◆ SpookStack

oo of two stars would be an extremely rare event, it followed that there would be very few other planetary systems in the universe and, in- deed, perhaps this was the only one. Religious belief said, further- more, that life was a gift bestowed by God. This was a relatively undisputed point since no scientific data existed to bridge the gap between non-living and living materials. The situation today is vastly changed in these respects. The most widely held theory of stellar formation would predict the formation of planetary systems to be a natural consequence of stellar evolution. On this basis, most stars would possess planetary systems, and the number of habitable planets in our galaxy would be tremendous. Our biggest telescopes cannot resolve planets at the distances even of the nearest stars, so no direct confirmation is yet available. In my own mind, however, the wide prevalence of multiple stars is an overwhelm- ing hint in support of this theory. In addition, the biological sciences have almost completely traced a series of natural occurrences which lead from inanimate molecules to elementary living viruses. Thus, we have the current scientific theory and data not only that there are a huge number of planets in the galaxy, but that life is quite likely to arise spontaneously on a large number of these. This, of course, does not necessarily imply intelligent life. Modern theology is not necessarily incompatible with this, The description in Genesis of the Creation cer- tainly is a better picture of the current theory than of a stellar collision, and since God only spent seven days on this system, He has clearly had lots of time to create many more systems. Even granting a probable existence of much life in the galaxy, there is still the question of whether another intelligent race exists in our solar system. There are, of course, two methods of its establishment in our system. One of these is that it originated on some other planet, for instance, Mars, Some of the spectacular markings of Mars have been interpreted as indicating intelligence. In particular, the famous ''Canali" are rather narrow, and always run from one prominent marking to another, frequently with round splotches at intersections. As far as I know, no one has discovered a '"'Canali'' which goes nowhere. This has quite understandably stimulated much conversation, In fact, a number of decades ago, when scientists thought that any life on other stellar systems was very remote, they seemed to feel that intelligent life “UF FICIAL USE ONLY