The Gold of the Gods by Erich von Däniken Read Free Book Online Page A

they steered for the nearest planet. Did the defeated find the third planet out from the sun, our earth, 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, after the war in the cosmos?
     
    Was our blue planet the refuge of the losers in a cosmic battle?
    If we continue to speculate about this theory, there are certain unavoidable premises. The home of the conquered must have had similar conditions to our earth. Their planet must have been about the same distance from the sun and naturally must have had an atmosphere containing oxygen.
    What is the possibility that space flights could have begun from earth-like planets in the cosmos?
    The statistical probability is enormous.
    The fact that the question of the existence of cosmic neighbors has become a “serious subject for research” (to quote Professor Hans Elsässer) is closely connected “with the view of many natural scientists who find it ridiculous to assume that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos.”
    Who knows how many stars there are?
    We reckon there are 100 billion fixed stars in our galaxy. So that if every tenth fixed star is surrounded by a planetary system, ten billion fixed stars have such systems. If we leave the majority of planets out of this rough calculation, taking only the figure of ten billion fixed stars (which really implies a much larger number of planets) with one planet each and allotting earth-like qualities only to each tenth one, we arrive at the truly astronomical figure of one billion planets resembling our earth. Supposing only each tenth planet to be of the size of the earth and possess the temperature range that makes it possible for life to originate and flourish, we are still faced with the inconceivable figure of 100,000,000! And even if we assume that only one in ten of these planets has a suitable atmosphere, we are still left with 10,000,000 planets with “putative” conditions for organic life.
    Hans F. Ebel of Heidelberg University writes in his essay “Possible Life on Alien Planets”:
“Astronomers’ estimates tend to accept the figure of inhabitable earth-like planets in our Milky Way alone at hundreds of millions.”
     
    So my theory does not inevitably collapse for lack of sites for launching ramps on earth-like planets. The hypertrophied opinion which dominated our conception of the world until a few years ago that the earth alone could support intelligent life has vanished from even the most rigid academic circles.
Tempi passati
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    There is one other question mark.
    Supposing that the universe does teem with planets and intelligent life, might not all the forms of life on them have developed in quite different directions from those taken by organic life on earth? If, in addition to the tolerance allowed when making any high statistical estimate, we assume that the beings who waged their cosmic war were like humans, are we not being rather presumptuous?
    In fact, the most recent research in many fields related to the subject confirms that extra-terrestrial intelligences
must have been
like men. Atomic structures and chemical reactions are the same everywhere in the universe. And, according to Professor Heinz Haber:
“It is simply not true, as has often been imagined in the past, that the phenomenon of life waits patiently until inanimate nature creates on a planet conditions under which life can exist. It seems to be more likely that life, with its extraordinary chemical activity, contributes enormously to creating its own environment and can transform a planet in such a way that it capable of supporting life in all its many-sided abundance.”
     
    Lord Kelvin of Largs (1824-1907) was Professor at Glasgow University. In the natural sciences he had a great reputation as a physicist, for not only did he discover the second law of thermodynamics, but he also gave a strictly scientific definition of absolute temperature, which is measured in Kelvin degrees today. In addition, Kelvin discovered standard