The Earth Grows Warmer?

What is happening to the universe --and how much longer will man survive? Many astrophysicists give man a few billion years more, but believe that his days are numbered as the earth grows cooler. Last week these orthodox views were openly disputed by London's famed Biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Writing in the American Scientist, Haldane advanced a "new theory of the past." Haldane's theory rests on a hypothesis of relativity developed in the '30s by British Cosmologist E. A. Milne. (Most of Milne's reasoning is far too deep for anyone but astrophysicists -- and Professor Haldane.) Milne suggested that time, like space, may be relative. Scientists, he said, have got themselves into a mess of contradictions by using only one time measure: the "dynamical" system, which everyone understands because it is based on his own experiences with matter. To make the behavior of light and the movements of galaxies more intelligible, why not use a "kinematical" system of time measurement, based on atomic vibration? Milne's highly specialized reasoning led him to this conclusion: in its first kinematical year the earth was 70 meters from the sun, and it has been moving slowly away ever since.

Bigger & Better Mountains? From Milne's hypothesis, Haldane leaped to some startling deductions. Most startling: that the earth's crust, far from cooling off, is actually getting warmer -- it is generating more heat by radioactivity (radiations from the earth's elements) than it is losing by conduction to the atmosphere.

As evidence, he cites the fact that mountain-building (presumably caused by heat) has increased: "During the cycle which now appears to be near its close the earth appears to have been more vigorous in its behavior than at any time during the last 800 or 900 million years."

Haldane thinks that man may expect "bigger and better mountain ranges--and bigger and better earthquakes--in the future than in the past." He adds that the earth will continue to get warmer for about a billion years.

As for man, the Professor thinks he is likely to become more & more energetic, find the earth more & more stimulating. In the dim eons of prehistoric time, animals were unable even to crawl (because of lack of enough energy in their cells), and oxygen is a comparative newcomer (1,500,000,000 years ago) to the earth.

As Haldane reconstructs cosmic history, the galaxies in their present form are some 500 billion years old; the earth and other planets began to part from the sun about 400 billion years ago; solidification came much later (the oldest known rock is a mere four billion years old); life on earth was impossible before three billion B.C.

Life Has a Meaning. "Former cosmologies," says Haldane, "faced us with the sharp alternative that the universe was created at some definite date in the past, or else has lasted forever. On the first hypothesis, why was it not created better; on the second, why has it not got better in the course of eternity? On neither theory have we very strong grounds for hoping that the world will be a better place. . . .

"Life could not have started much be fore it did, or have got much further than it has at the present date. If this is so, human effort is worth while, and human life has a meaning."

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