When imaginative men turn their eyes toward space and wonder whether life exists in any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist and even this is doubtful. Even more interesting is the possibility that life on other planets may be in a more advanced stage of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably fleeting stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are in fact, still capable under favourable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man’s societies already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power and effectiveness than the individuals have. It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand years from now man’s societies may have become too close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organism and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on, and a million years is a tick of the clock on the evolutionary time scale, man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and the nerve cells that actuate them. The explorers of space should be prepared for some such situations. If they arrive on a foreign planet when its living organisms are in an earlier stage of evolution, they may find the equivalent of dinosaurs or mollusks or even one-celled protozoa. They could live on very hot or very cold planets. They could breathe any atmosphere or none. They could build their bodies to any desirable size out of material plentiful in their planet’s crust. They could get their energy from sunlight. Such creatures might be relics of a bygone age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favourable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favoured planet. Answer the questions.
A. Which planet looks like where life like ours could exist?
B. What might be the possibility of life on other planets in terms of stage of evolution?
C. What stage of evolution is the present-day man probably in?
D. What would happen to the societies fifty thousand years from now?
E. What are the inorganic parts mentioned in the passage?
F. How might the man and his machines be, a million years from now?Required to answer. Multi Line Text.