Word: struve
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...planets other than the earth sustain thinking creatures? Philosophers, theologians, scientists, fiction writers and ordinary people have speculated on the question for centuries. Now a widely honored scientist, having pondered long on the subject, makes his answer: yes. Says Russian-born Otto Struve, 60, head of the astronomy department of the University of California at Berkeley: The Milky Way galaxy, the great swarm of stars to which the sun belongs, almost certainly contains millions of planets inhabited by intelligent life...
Stars are formed by condensation out of clouds of gas and dust. There are many different kinds in the galaxy. Most of them are spinning rapidly, but about 10% of them rotate slowly like the sun, which turns only once in about 28 days. Dr. Struve believes that when such stars were formed, a small amount of material was left outside the main body. It gathered into planets whose rapid orbital circling took away from the star most of its energy of rotation. So any star that rotates slowly, says Dr. Struve, is likely to have a brood of planets...
...Proof. Astronomer Struve believes that about one-fiftieth of these planets have had conditions on their surfaces that were favorable for the appearance of life. Assuming that life appears whenever conditions are right, Struve calculates that one billion (one-fiftieth) of the galaxy's 50 billion planets have life of some sort on them now. Not all life is thinking life, but Struve figures that between 1,000,000 and 10 million of the galaxy's billion inhabited planets have creatures on them that are just as intelligent as present day earthlings...
...Struve admits freely that he cannot prove his conjectures. No existing telescope or other instrument can see planets revolving around any star but the sun, and there is little possibility that such planets, if they exist, can ever be observed accurately enough to determine whether they are inhabited...
...Bridge. Struve is asked why the inhabitants of distant planets, some of whom must be higher in the evolutionary scale than humans are, have never visited the earth or communicated with it. He replies that there may be a limit to the degree of intelligence that life can attain. This limit may make it impossible for the wisest inhabitants of the galaxy to bridge the enormous distances between planetary systems...