Page:Life in a thousand worlds.djvu/31

 "How many planets, how many suns, how many milky ways are there?" you ask in one breath. Speaking alone of our own universe, of which the Milky Way is the backbone, I estimate that if we multiply the number of stars by forty-nine, we shall have the approximate number of worlds that are large enough to be classed with the family of inhabited planets.

In our immediate universe there are at least one hundred million stars, a number of which have over five hundred worlds revolving around them; others have only six or ten. The average, as above stated, is estimated at forty-nine. Then, also, far out in the depths of space, there are nebulous spots visible only through the most searching lenses. These are new systems of milky ways or new universes, so immensely distant that our most powerful telescopes cannot even resolve them into star

There are inhabited worlds so far from us that, if one could travel the distance around our Earth in one second, he could proceed in one direction, at this rate of speed, for twenty million years and yet see