A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
BY
H. G. WELLS
2.THE WORLD IN TIME
In the last fifty years there has been much very fine and interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the earth has had an independent existence as a spinning planet flying round and round the sun for a longer period than 2,000,000,000 years. It may have been much longer than that. This is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination.
Before that vast period of separate existence, the sun and earth and
the other planets that circulate round the sun may have been a great
swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in
various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the
spiral nebulæ, which appear to be in rotation about a centre. It is
supposed by many astronomers that the sun and its planets were once
such a spiral, and that their matter has undergone concentration into
its present form. Through majestic æons that concentration went on
until in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given
figures, the world and its moon were distinguishable. They were
spinning then much faster than they are spinning now; they were at a
lesser distance from the sun; they travelled round it very much faster,
and they were probably incandescent or molten at the surface. The sun
itself was a much greater blaze in the heavens.
If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the earth
in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a scene more
like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow
before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary scene. No
water would be visible because all the water there was would still be
superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulphurous and metallic
vapours. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock
substance. Across a sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun
and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breaths of flame.
_Taken in 1920 with the aid of the largest telescope in the world. One
of the first photographs taken by the Mount Wilson telescope._
There are dark nebulæ and bright nebulæ. Prof. Henry Norris Russell,
against the British theory, holds that the dark nebulæ preceded the
bright nebula.
Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another, this fiery
scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapours in the sky
would rain down and become less dense overhead; great slaggy cakes of
solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea, and
sink under it, to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and
moon growing now each more distant and each smaller, would rush with
diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its
smaller size, would be already cooled far below incandescence, and
would be alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a
series of eclipses and full moons.
And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time, the
earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we live, until
at last an age would come when, in the cooling air, steam would begin
to condense into clouds, and the first rain would fall hissing upon the
first rocks below. For endless millenia the greater part of the
earth’s water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere, but there
would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing rocks below and
pools and lakes into which these streams would be carrying detritus and
depositing sediment.
At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a man
might have stood up on earth and looked about him and lived. If we
could have visited the earth at that time we should have stood on great
lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living
vegetation, under a storm-rent sky. Hot and violent winds, exceeding
the fiercest tornado that ever blows, and downpours of rain such as our
milder, slower earth to-day knows nothing of, might have assailed us.
The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the
spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges
and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the
earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun
moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the
moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. And
the moon, which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth, would then
have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so
inexorably.
The earth aged. One million years followed another, and the day
lengthened, the sun grew more distant and milder, the moon’s pace in
the sky slackened; the intensity of rain and storm diminished and the
water in the first seas increased and ran together into the ocean
garment our planet henceforth wore.
But there was no life as yet upon the earth; the seas were lifeless,
and the rocks were barren.