Seasonal Essay for October

In the clear skies of October we are encouraged to look upward and marvel at the vastness of the universe. The book, "October Skies", and its derivative movie tell of a teenager with a driving fascination with rocket propulsion. It is by such means that in the far distant future, humankind may break free from a decaying solar system and seek another home. Even now, with robotic travel to Mars and other planets, we are taking the first tentative steps toward that ultimate necessity.

It was in the 1950's that I heard the astronomer Harlow Shapley tell of Edwin Hubble's finding in 1924 that many of those stars we see in such profusion are not suns like ours, but great numbers of clustered suns like our Milky Way galaxy, though far distant from it. Many astronomers think it reasonable to suppose, there being such an enormous number of galaxies, each containing within it such an enormous number of suns, that among these suns must be some with planets which are similar enough to ours to support life as we know it. Already astronomers have detected 490 such extrasolar planets within our own galaxy. It comforts me to think, as George Wald the Harvard physiologist expressed it, that it is possible if not probable that, if our life on earth should somehow destroy itself or not escape our planet home before it self-destructs, there will be life forming somewhere else in some far distant star or galaxy and we wish it well.