TEXT D When imaginative men turn
their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in and 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. But there may be other kinds of life
based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At
least we cannot prove at present that they do not. Even more
interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more
advanced state of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably
temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They
are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual
lives. But man’s societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously
more power 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 so close-knit that
the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction
will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organisms and the
inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years
further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the
human body and the nerve cells that set them in motion. The
exploration of space should be prepared for some such situation. If they arrive
on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means
impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism
composed of many closely cooperating units. The units may be
"secondary"—machines created millions of years ago by a previous form of life
and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built
entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be
much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would
destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the
familiar carbon cycle. Such creatures might be relics of a past
age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin
of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet. (401 words) It seems that the writer ______.
A.is interested in the imaginary life forms B.is eager to find a different form of life C.is certain of the existence of a new life form D.is critical of the imaginative people