Radical as they are, such late twentieth century speculations do, however, come with their own history of sorts—a history, moreover, that reaches back to early modern times or, more precisely, to the scientific revolution that swept the continent in the wake of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). It was in this period that a discourse was set in motion, which today enjoys unprecedented topicality as a result of our technical capability to receive electromagnetic signals. In principle, however, and from a purely theoretical point of view, this discourse was as plausible and valid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it is today. For even then the assumption of extraterrestrial planetary worlds was not, as it had been in the Middle Ages, a matter of purely theological speculation about the omnipotence of the Creator; neither was it grounded in a philosophy of corpuscular behaviour as in classical atomism. Rather, it was a scientifically defensible extrapolation from empirical facts on the basis of analogy, deemed to be a scientific principle. In other words, the assumption of a plurality of worlds was a consequence of Copernicanism: if the Earth is a planet, then planets are earths, not just in our own solar system but also beyond, and why not habitable earths, populated worlds?
4 Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man, ed. Richard Berendzen (Washington, DC, 1973), 17–19.
Without Galileo, however, Copernicanism would hardly have brought about a general acceptance of this line of thought so swiftly.
Galileo had been one of the first to turn the newly invented telescope skywards rather than on his neighbours’ house across the road, and what the professor at Padua espied through his lens in the winter of 1609–1610 confirmed the Copernican theory in every respect—as he himself stated in his observational report Sidereus nuncius (1610) and as Thomas Kuhn has since retraced in detail in his book The Copernican Revolution (1957). This is undoubtedly Galileo’s most lasting scientific achievement. But the impact of his work on the human imagination was no less profound. After all, his observations offered nothing less than visual proof of the Copernican analogy between the Earth and the planets that suggested the idea of life on other celestial bodies in the first place. As his telescope showed, Jupiter was surrounded by moons and was as such not unlike planet Earth. Why, then, should these moons not illuminate the lives of Jupiter-dwelling peoples? Indeed, what else could they illuminate? Our own Moon, meanwhile, with its mountain ranges and, as Galileo initially assumed, oceans, seemed, in its turn, not unlike the Earth: and did not the Moon’s main crater bear an uncanny resemblance to the Bohemian landscape? Finally, ought not the stars, in analogy to the Sun, be conceived as the respective centres of planetary orbits? These analogies, which Galileo describes in his 1610 booklet, were, thanks to the telescope, now observable by everybody, and as the title page attests, it is precisely to everybody that Galileo dedicated his report. Hence, everybody could speculate on the probability of other heavenly bodies being populated by creatures, possibly humans—
perhaps even by Bohemians!
This, of course, was a prospect fraught with danger. Galileo himself took great pains to refrain from any sort of speculation on the topic, while the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini is reputed to have refused to even look into the “perspective” for fear of coming face to face with a reality which the Church had already declared to be non-existent. Such hesitation notwithstanding, the telescope quickly became not only a favourite toy with the educated classes, but also the symbol of the scientific plausibility of the plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial populations.
Such arguments gained in topicality when the discovery of new worlds in space was viewed in direct analogy to the discovery of America—the most prominent scenario of terrestrial conquest at the time. Tommaso Campanella and others regularly referred to Galileo as
“the new Columbus.”5 The suspected new worlds in space thus could be thought of as analogous to the New World with its Native Americans or Antipodes (who had only just, in 1537, been declared humans by Pope Paul III—to whom Copernicus had dedicated his work).
What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the fact that the game of analogy could be played with reversed roles over the course of the history of human speculation about extraterrestrial worlds. For Kepler, writing in the early seventeenth century, the only possible scenario is one of a kind of cosmic imperialism in which we would set out to discover
“them.” Towards the end of the century, however, Fontenelle’s best-selling Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes suggests that, by that time, it was equally conceivable that “they” would travel through space to visit us—in this scenario, “we” could very well turn out to be the Indians, the defeated party in the Conquista. At the end of the nineteenth century, it is indeed—as in the science fiction of, say, H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, 1897) or Kurd Lasswitz (Auf zwei Planeten, published in the same year)—the extraterrestrial others that come to us, travelling to Earth in their spaceships and revealing themselves as either technologically advanced predators armed with deadly radiation devices, or as high-tech angels of a Kantian moral persuasion.6 Obviously, the present-day hope of receiving an electromagnetic signal from outer space similarly implies that “they” would reach out or even come to us, the Indians.
But however the various parts may be allocated in this metaphorical drama, what remains constant across the centuries is the underlying
5 Letter of Tommaso Campanella to Galileo Galilei, 13 January 1611, in Galileo Galilei, Le Opere. Edizione nazionale, ed. A. Favaro, XI, 21–26. See also Marjorie Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Hamden, CN, 1976), 18–10, 24–25.
6 Johannes Kepler, Dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo (Prague, 1610), Gesammelte Werke, eds.
Walther von Dyck and Max Caspar (München, 1938ff.), IV, 305; Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, trans. Edward Rosen (New York, 1965), 39; Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, ed. Alexandre Calame (Paris, 1966), 72; H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London, 1898, first publication as a single volume); Kurd Lasswitz, Auf zwei Planeten (Weimar, 1897).
response pattern of “fear and hope” that survives right through to the present day. Yet this is only half of the story, and the less interesting half at that. It should be much more illuminating to retrace the changing fortunes of the fears and hopes related to habitable extraterrestrial worlds, and, centrally in this context, the question of how such fears and hopes—grounded, over time, in divergent anthropological paradigms—
articulate an equally diverse set of ideas about what, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, has defined the worth, the dignity, and standing of humans. It is some of these historically specific versions of extraterrestrial nightmares and utopias that will be discussed, with a few typical examples, in the following pages. There are, to be sure, the purely theoretical horror or redemption scenarios, existential fears of looming threat on the one hand and emancipatory desires on the other. But in the more interesting cases, the literary ones in particular, such abstractions combine with very concrete forms of imaginative elaboration of the scientifically plausible assumption of inhabited or at least habitable extraterrestrial worlds, which inspired these hopes and fears in the first place. The landscapes and inhabitants of such planetary worlds suddenly come alive and are drawn in vivid detail. And yet, these worlds are relevant first and foremost as intellectual counter-worlds to our own and as such they are meant to pose a challenge to our understanding of ourselves as human beings in the most fundamental sense, and it is precisely this fundamental sense, in tandem with the concretely visualised extraterrestrial worlds, that is subject to historical change.