Let us complete the intellectual confusion with a compendium of oddities from the dim past.

In 1900 Greek sponge divers found an old wreck loaded with marble and bronze statues off Antikythera. These art treasures were rescued and subsequent investigations showed that the ship must have foundered around the time of Christ. When all the plunder was sorted out, it included a shapeless lump that proved more important than all the statues put together. When it had been carefully treated, scholars discovered a sheet of bronze with circles, inscriptions and cog wheels and soon realised that the inscriptions must be connected with astronomy. When the many separate parts were cleaned, a strange construction came to light, a regular machine with movable pointers, complicated scales or dials and metal plates with writing on. The reconstructed machine had more than twenty little wheels, a kind of differential gear and a crown wheel. On one side there was a spindle that set all the dials in motion at varying speeds as soon as it was turned. The pointers were protected by bronze covers on which long inscriptions could be read. In the case of this 'machine from Antikythera', is there the slightest doubt that first-class precision mechanics were at work in antiquity? Moreover the machine is so complicated that it was probably not the first of its kind. The American Professor Solla Price interpreted the apparatus as a kind of calculating machine with the help of which the movements of the moon, the sun and probably other planets could be worked out.

The fact that the machine gives the year of its construction as 82 B.C. is not so important. It would be more interesting to find out who built the first model of this machine, this small-scale planetarium!

The Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II is supposed to have brought back a most unusual tent from the east when he returned from the Fifth Crusade in 1229. In the interior of the tent stood a clockwork motor and people watched the constellations in motion through the dome-shaped roof of the tent. Once again a planetarium in olden times. We accept its existence at that date because we know that the necessary mechanical skills existed then. The idea of the earlier planetarium irritates us because in Christ's day the concept of a heaven with fixed stars taking into account the rotation of the earth did not exist. Even the knowledgeable Chinese and Arabic astronomers of antiquity can give us no help regarding this inexplicable fact, and it is undeniable that Galileo Galilei was not born until 1,500 years later. Anyone who goes to Athens should not miss the 'machine from Antikythera'; it is on show in the National Archaeological Museum. We possess only written accounts of Frederick II's tent planetarium.

Here are some more strange things that antiquity has bequeathed to us:

Outline drawings of animals which simply did not exist in South America 10,000 years ago, namely camels and lions, were found on the rocks of the desert plateau of Marcahuasi 12,500 ft above sea-level.

In Turkestan engineers found semicircular structures made of a kind of glass or pottery. Their origin and significance cannot be explained by the archaeologists.

The ruins of an ancient town which must have been destroyed by a great catastrophe exist in Death Valley, in the Nevada Desert. Even today traces of melted rocks and sand can be seen. The heat of a volcanic eruption would not have been enough to melt rocks—besides the heat would have scorched the buildings first. Today only Laser beams produce the required temperature. Strangely enough not a blade of grass grows in this district.

Hadjar el Guble, the Stone of the South, in the Lebanon weighs over 2 million pounds. It is a dressed stone, but human hands could certainly not have moved it.

There are artificially produced markings, as yet unexplained, on extremely inaccessible rock faces in Australia, Peru and Upper Italy.

Texts on gold plaques, which were found at Ur in Chaldea, tell of 'gods' resembling men who came from the sky and presented the plaques to the priests.

In Australia, France, India, the Lebanon, South Africa and Chile there are strange black 'stones' which are rich in aluminium and beryllium. The most recent investigations showed that these stones must have been exposed to a heavy radioactive bombardment and high temperatures in the very remote past.

Sumerian cuneiform tablets show fixed stars with planets.

In Russia archaeologists discovered a relief of an airship, consisting of ten balls arranged in a row next to each other which stand in a right-angled frame supported on both sides by thick columns. Balls rest on the columns. Among other Russian finds there is a small bronze statue of a humanoid being in a bulky suit which is hermetically closed at the neck by a helmet. Shoes and gloves are equally tightly attached to the suit.

In the British Museum the visitor can read the past and future eclipses of the moon on a Babylonian tablet.

Engravings of cylindrical rocket-like machines, which are shown climbing skywards, were discovered in Kunming, the capital of the Chinese province of Yunnan. The engravings were on a pyramid which suddenly emerged from the floor of Lake Kunming during an earthquake.

How is anyone going to explain these and many other puzzles to us? When people try to dismiss the old traditions wholesale as false, erroneous, meaningless and irrelevant, they are merely dodging the issue. It is equally unreasonable, when all is said and done, to lump all translations together as inaccurate arid then make use of them when it happens to suit one's purpose. I think that there is something cowardly about stopping one's eyes and ears to facts'—or even hypotheses—simply because new conclusions might win men away from a pattern of thought that has become familiar.

Revelations take place hourly and daily all over the world. Our modern means of communication and transport spread discoveries all round the globe. Scholars of all disciplines should inquire into the reports from the past with the same creative enthusiasm that they bring to contemporary research. The adventure of the discovery of our past has finished its first phase. Now the second fascinating adventure in human history begins with man's moving into the cosmos.

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The question whether space travel has any point has not yet been silenced in discussion. The partial or total meaninglessness of space research is supposed to be proved by the banal assertion that people should not poke around in the universe so long as there arc still so many unsolved problems on earth.

As I am anxious not to enter into the realm of scientific argument unintelligible to the laymen, I shall only give a few obvious and valid reasons for the absolute necessity of space research.

From time immemorial curiosity and the thirst for knowledge have always been the driving force for continuing research on the part of man. The two questions, WHY did something happen and HOW did it happen, have always been the spur to development and progress. We owe our present-day standard of living to the permanent unrest that they created. Comfortable modern means of transport have removed the hardships of journeys which our grandfathers still had to suffer; many of the rigours of manual labour have been noticeably alleviated by machines; new sources of energy, chemical preparations, refrigerators, various household appliances, etc., have completely liberated us from many activities that formerly could only be done by human hands. The creations of science have become not the curse, but the blessing of mankind. Even its most terrifying offspring, the atom bomb, will turn out to be for the benefit of mankind.