mare Island, California. When, therefore, he speaks about Venus it is with the voice of great authority. He says:
“And just as the earth never rotated very rapidly and has not been appreciably retarded by the effects of tidal friction, so also Venus likewise has escaped a corresponding retardation of axial rotation and still rotates in 23 hours 21 minutes, as has been held by observers since the days of Cassini, 1667. Accordingly it follows that the conditions on this planet are more like those of the earth than any other body of our system. Mars rotates forty-one minutes slower than the earth, while Venus rotates thirty-five minutes faster, and as the former planet is about as much outside of the earth’s orbit as the latter is inside there is seen to be a profound physical cause which has operated to establish the period of 33 hours 21 minutes, first inferred from observations taken over two centuries ago. The planet Venus therefore is habitable, and probably inhabited by some kind of intelligent beings.”
According to mythology, Mars and Vulcan got into quite a row over the goddess Venus. It is a sad duty to record that in these modern enlightened days two eminent astronomers are differing about Venus. While Professor See asserts in his big book his firm belief that Venus is habitable, or, in fact, inhabited by sentient beings, Professor Percival Lowell, he of Mars fame, makes assertions which if supported will render Professor See’s position quite untenable. According to Professor Lowell, Mars is the only planet outside of our own that contains the possibility of organized life. He declares that Mercury and Venus are in their dotage as planets, being already dead and dried up worlds; that Mars is rapidly reaching the stage when life no longer will be possible on its surface and that our own beloved earth is next on the toboggan of life, almost ready, geologically speaking, to take the swift slide that ends in lifeless oblivion, beyond the hope of physical resurrection. “Only self centered ignorance sustains our self conceit that we are something peculiar in nature’s scheme,” says Professor Lowell. “Our peculiarity consists in so thinking. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are too young yet [to sustain life]. Venus and Mercury, though ostentatiously open, are too old to have anything to reveal.”
Professor See’s position is also held by Professor Pickering, the famous Harvard astronomer. “There are many physical reasons for thinking that if any other planet besides the earth is inhabited it is probably Venus,” says the Cambridge man.
It is a pretty quarrel as it stands, with issues and reasoning too vast and too complicated to be understood of the ordinary intellect. In it are involved matters of the deepest religious belief as well as questions of the utmost earthly seriousness. If the earth’s life is within measurable distance of annihilation – reckoning time by geological eras, remember, not by our infinitesimal years – if Venus has preceded us on the way to cosmical death, if Jupiter is, as Professor Lowell asserts, a “huge baby of a world still in its swaddling clothes,” with possibilities of developing life as we know it or in some other form, who shall measure the effects of these theories on the views which our remote descendants shall take of life on this earth, in other worlds and in the hereafter?
Source: The evening times. (Grand Forks, N.D.), 25 Feb. 1911.
