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Show LIFE ON MARS 1 Marconi, working with delicate ma-' chinery on his yacht, is unsuccessful at receiving a wireless message from Mare Qe will try again Mars recently has been the nearest to our earth since 1909 a trifle of onlv about 42.000.O0O miles away. At time? the distance is 235.000,000 miles. In 1924 the red planet will approach ap-proach within 37.000,000 miles of earth When we become conceited about traveling several hundred miles an hour in airplanes, we should ponder the speed of the mysterious bodies we call stars Ttue philoposhy is humility In the realization of the infinite wonders of the universe, compared with 'he -pork, lium.initv What would you see if you could travel io Mars in n rockrt ' To si art with, you would find a plan et about half the size of the 'arth Mars has two moons. A dav and a night lasts 37 minutes longer than on earth. The Martian year Is .s 7 days long The oceans of Mars are rapidl dr ing up it has at least 200 "canals,' some 75 miles wide aud 3000 miles long Our astronomers claim the see. not these canals but the vegeta Hon that sprouts up along them In springtime. Temperature on Mars averages 60 degrees. A rock thai Weighs 100 pounds on earth would weigh only 38 pounds od Mars This difference in gravity, alone With other peculiarities of environment, environ-ment, causes our scientists to belixt that If jjeople llvo cm Mars the are from 12 to 15 feel tall. All these scientific tacts and speculations specu-lations about Mars are interesting More Interesting is man's ability to j reach out through space so many mil , lions or miles and gather these pieces of direct and circumstantial evidence. The knowledge and machinery with which our scientists accomplish these feat- were acquired patiently and slowly, through many thousands of years. It is a great step forward from primitive man who believed that the shining heavenly bodies were devils ! and supernatural beings. The human ! race is progressing steadily, mentally, : and the goal would seem marvelous ii we could picture it. Mankind is sailing slowlv, through I fog and night, to an unknown destl- 1 nat inn The American Association of Yari able Star observers, an organization composed largely of amateur astrono mers, is conducting a nightly patrol of the sky under the guidance of Har vard college observatory. Just at present the telescopes are much pointed toward a variable star known in the catalogues as S S Cygnl. The lnterosting point about S S Cygnl is its irregular habit of changing chang-ing in brightness Somewhere out in space It hangs a great blazing sun. perhaps many times larger than our own sun We see it ordinarily as B star of leas than twelfth magnitude. Suddenly all in a few hours time It will increase in brightness to between be-tween the eighth and ninth magni tudes It will hold this brightness for a period of some days or perhaps a week or two, then will taper off in its usual dimness and remain dim tor , about three months. An increase of four magnitudes In brightness means that the star at its j bright stage is giving off 43 times ae much light as in Its dim 3lage. Imagine Imag-ine what would happen to this earth if our own sun began to behar in such a manner. If the sun increased as much as one magnitude in bright ness, all life, such as we know it. WOUld start to shrivel up and die An j increase of four magnitudes In the brightness of the sun would bake the earth to a crisp When a bright sun, revolving abou' another sun that is not so brlghi, comes into our line of sight, all that wo see is a single star apparently increasing in-creasing in magnitude But the spec troscope tells the story of whether we are looking at one star, or two stars, or a number of stars revolving about a common center of gravity S S. Cygnl Is a single star and its : changes in brightness are therefore , not due to eclipses, but come from within The astronomers, patlentlv i working to solve these riddles, are on ! the trail of the secret of the universe, j One small fact, finally gleaned from , endless research, provides the ke ' wiih which to unlock many other facts and gradually we learn more about I the universe of which our sun and our earth form so Inconsiderable a part |