Doubt Signals Between Planets

LOCAL ASTRONOMER COMMENTS ON SCIENTISTS' BELIEFS

DIFFERENT FORMS OF LIFE

Other Planets Undoubtedly Inhabited, But Not by Same Kind of Life, Norman S. Snell Believes.

Statements by Marconi, Edison and Tesla that wireless disturbances in the air may possibly be attempts on the part of Mars or some other planet to signal the earth have not aroused much enthusiasm among Watertown people who profess to even a slight knowledge of astronomy, electricity, and kindred subjects.

Although they are extremely skeptical as to the grounds for belief that some other planet is trying to communicate with this planet, they in the same breath hasten to say that in these days of science nothing can be said to be impossible, and that such communication may come to pass some time in the future.

“I don’t take much stock in the talk of wireless communication between this planet and Mars or any other planet,” said Norman S. Snell, of 939 Franklin street, one of the best informed men in Watertown on astronomical subjects. Mr. Snell has a wide knowledge of the heavens and the planets that go to make up the universe.

“It doesn’t seem to me to be reasonable that other planets are inhabited by life such as we have on our own planet,” said Mr. Snell. “Some authorities go so far as to say that all of the planets are inhabited, while some authorities take the opposite view and say that the earth is the only planet that is inhabited.

“Professor Swift, who once had an observatory at Rochester and who was considered an authority, once said that it was an insult to the Creator to believe that of the millions of planets that we know to exist this was the only one that bore life.

“I do not doubt but what the Creator has put life on other planets. There is undoubtably vegetable life and animal life congenial to the climate and the planet. But life such as we have on this planet could not exist on many other planets, because they are much nearer the sun and the heat would be more intense. On other planets the climate would be far colder, since they are farther from the sun.

“But, conceivably, there is some form of life that can exist on these planets. On this planet, there are the Hottentots who live near the equator, and the Eskimos who live in the Arctic regions. The Hottentots could not live in the Arctics, nor could the Eskimos live in the tropics.

“Granted that the other planets were inhabited by some form of life, some possibly higher than ours, the big question would be, if we could communicate, to talk intelligently and understandingly with one another. I can’t conceive that there is the same kind of life on the other planets that we have, and I do not see how the problem of talking intelligently could be solved even if it was possible to communicate.

“But this is a wonderful age. One cannot say that anything is impossible in the light of things that have already taken place. When a man can talk from New York to San Francisco by telephone, and have the wireless take it up from there and send it on to Hawaii, and at the same time have a man on the Eiffel tower in Paris overhear the conversation it is hard to say that anything is impossible.”

Tesla’s experiments over a period of years have become fairly well known, and that scientist avers that he has observed effects which might have been signals from somewhere in inter-stellar space.

“I could not have been deceived by earth vibrations,” Tesla is on record as saying, “mistaking them for signals from afar, because terrestrial vibrations are easily recognized. They could be distinguished absolutely.

“The effects which I received accurately corresponded with disturbances which might have emanated from Mars. I admit that they excited me. I decided that, indeed, they actually came from Mars.

“The sending to and reception from Mars of signals would be an achievement by no means as wonderful as nature’s simple process of making seeds grow in the ground.”