The reign of law—Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.
Your chance of drawing No. 1 is 1 to 10. Your chance of drawing 1 and 2 in succession would be 1 in 100. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, and 3 in succession would be one in a thousand. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3, and 4 in succession would be one in 10,000 and so on, until your chance of drawing from No. 1 to No. 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion.
The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.
So many essential conditions are necessary for life to exist on our earth that it is mathematically impossible that all of them could exist in proper relationship by chance on any one earth at one time. Therefore, there must be in nature some form of intelligent direction. If this be true, then there must be a purpose.…
Some astronomers tell us that the chance of two stars passing sufficiently near to each other to develop a pulsating and destructive tide is in the order of millions and that a collision would be so rare that it is beyond calculation. Nevertheless, one of the astronomical theories is that at some time, let us say two billion years ago, a star did pass near enough to our sun to raise terrific tides and throw out into space those objects we know as planets, which appear vast to us but are insignificant astronomically. Among those masses drawn out was that wisp of cosmos which became what we call the earth. It is a body of no importance astronomically, yet it may be demonstrated that it is the most important body so far known to us.
We must presume that the earth is composed of some of the elements which are to be found in the sun and none other. These elements are apportioned on earth in certain percentages, which, so far as the surface is concerned, have been fairly well ascertained. The bulk of the earth is now reduced to very permanent dimensions and its mass has been determined. Its speed in its orbit around the sun is extremely constant. Its rotation on its axis is determined so accurately that a variation of a second in a century would upset astronomical calculations. It is accompanied by a satellite known as the moon, whose motions are determined and whose sequence of variations repeat themselves every 18 1/3 years. Had the bulk of the earth been greater or less, or had its speed been different, it would have been farther from or nearer to the sun, and this different condition would have profoundly affected life of all kinds, including man. So profoundly indeed, that had this earth varied in either respect to any marked degree, life as we know it could not have existed. Of all the planets, the earth is, so far as we now know, the only one whose relation to the sun makes our sort of life possible.
Mercury, because of astronomical laws, turns only one side to the sun, rotating on its axis only once in its complete revolution of the sun—Mercury’s year. In consequence, one side of Mercury must be a desert furnace and the other frigid. Its mass and gravity are so small that all traces of an atmosphere seem to have escaped. If any atmosphere does remain, it is tearing in unbelievable tornadoes from one side of the planet to the other. Venus is a mystery, with dense vapor for atmosphere, and its id demonstrated to be absolutely uninhabitable by any known living thing. Mars is the one exception and may bear life like ours, either in its beginnings or on the point of extinction. But life on Mars must be dependent upon other gases than oxygen, and especially hydrogen; as they seem to have escaped. There can be no water on Mars. Its temperature averages too low for vegetation as we know it. The moon could not hold an atmosphere and is now absolutely uninhabitable. During its night it is extremely cold, and during its long day it is a very hot cinder. The other planets are too far from the sun for life to be established, and because of other insuperable difficulties cannot support life in any form. It is now generally agreed that there has never been, and can never be, life in any known form on any planet except our earth. Therefore, we have in the very beginning as a home for human beings a little planet which, after a series of vicissitudes during two or more billion years, has become a suitable place for the existence of plant and animal life, of which we find the crowning achievement to be man.
The earth rotates on its axis in 24 hours or at the rate of about 1,000 miles an hour. Suppose it turned at the rate of 100 miles an hour. Why not? Our days and nights would then be ten times as long as now. The hot sun of summer would then burn up our vegetation each long day and every sprout would freeze in such a night. The sun, the source of all life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms up just enough and not too much. It is marvelously stable, and during millions of years has varied so little that life as we know it has survived. If the temperature on earth had changed so much as 50 degrees on the average for a single year, all vegetation would be dead and man with it, roasted or frozen. The earth travels around the sun at the rate of 18 miles each second. If the rate of revolution had been, say, six miles or forty miles each second, we would be too far from or too close to the sun for our form of life to exist.
Stars vary in size, as we all know. One is so large that if it were our sun, the orbit of the earth would be millions of miles inside its surface. Stars vary in the type of radiation. Many of their rays would he deadly to every known form of life. The intensity and volume of this radiation is anywhere from less than that of our sun to 10,000 times as great. If our sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would have been reduced to dust long ago if we had ever been born as a protoplasmic spark of life. So our sun is about right for our life among millions of others which are not.
The earth is tilted at an angle of 23 degrees. This gives us our seasons. If it had not been tilted, the poles would be in eternal twilight. The water vapor from the ocean would move north and south, piling up continents of ice and leaving possibly a desert between the equator and the ice. Glacial rivers would erode and roar through canyons into the salt-covered bed of the ocean to form temporary pools of brine. The weight of the unbelievably vast mass of ice would depress the poles, causing our equator to bulge or erupt or at least show the need of a new waistline belt. The lowering of the ocean would expose vast new land areas and diminish the rainfall in all parts of the world, with fearful results.
We seldom realize that all life is confined to the space between the snow of the mountain tops and the heat of the earth’s interior. This narrow stratum as compared with the diameter of the earth is but one half the thickness of one leaf of a thousand-page book. The history of all creatures is written on this tissue-thin surface. If all the air was liquefied it would cover the earth to a depth of 35 feet or 1 part in 600,000 of the distance to the earth’s center, a close adjustment!
The moon is 240,000 miles away, and the tides twice a day are usually a gentle reminder of its presence. Tides of the ocean run as high as 60 feet in some places, and even the crust of the earth is twice a day bent outward several inches by the moon’s attraction. All seems so regular that we do not grasp to any degree the vast power that lifts the whole area of the ocean several feet and bends the crust of the earth, seemingly so solid. Mars had a moon—a little one-only 6,000 miles away from it. If our moon was, say 50,000 miles away instead of its present respectable distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all the lowland of all the continents would be submerged by a rush of water so enormous that even the mountains would soon be eroded away, and probably no continent could have risen from the depths fast enough to exist today. The earth would crack with the turmoil and the tides in the air would create daily hurricanes.
If the continents were washed away, the average depth of water over the whole earth would be about a mile and a half and life could not exist except perhaps in the abysmal depth of the ocean, where it would feed upon itself till extinct. Science seems to sustain the theory that this condition did exist during the general chaos before the earth solidified. By well recognized laws, the very tides pushed the moon farther and farther away and at the same time slowed the rotation of the earth from less than a six-hour day to one of twenty-four. So the gentle moon has now become the lover’s delight and is in splendid adjustment, which promises to remain safe for a billion years or so. The same astronomers also believe that far in the future, by the same astronomical laws, the moon will return to the earth, burst when close enough and glorify our dead world with rings like those of Saturn.
Out of a chaotic mixture of the elements torn from the sun at 12,000 degrees temperature, and thrown at every conceivable velocity into limitless space, has come our solar system. To chaos has come order so exact that the place any part will occupy at any time can be predicted to the second. The balance is so perfect that it has not varied in a billion years and points to eternity. All this through the reign of law. By this same law the established order as we see it in the solar system is repeated elsewhere.—A. CRESSY MORRISON,Man Does Not Stand Alone, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1944 (Rev. ed., 1947), Chapter 1, “Our Unique World,” pp. 13–19.
