chp#04

• It is improbable that one particular star will ever come close to another, because there is a natural distance of millions miles from one star to another.
• Jean's explanation of how the planets came to be formed from the sun

  1. Some two thousand million years ago a second star wandering blindly through space happened to come with hailing distance of the sun

  2. This star raised tides on the surface of the sun-forming mountain of prodigious (unusual) height

  3. Before this star began to recede (move away) its tidal pull had become so strong and powerful that the mountain was torn into pieces and threw off small fragments of itself

  4. These small fragments have been circulating around their parent sun ever since and our earth is one of them
• A planet, such as the earth, derives its warmth from the radiation, which the sun pours down over its surface.
• Jeans imagines the first forms of life on earth to have started in simple organism whose vital capacities consisted of little beyond reproduction and death.
• Our first impressions of an astronomer's picture of the universe likely to make us feel that humanity is insignificant, because of extreme loneliness and material insignificance of our home in space.
• Jeans justifies his assertion that 'the universe appears to be actively hostile to life like our own by saying that for the most part of the empty space is so cold and life would be frozen and there are many parts in space that are so hot as life is impossible on it.
• A planetary system seem to be the only kind of environment on which life could originate, because it has all physical conditions necessary for life.
• The temperature of most of space is zero about 484 degrees of frost on Fahrenheit scale.
• It seem incredible to Jeans that the universe was designed primarily to produce life like our own, had it been so, surely we might have expected to find a better proportion between the magnitude of mechanism and the amount of product.