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The surprisingly long history of speculation about extraterrestrials

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From Wade Roush’s book “Extraterrestrials.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/histo...ut-aliens/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5177...rrestrials

EXCERPTS: . . . By contrast, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius offered a picture of a purely mechanical universe where everything arises from the purposeless collisions of atoms and where humans might be just one of an infinite number of intelligent races. “Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors,” writes the Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker.

As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.”

Somehow, though, Lucretius’s poem “On the Nature of Things” managed to cross the abyss into the 15th century. [...] the Florentine book collector Poggio Bracciolini ... recovered a copy of the poem in the library of a monastery in southern Germany in 1417. Within 60 years, hundreds of manuscripts and print editions were in circulation, reigniting interest in Epicureanism. ... the poem’s atheistic and materialist ideas helped usher in Renaissance humanism — an inquisitive philosophy that, despite its name, began to question humanity’s privileged station in the cosmos.

Whether the credit is due to Bracciolini or not, the Renaissance saw steadily growing interest in the idea of the plurality of worlds and its corollary, the possibility that other worlds might be populated by other beings. Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus, provided one key stepping stone.

The Polish mathematician and astronomer was born in 1473 — coincidentally, the same year the first print edition of “On the Nature of Things” appeared. [...] Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe.

[...] Giordano Bruno ... was a Sicilian subject who entered the Dominican order in Naples and then became a religious vagabond. He read Lucretius and Copernicus, took their ideas deeply to heart, and made some startling leaps of his own.

In three sets of dialogues published between 1584 and 1591 [...] Bruno argued that at least some of the stars are suns with their own planets and that some of these planets must have their own residents. On this and many other subjects, Bruno’s daring views conflicted with long-standing doctrines of the Catholic Church [...] On February 17, 1600, he was hanged naked upside down and burned at the stake.

Bruno’s persecution was widely followed by people living outside Rome, but it couldn’t prevent the emergence of a new understanding of the heavens... [...] Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who explained the rings of Saturn and discovered its moon Titan, took a more serious tack ... He noted that Venus and Jupiter have atmospheres, one requirement for life. He expanded on Bruno’s assertion that other stars must have their own planetary systems and reasoned that where there are planets, there must be people.

By Huygens’s time, the plurality-of-worlds concept was beginning to seem ordinary. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, and Thomas Paine accepted it as part of a scientific-realist worldview. This view was, however, still incompatible with strict Christianity. That’s what motivated a leading 19th-century scientist and one-time believer in other inhabited worlds, William Whewell, to abandon pluralism and publish one of the strongest catalogs of scientific arguments against the idea.

[...] Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty. In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. Here in the local neighborhood, Whewell noted, the Moon has no atmosphere or water; Jupiter features crushing gravity and may lack a solid surface; Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are probably too far from the sun and therefore too cold to support life; and Mercury and Venus are probably too close to the sun and therefore too hot. He wasn’t sure about Mars, but he theorized that only Earth is in what he called “the Temperate Zone of the Solar System.”

In short, though Whewell’s ultimate goal was to defend Christian theology, he was the first to marshal empirical evidence to point out the real weaknesses in the plurality-of-worlds idea. This challenge was, in a sense, long overdue. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe. We know today that Democritus and Epicurus were on the right track when they theorized about atoms and other worlds, but they didn’t have any hard data, and neither did Bruno, Kepler, Huygens, or Fontenelle. Whewell concluded: “The belief that other planets, as well as our own, are the seats of habitation of living things, has been entertained, in general, not in consequence of physical reasons, but in spite of physical reasons.”

Coming from the master of Trinity, this attack caused a ruckus in the scientific world. [...] Even today, the essential aim of astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters is to provide what Whewell called the missing “physical reasons.”

One of the researchers who poured new energy into the pursuit of extraterrestrials in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. [...] making nearly nightly observations of Mars starting in mid-1894. He duly discovered 184 canals ... The public greeted Lowell’s work rapturously, scientists more coolly. Alfred Russell Wallace ... eviscerated the idea of intelligent, canal-building Martians. ... Wallace was right that there are no men on Mars. But there was an intelligence at work in the story: Lowell’s.

We know from decades of telescopic, orbital, and robotic exploration of the red planet that there are no canals or even features such as sand dunes or dust storms that could create the illusion of canals. What Lowell saw had to have been what astronomer Simon Newcomb would call, in 1907, unconscious “visual inferences” — projections of Lowell’s desire to see what he already believed was there...

But [...] Martians had escaped into popular culture. H. G. Wells took Lowell’s concept of an ancient, advanced race of Mars dwellers and added a layer of imperial malice in “The War of the Worlds,” which was published in serial form in 1897 and as a print novel in 1898. Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars, a.k.a. “Barsoom,” as the setting for a series of pulpy stories and novels published between 1912 and 1948. Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s story as a live radio drama broadcast on Halloween Eve in 1938, and its simulated news format scared at least a few listeners into believing invaders from Mars had really arrived. The hostile-Martian cliché spread so quickly that by 1948 it would be satirized in the form of every nerd’s favorite Looney Tunes villain, Marvin the Martian, followed in 1950 by Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking short-story collection “The Martian Chronicles,” about the conflicts between telepathic Martians and settlers from Earth.

Today we know that Mars is cold and dry and that if there are real Martians, they’re probably microbes, buried below the surface... (MORE - missing details)
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