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nize our galaxy in « mere 10 mil-
lion years, which is only five times
as long as we have been around so
far in recognizable human form.
He suggests that by looking for
radio signals, we might be trying
to tap into the wrong communica-

A SATURDAY morning. The Globe & Mails science and
astronomy section has published 2 new map of the ‘‘near-
by’’ universe with 14,000 dots on it, each representing a
galaxy composed of a few hundred billion stars.

The map, compiled by the Har-
vard-Smithsonian Centre for

Astrophysics in Cambridge;
Mass., represents only a fraction
of the sky as seen from Earth:

**The most prominent feature of
the southern section of the map,”’
the accompanying story states, ‘‘is
a newly found archipelago of
galaxies that stretches some five
billion-trillion kilometres, similar
to the so-called Great Wall of
galaxies visible on the northern
side of the map.”’

Impressive as all this might be,
it is just a start. It took 10 years
to collect the distances of the

tions grid.

‘One attractive possibility,’ he
writes, ‘‘is a civilization based on
vegetation growing freely in space
rather than on massive industrial
hardware.”

The kids and I mull these
cosmic possibilities as we finish
our orange juice and coffee, then
I go out to my cabin to write (to
help pay the bills), and the kid
goes out to cut the grass (to make
money to buy more comics), and
my wife smiles an inscrutable, ir-
ritating smile.

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“It’s all done with mirrors,”

- she shouts after us. And the worst
part is, yeah, sure, it could all be
some kind of trick. The Veil of
Maya. A An illusion, What an awful

14,000 galaxies on the map.
Using new equipment,
astronomers should be able to
‘measure 5,000 galaxies a night
from now on until they’ve covered
the 150,000 that should be visible

STRICTLY PERSONAL

“alien life’’ out in space some-

from our vantage point on the

_ edge of the Milky Way.

According to Dr. Margaret .
Geller, head of the survey team,
“If the surface of the Earth rep-

’ resented the whole universe, then

the area mapped so far would

correspond to the size of Toron-

* to.””, ‘
“Wow,” I said to my wife,

* «makes you kind of wonder, why

worry about our mortgage, eh?’’ .
‘‘Not really, dear,”’ she replied.

: “I mean, so what?”

**So what about all those galax-
* jes, or so what about the mort-
gage?’’

So what about the galaxies.
~: Maybe it’s all just mirrors out
“there and a bunch of gods stand-
ing behind,-laughing their faces
"off when some poor schmuck on

o Earth goes ‘Wow!’”

That was it. I got up and |
“stomped off to our son’s bedroom
:to wake him up with the news.

“Look at this,’’ I demanded.

“") “See all those dots? Fourteen

thousand of them. Each of them
is a galaxy. See that one dot

-* there? That’s our galaxy. It's got

, 406 billion stars.

: $$Qne out of seven has probably
got ‘planets. Figure there’s a good
mathematical chance of some kind

of life out there besides us?”’

Well, at least the kid was im-

pressed.

“Your mother doesn’t think it
matters compared to the mort-
.” gage,’’ I muttered.

: The kid shook his head.

. “Mothers, eh?”’ he said.

: Later, as we were having
breakfast, my wife, rio doubt hav-
. ing heard that crack, went on to -
- say to me: “You're still the little
boy who used to lie on the ground
at night, staring up at the stars,
wondering what it’s all about.”’
|, Ah, yes: And it’s true. Except

* that, actually, 1 was writhing on

the ground, feeling royally ripped

” off Secause I was stuck on this lit-

tle boondock planet on the edge

. _of the Milky Way, removed from

‘all the action I imagined must be

‘taking place toward the centre of

: =the galaxy:

It has been an article of faith

| with me since I was six or seven
“| years old and read my first science
fiction comic that there has to be

where.

T used to hope it was close, like
on Venus or Mars, but these
hopes died with the American and
Soviet space probes.

Not all hope has been lost, of
course. I note that the search for
radio messages coming from the
inter-stellar depths has recently
yielded a couple of hundred
“signals” that may or may not
have been natural.

It remains that, within my life-
time — hell, any day! — we may
still be able to record soine noise
coming from space that will be
confirmed as being the work of

_ intelligence.

1 just go by the numbers.
Among all those stars in our own
galaxy alone, the chances of there
not being other forms of in-
telligent life are 400 billion to one
roughly divided by seven.

There has been some fascinating
work done lately concerning the
role that large planets like Jupiter
and Saturn play in the evolution
of life, and big planets have al-
ready been indirectly detected
around plenty of nearby solar
systems.

Without enormous planets in
orbit between us and the depths of
space, life could not have devel-
oped on Earth, scientists are now
saying.

The big worlds act as gravita-
tional shields, drawing most of the
incoming comets and interstellar
debris into collisions with
themselves, sparing us Earthlings
from being splattered much mare
often than every couple of hun-
dred million years.

The Russian astronomer Nikolai
Kardashev has theorized that civi-
lizations in the universe might fall
into three categories.

Type 1 would control the
resources of a planet, Type 2 the
resources of a star, and Type 3
the resources of a galaxy.

According to Freeman Dyson,
the Princeton scientist whose
autobiography, Disturbing The
Universe, is one of the finer exer-
cises in big thinking, the vast
distances between the stars aren’t
really all that daunting.

Even with our primitive space
technology, travelling at 1% of
the speed of light, we could colo-

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