KinSource - Tale of the Week - Is The Earth Being Watched?

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The Minneapolis Tribune, March 6, 1902, p. 12

Is The Earth Being Watched?

By GARRETT P. SERVISS.

It is a peculiar sensation to feel that eyes are watching us from another world - eyes belonging to mortal beings like ourselves.

The earth suddenly presents itself to us from a new point when we consider that people, looking at it from afar, as passengers on the deck of a steamer survey a distant hull, may be debating among themselves the question whether a planet so variant in many respects from their own can really be inhabited.

It is the inhabitants of the planet Venus who now have an opportunity to survey our world more advantageously than we are able to survey any planet in the solar system. No astronomical event that ever occurs for us can possess quite the interest that must be excited by the periodical advance of the earth into the midnight sky of Venus. That phenomenon is now appearing to them.

Every night the earth rises higher and glows more brilliantly among stars of Leo, as seen by the people of Venus, and in the heart of the winter our planet passes through the mid-heavens of our watchers, beaming down upon them at midnight with a splendor far in excess of that of any star that we ever see, while close by this gleaming abode of Adam's descendents, "hanging in a golden chain," they will perceive our faithful attendant the moon. Venus has no moon, and ours, plainly visible to them with the naked eye, must be a source of ceaseless speculation to the good folk of that planet.

It is because Venus' orbit lies inside the orbit of the earth that her inhabitants enjoy an unrivalled view of a foreign world, a view so much finer than any we can get that it would be worth the while of a terrestial astronomer to visit Venus for no other purpose than that of looking back at the earth and the moon glowing in the zenith.

When they are nearest to one another, only about 26,000,000 miles apart, on Feb. 14, Venus is almost directly between the sun and the earth, so that, for two reasons, we are unable to see her at all, first because she has her back to us, her illuminated face being, of course, toward the sun, and, second, because in the glare of the sunlight surrounding her she is beyond our powers of vision even if that side of her globe turned our way were illuminated.

But the inhabitants of Venus have no such difficulties to contend against. At the very moment when they are nearest the earth, they see this globe directly opposite to the sun, high in the midnight heavens, dazzling and beautiful in the extreme, showing its full round face completely lighted by the sunshine, exhibiting the various hues of continents, oceans, grassy prairies, vast equatorial forests, yellow deserts and blinding snowfields, over which will drift the ever varying forms of clouds.

And close at hand, as if to heighten and set off the beauty of this imperial planet, adorned with so many tokens of abounding life, they will see the silver gleaming moon, cloudless, colorless and unchanging.

If we are deeply stirred by the problems presented by the other worlds around us, the people of Venus, with such a spectacle exhibited every 19 months before their eyes, must experience a ten-fold interest in that subject. Granting them intelligence equal to ours, they surely have telescopes, or instruments eqivalent to telescopes, and with such instruments they cannot long remain in doubt as to the habitability of the earth.

Very likely they settled that question in the affirmative long ago, and if there is any planet in the solar system from which we could reasonably hope to receive a message of greeting and brotherhood sent across etherial space, it is certainly the planet Venus.

This month they are as near to us as they can get, their telescopes will behold a scene that no intelligent being could view without enthusiasm, and then, if it is in their power, they will transmit their message. They may have been trying it for centuries, and wondering whether it is their efforts that are ineffective, or our powers of comprehension that are stupid.

Or they may know that the thing is impossible, and may have settled down to content themselves with enjoying the beauty of the wonderful spectacle, and with writing books about us and drawing imaginary portraits of us. But, in any event, they cannot keep their eyes or their minds off the earth whenever it becomes their midnight star.