The talk Olaf Stapledon gave at Birkenhead High School on 1 March 1933 and again at Quarry Bank School in March 1934 — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences, examples, and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.
The occasion is better evidenced than for most of the surviving note-sets: the first sheet carries, in Stapledon's own hand, "1·3·33 Birkenhead High School / 3·34 Quarry Bank Schl." — two school deliveries, on 1 March 1933 and in March 1934, the second dated to the month only. Both are sheet evidence, written on the manuscript itself; no external record of either occasion is held, and nothing on the sheets says how the talk differed between the two schools.
The manuscript (Liverpool University Library OS/F13/9) runs to eighteen sheets: a title sheet with a running order (in which "Moon" is entered and then struck), note sheets with substantial afterthoughts on the versos, an "Upshot" sheet whose page number and opening lines are in the manuscript's paler pencil, a one-sheet recapitulation of the whole talk, and a Martins Bank compliments slip that closes the folder as an archival object. Whether the paler-pencil layer belongs to the 1934 re-delivery the cover records is not known. Two readings remain disputed — a word on the Venus preparation sheet ("X rays", with "Xem" the recorded alternative) and a marginal phrase about Jovian natives — and they are quoted here with their uncertainty acknowledged rather than resolved.
The argument is a single sustained thought-experiment. A newspaper prediction of the earth's destruction three hundred years hence is imagined; the psychology of the response is sketched — thrilled at first, then "eat drink & be merry", then a gradual realization that "A great adventure must go on" — and the rest of the talk works out what acting on that duty would cost: ether ships, the dead Moon, molten Mercury, cloud-hidden Venus, cold and poverty-stricken Mars, the giant planets, and finally Haldane's question whether life needs planets at all.
In the corpus the talk matters as early evidence. The project's lecture concordance places its third sheet in three threads at once: the ladder "worm - monkey - man - superman", the "sacred duty to preserve mankind", and the hedonist shrug that the sceptic of Humanism and Superhumanism (South Place, 30 December 1934) will repeat. The concordance's synthesis reads such school and club talks as showing that the 1934 lecture "did not invent the position; it added the worship": here the futurist ethics stands complete, in a plain and almost cheerful register, with none of the numinous vocabulary. The planetary matter itself — settlers adapted to their worlds, "acclimatize babies", the ethics of colonisation — returns in the 1948 British Interplanetary Society lecture, with cautions this schoolroom version does not carry.
What is not known: how the talk was received; whether the sheets served further, unrecorded deliveries; which layer of the manuscript belongs to which school; and the sources of the astronomical figures. The three-hundred-year horizon, the telescope that "may tell much more", and the canals "very doubtful" are the notes' own hedges, and this edition keeps them.
Suppose that one morning the newspapers carried a startling heading: the destruction of the Earth predicted — three hundred years hence. The cause might be a collision with some wandering body; or the Earth itself might be going to burst; or the Moon might be going to fall upon us. None of these things, so far as we know, is at all likely. But the supposition is a useful exercise for the imagination, and I ask you to entertain it.
How mankind would take it
At first, I think, everybody would be thrilled. But three hundred years is a very long time to ordinary human feeling, and the catastrophe would soon come to seem too remote to be taken seriously. Many would shrug and say, in effect, "Let us eat, drink and be merry." Only gradually, generation by generation, would the reality of the thing sink in.
But some people would want man to continue. "A great adventure must go on," they would say. Man is only about a million years old; his possible future, if the race can be preserved, is to be reckoned in thousands of millions of years. He might become a much finer being than he now is. Life has climbed from the worm to the monkey and from the monkey to man; it might climb from man to something deserving the name of superman. Those who felt this vividly would feel it as a sacred duty to preserve mankind. They would say: we must find another world, and send a few men and women to it. Only a few could go; the rest must die with the Earth. And gradually, I believe, this view would become commoner.
