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Pseudo-People. None of these systems can be seen with telescopes (nor are they likely ever to be seen), but Hoyle believes that at least 100,000 of them must each contain at least one planet with physical conditions (temperature, chemical content, etc.) favorable to the development of life. The question whether life will develop where life is possible he leaves to the biologists, but he thinks their answer would be yes. He suspects, too, that life on faraway planets may have evolved along familiar lines. There may be "pseudo" men & women with two legs, two hands, large brains and two eyes—for all these bodily features have inherent virtues of which evolution may well have taken advantage.
No matter how interesting planets may be as niches for intelligent life, they are mere dust specks on the cosmological scalf. Hoyle and his Cambridge theorists are more concerned with the origin of the stuff out of which the galaxies were formed. When they consider such matters, they zoom to levels of mathematics where few can follow.
Back in the late '20s a discovery was made by California's Edwin Hubble and others (TIME, Feb. 9, 1948) that threw cosmology into a confusion from which it has not yet recovered. Hubble showed that the galaxies in far-off space, judged by spectroscopic analysis of their light, are rushing away from the solar system at speeds directly proportionate to their distances. The farther away they are, the faster they are moving. At an easily calculated-distance (about 2 billion light-years), the galaxies must be receding at the speed of light itself. No matter how big his telescopes may grow (the 200-inch on Palomar Mountain can penetrate half that distance), an earthling will never see such galaxies. They are speeding awa.y too fast; their light can never reach the earth.
Monkey Business. Why are the galaxies receding? Some cosmologists have suggested an enormous explosion that blew all the matter in the universe away from a common center. The chief thing wrong with this theory is that the galaxies are moving too fast; simple calculations show that^ they would have had to start their motion at a point so close in time that the whole universe would turn out to be younger than such minor parts as the stars and the earth.
Other cosmologists "monkeyed with gravitation," as Hoyle puts it, suggesting that it pulls now one way, now the other way, making the universe expand and contract alternately. Some "monkeyed" with time, too. None of these early theories settled the question of the galaxies in flight.
Hoyle's Cambridge colleagues, Bondi and Gold, approached the problem of the receding galaxies from an entirely different angle. They started with the assumption, based on philosophical-mathematical reasoning, that the universe must be in a "steady state," not blowing itself to nothing. Then they looked for something that was keeping it steady.