Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION The question whether or not extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist remained unanswered in 1915——and remains unanswered today. Or perhaps a more accurate statement would be that over the last twenty-five hundred years, humans have supplied an abundance of answers to this question, but a paucity of direct evidence in support of those answers. If the materials presented in this volume are looked at broadly, it emerges that already in the premodern period extraterrestrials had made their entrance into terrestrial thought. Some authors such as Aristotle made efforts to dislodge them, whereas others such as the materialist Lucretius and the Christian Cusanus fought for their acceptance. If it be asked——who from modern times must ultimately be held responsible for the invasion of the extraterrestrials and for the controversy this has caused?—— the surprising answer is a conservative Polish canon writing from Frauenberg Cathedral . It was certainly not the intention of Copernicus to invite extraterrestrials into his heliocentric system; in fact, he did nothing more than open the door an inch, but this was enough to initiate the invasion. He conveniently exited our planet before the invasion, but it was nonetheless his highly mathematical volume, which was read only by experts and understood by only a portion of them, that provided the incentive for their immigration. To put the point differently, the celibate canon of the cathedral in Frauenberg acted in a manner that has left him open to the charge that he is the father, or at least the grandfather, of Darth Vader, ET, ALF, Mork, and the whole tribe of extraterrestrials whom we all know so well. 518 Copernicus’s heliocentric system brought a new order to the planetary system but greatly disrupted the traditional cosmos. It pried the stars loose from the starry vault, scattered them throughout a nearly or actually infinite cosmos, and turned them into suns; as Edward Young put it, “One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine.”1 And the Copernican system transported humans from seeing their location as the center of the universe to viewing their home as a second-rate planet circling one of billions of stars composing our galaxy, which is but one of the billions of galaxies in our vast universe. One of the first fully to realize the severity of this problem created by the Copernican universe was Blaise Pascal, whose partial resolution of the problem was to stress that although a knowledge of the infinite universe may humble humanity, such knowledge also indicates the greatness of humanity as composed of thinking beings who, despite their minuscule size and remote location, have managed to measure this vast universe and determine their location in it. Pascal stated: Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.2 The invasion of our solar system by the extraterrestrials did not take place over night. Indeed, we have seen that it was only in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries that the invasion largely succeeded. By about 1800, the extraterrestrials had made more inroads on the human intellect than at any time before–or perhaps since. Essentially every body in our solar system, the Sun and Moon, the planets and their satellites, and comets, were territories that in the eyes of many, the extraterrestrials had occupied. And their presence was applauded by devotees of natural theology, by poets, preachers, and scientists. c o n c l u s i o n 519 1. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1853), IX, line 748. 2. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter, Harvard Classics edition (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1938), #347 (Brunschvicg) = #200 (Lafuma). 3. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 31...