One thing must be said at the outset. The Earth today is a disunited world, absorbed in war and trade. The task I have imagined could not be attempted by a squabbling collection of nations, for all the resources of the whole world would be needed. If mankind were ever to undertake it, mankind must unite.
The task
How should we set about it? There would be four main stages. First, study the planets, with telescopes and every other instrument. Second, invent what I shall call "ether ships" — vessels to take us away from the Earth. Third, explore the possible planets and choose. Fourth, prepare mankind for its new home — and prepare the home for mankind.
Travelling in space is not impossible, if we really wanted to do it. The first vessels would presumably work on the principle of the "rocket to the moon", though they would have to be huge ships, driven by some explosive mixture, or perhaps by subatomic energy. Once beyond the air, a ship needs no continuous push merely to keep moving; power is wanted only for steering, and for stopping at the far end. There would be the danger of meteors, and the danger of incandescence. There is the problem of air — compressed oxygen, carried in liquid form; food and water are not in themselves serious problems. But the voyage would last for months or years, and there must be machinery for heating and for cooling.
And we must not suppose the thing would be done at the first attempt. There would be many experiments, and there would be tragic failures. A ship might break. It might lose its air. It might collide with something, or fail to return. There would be failures from cold and from heat, and failures of steering.
The first voyage
Picture the first ether voyage. Would the start come with a bump? The horizon would contract, as it does from an aeroplane; the Earth would show itself circular, or gibbous, or crescent, according to the light. As the air thinned, the sky would darken, until stars and sun stood in it together. The Earth would shrink behind the travellers, and its gravity would weaken; inside the ship there might have to be artificial gravity — magnetic boots, perhaps.
The first journey would be a trial trip only — an approach to the Moon. The travellers might circumnavigate it; or they might land, though they could not go out, because there is no air.
As a home the Moon is useless, save for metals and minerals. No air to breathe, no water; all rock and mountains. And the loss of its air can be explained. The molecules of a gas are perpetually jumping about at great speeds, and in the outermost layer of an atmosphere some jump so fast that a small world's gravity cannot hold them. They fly off — compare the fizz of soda water. The Earth is strong enough to keep its air; the Moon is not; and no small world is possible as a lasting home. Could we give the Moon an atmosphere — tranship air from the Earth? It seems hopeless; and if we could, the gift would trickle away again in a few thousand years.
Mercury and Venus
Survey the planets, then, according to present knowledge — remembering that our knowledge is very incomplete, and that the new 200-inch telescope may tell us much more.
Mercury is useless. It is too small to hold an atmosphere, and it keeps one face always to the sun, as the Moon does to us. On the hot side lead would melt; on the cold side there is extreme frost. The ether ships themselves would melt on the way there; perhaps they could be refrigerated, for a brief exploration; but Mercury is no home.
Venus is more promising. It is roughly as big as the Earth, and it has an atmosphere, under dense cloud. But there is no free oxygen to breathe, and so Venus in its present state is useless too. Imagine the ether ship's hot voyage, and the long sinking through the cloud — onto what surface? Sea? Islands? We do not know.
Why should Venus have no free oxygen? Because oxygen combines too easily — it is, so to speak, too friendly an element — and left to itself it disappears into compounds. Then why is there oxygen on Earth? Because plants keep pouring it into the air faster than it can combine, and faster than the animals breathe it. On Venus, then, there are presumably no plants of our sort, and no animals dependent on them: a dead world. Why did life never begin there? Possibly there is some other sort of life, needing no oxygen; we must not assume that everything alive must be built on the terrestrial plan. And the inference runs the other way too: wherever free oxygen is found, vegetation exists.
If we chose Venus, it would have to be prepared. First, exploration with settlement in view. Second, electrolysis stations, splitting water to set oxygen free — the hydrogen let jump off the planet, though some might return, with danger of explosions. Third, plants from Earth, specially bred for the place. Fourth, the acclimatising of men to the heat and the other unfamiliar conditions. Fifth, colonisation — and here is the sting: most men and women would be left behind to die. There is a food problem too, for there would be no food there; the colonists must wait for terrestrial vegetation to spread, and might not have time — though above the clouds there is a wealth of sunlight, which might be made to yield synthetic food. There may be storms, since Venus lies so near the sun; the sky beneath the cloud may be a bright white; there may even be native life.
