Re: Inhabited Planets

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 22:33 -0700 1/28/02, Jim Green wrote:
> When did the idea of other inhabited planets begin?
>
> Recently?  Aristotle?  Newton?  Egyptians?  Chinese?  Babylonians?
> Pre-history?
I'm not an expert in this area, but I have in my collection of
quotations several from Roman times indicating that they expected
that life was probably common elsewhere in the universe. I don't know
if they thought in terms of our local planets or not, but since they
really had no idea then just what the stars or the planets actually
were, I doubt that they gave too much thought to just where these
"other worlds" on which life might exist actually were.

I think that the uniqueness of life, even on earth, is a relatively
recent idea. As recently as the days of Pasteur, the idea that life
could spontaneously occur from non-living matter, was scientifically
accepted (although disputed by those like Pasteur, who thought the
life that appeared on rotting meat was somehow carried by the air to
which the meat was exposed). I suspect that Pasteur's findings and
the growth of religious fundamentalism around the turn of the 20th
century was what led us to believe that the creation of life was at
best difficult, even if it didn't require a supernatural power to do
so, and thus led most scientists to believe (for a while, at least)
that it was highly unlikely that life existed anywhere else but here.
I remember reading a book back in the 40s or 50s, written in the 30s
by the then Astronomer Royal of England in which he "proved" that
life on any of the other planets was just impossible. Whether the
possibility of planets orbiting other stars had crossed his mind at
that time, I don't recall his mentioning it.

I suspect that the idea that life is present elsewhere but on earth
has been around for as long as people have understood that there *is*
an elsewhere that we can see, i.e., that the stars and planets were
not a local phenomenon.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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