OCR Text |
Show step forward from primitive man who believed that the shining heavenly bodies were devils and supernatural beings. The human race is progressing pro-gressing steadily, mentally, and the goal would seem marvelous if we could picture it. Mankind is sailing slowly, through fog and night, to an unknown destination. n d- Life on Mars . 1 1 MARCONI, working with delicate machinery on his yacht, is unsuccessful at receiving a wireless wire-less message from Mars. He will try again. Mars recently has been the nearest to our earth, since 1909 a trifle of only about -42,000,000 miles away. At times the distance Is 235,000,000 miles. In 1924 the red planet will approach within 37,000,000 miles of earth. When we become be-come conceited about traveling several hundred miles an hour in airplanes, we should ponder the speed of the mysterious bodies we call stars. What would you see if you could travel to Mars in a rocket? To start with, you'd find a planet about half the size of the earth. Mars has to moons. A day and a night lasts 37 minutes longer than on earth. The Martian year is 687 days long. The oceans of Mars are rapidly drying up. It has at least 200 "canals," some seventy-five seventy-five miles wide and 3000 miles long. Our astronomers astron-omers claim they see, not these canals, but the vegetation that sprouts up along them in springtime. spring-time. The difference in gravity, along with other peculiarities of environment, causes our scientists to believe that if people live on Mars they are from 12 to IS feet tall. All these scientific facts and speculations about Mars are interesting. More interesting is man's ability to reach out through space so many millions mil-lions of miles and gather these pieces of direct and circumstantial evidence. The knowledge and machinery with which our scientists accomplish: these feats were acquired patiently and slowly, through many thousands of years, It is a great |