ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE? 



the normal life of man. And although the altitude figures 

 in international aircraft records have crept up and up, 

 from 38,419 feet in 1927 to the record height (as I write 

 these words) of 100,000 feet attained by Major David G. 

 Simons, in a manned freed balloon, of more than nine- 

 teen miles, in August 1957, yet the limit of man's physical 

 penetration into the world's atmosphere probably still 

 falls short of thirty miles.* 



The clearest and most accurate conception of the 

 three ''elements", earth, air and sea, that we can possibly 

 create is one which needs a pictorial representation of the 

 world with a diameter of five feet. Any smaller scale 

 makes it impossible to show the average depth of the 

 oceans as a perceptible line. Many books which attempt 

 to give pictorial representations of the earth, surrounded 

 by its atmosphere and its oceans, are compelled to 

 exaggerate the depth of the oceans for that reason. 



If you can find a convenient surface — an appropriate 

 one would be a smooth stretch of sand when you are 

 next at the seaside — you can get a rough idea of the 

 average depth of the world's oceans as compared with 

 the earth itself by tracing a circle with a diameter of 

 five feet. If the line you have drawn is not thicker than a 

 fiftieth of an inch you will have some idea of the thinness 

 of the film of water that covers our world. Yet film-like 

 though it is compared with the diameter of our world, 

 its depth is formidable for us, as we send down our bathy- 

 scaphes into it, and its volume is truly overwhelming. 



For the total weight of the world's waters has been 

 calculated as amounting to one and a half million million 

 million tons, a figure which may perhaps be better 

 appreciated if we realize that, shared among the 2,500 

 million human beings who constitute the present popula- 

 tion of our world, it would give every man, woman and 

 child 600 million tons of sea- water each. 



♦Even if we allow a margin for aircraft flights, details of which have not been 

 officially released. 



23 



