This idea has been around, obviously, for most of the 20th century, ever since Percy Lowell started speculating about canals on Mars, but I’m wondering if any ancient thinkers speculated that there could be life on other planets. What’s the oldest cite you can come up with? This seems a natural topic for philosophy, a sort of “abstract life, removed from the context of earthly considerations” but no names of philosophers or other thinkers comes readily to mind.
Anaxoragus believed in a plurality of worlds, and Democritus (via his atomic theory) reasoned that things were the same all over and likely that we were not the only planet. I’ve not got my books handy, but the thought is certainly 2500 years old.
That’d be Anaxagoras.
I’m not sure when people even realized that other planets were, well, actually planets rather than little balls in the sky, orbiting around in epicycles. Astronomy and celestial observations of the planets has a long history–in India, even preceeding the great astronomers of China by nearly a millenia, astronomers deduced much about the heavenly spheres that took the natural philosophers of the Renaissance-era centuries to discover on their own, and much later–but I don’t see any evidence that life was seriously postulated on other worlds until the 19th Century. In part, this would stand in contradiction, or a least serious revision, of most religious creation myths; the idea that the Earth, and the life upon it, is somehow unique and divinely inspired, is a common theme in essentially all religions.
Stranger
Well, how about A True Story, by Lucian of Samosata (c. 120-180 AD)? The protagonist helps to forestall a war between the inhabitants of the Sun and the Moon.
IIRC the Aztecs believed either the moon or mars to be a dead world, which means one that used to have life.
The idea of visitors to earth from other planets goes back at least as far as Voltaire’s story Micromegas.
Even before him, in relatively recent times Johannes Kepler wrote of a trip to the moon and visiting the inhabitants there.
But the ancient writers cited above certainly predate Voltaire and Kepler.
The idea of profoundly non-human inhabitants of other worlds, as far as I can tell, goes back only to H.G. wells, with first his Martian invaders and later his insect-like Selenites. Other writers about the same time (as well as those cited above) saw the extraterrestrials as human, perhaps with a few minor changes. Odd, when you consider that even in anncient times people related and believed stories about races of huge-eared people, people with one large foot, centaurs, and cyclopes.
Divinely inspired, yes. But unique? Is it really the case that essentially all religions maintain that god is not allowed to create life elsewhere?
That seems to be implicit in most religious thought–it is certainly dominant in traditional Judeo-Christian thinking–but I wouldn’t say it’s a hard fact, just a generalization.
Stranger
I would have said that most religions simply don’t address the issue of life elsewhere, beyond the obvious “God created everything.” Is there a passage in the Bible that you’re thinking of?