And in due course generations would be born on Venus who had never seen the Earth. What future would they make? Class war and national war under a new sky? Or a new start?
Mars
Mars is much smaller than the Earth. It has an atmosphere, but not much — thinner than the air at the top of Everest. It has oxygen, but only some fifteen per cent of ours; water vapour, but very little. It is far from the sun and very cold: at the equator at noon, at best a "cold bright day"; in winter, colder than the arctic. We could not live there in the open. But might we acclimatise babies? The policy would be to set up an ether-ship station, an anchorage, and from that sheltered base gradually produce a population that could bear the planet.
What would the explorers find? Mostly desert — reddish sand or rock; probably large districts of something like vegetation, perhaps feathery, greenish in spring and brown in winter; polar caps, seasonal, perhaps partly carbon dioxide — the south cap vanishes in its summer. Could Mars support much life? There is a water shortage, an air shortage, a shortage of the materials of life, and above all a light shortage.
Then there are the famous "canals" — straightish lines running out from the green parts. Lowell says they may be the work of intelligent beings, irrigating a desert world. But all this is very doubtful. If there were Martians, the explorers might be resisted; there might be war. We have no idea what Martians would be like — very different from us, as Wells imagined in The War of the Worlds — and the men might simply be destroyed.
Even apart from resistance, the problems crowd in. Food, in the new world: could we eat the Martian vegetables, if there are such things? They might poison us. Could we grow our own? Under that cold and that feeble light it would be difficult. Coal and oil? Perhaps the settlers must burn the Martian vegetation itself. No water power; no wind power; no seas to navigate. A poverty-stricken world. Yet some things would be easy there. Flying would be hard in one way — the air is too thin to hold up a plane — and easy in another, for gravity is slight. Athletics would be easy: a man might jump like a grasshopper.
The remaining planets
The asteroids are too small — from perhaps ten miles across to five hundred — with no atmosphere, and too cold; on the least of them a vigorous jump might carry a man off altogether. Jupiter is the opposite case: very big, with gravity so strong that we could hardly stand up; any natives must be minute. It has atmosphere and cloud — whether any oxygen, we do not know — and it is cold, the sun shrunk almost to a mere star. Saturn is worse, for all its ring display and its moons. Uranus is farther still; from Neptune the sun looks like a bright arc lamp; and beyond is Pluto — the lost tribe of worlds.
The upshot of it all
We might colonise Venus and Mars — but only with very different types of human beings; and even if we never colonise them, we may explore them some day.
And the question widens. There have been two old views about life in the universe: that life is possible only here, and that the universe teems with inhabited worlds. In fact planets seem to be rare things. The stars are unimaginably many — grains of sand enough to cover the British Isles fifteen feet deep — but if a planetary system is born only once in every two hundred thousand years or so, there may be only a million of them, and few of their worlds suited to life.
But perhaps we are too quick to assume that life must mean planetary life. J. B. S. Haldane has speculated about stellar life — life in the interiors of the suns themselves. Could a star be, in some sense, a fiery brain? Could there be organisms like the salamanders of legend, at home in the fire? And beyond that, the nebulae — the cosmos itself?
The prerequisites of life, so far as our single case teaches them, are three: a suitable temperature; a flow of available energy, for life cannot continue in a state of complete equilibrium; and diversity enough of circumstance and material for complex organisation to arise. We ought not to define them too narrowly from our own case. And the significance of the whole subject is partly the sober scientific question, but chiefly, I think, what the great prediction does to the imagination: it makes us see the Earth as one world among many, our tenancy as a thing that may end, and mankind — worm, monkey, man, perhaps superman — as an adventure worth preserving.