Early Modern ET, Reflexive Telescopics, and Their Relevance Today

Abstract

The period from the discovery of Tycho’s New Star in 1572 to Galileo’s “geometrization of astronomical space” in 1610 (and the years following) saw the disintegration of the boundary between the sublunary and superlunary spheres—between the “lower storey” and “upper storey” of the Aristotelian Universe. This establishment of a strong physical affinity between the universe “up there” and the earthly realm “down here” was also complemented by the rise of Copernicanism: for once the Earth was seen as a planet, the other planets could readily be imagined as other Earths. This analogy suggested not only physical but also biological affinities and supported the plausibility of humans’ capacity to travel to the Moon and beyond. Robert Burton—given the demise of Aristotle’s physics—declared in 1621 that “If the heavens be penetrable … it were not amiss in this aerial progress to make wings and fly up.” John Wilkins and Francis Godwin in the 1630s actively imagined creatures in the Moon and human journeys thither. The epic poet John Milton in 1667 hinted that “every star [is] perhaps a world / Of destined habitation.” Moreover, space travel was no one-way street: Thomas Traherne in the 1670s imagined a dweller among the stars visiting Earth and remarking on what must be the condition of its inhabitants. In these and other ways, seventeenth-century writers offered serious and impressive speculation about extraterrestrial life and its possible perceptions of Earth. Such speculations remain pertinent to astrobiological theory today. What Hans Blumenberg in the 1970s called “reflexive telescopics”—the examination of Earth from an imagined extraterrestrial viewpoint—is an important counterpart to the search for life “out there.” It serves as a reminder of the obvious but profound premise that Earth is part of the cosmos. At a popular level we often continue to speak of “outer space” as if the old “two-storey” picture of the universe still had some residual legitimacy. However, if Galileo, Wilkins, and other devotees of the New Astronomy were right about Earth’s being a full participant in “the dance of the stars,” then “outer” is a merely relative and parochial term, not a scientific or qualitative one. And it is no trivial claim to assert that the search for intelligent life in the universe has already identified its first specimens.