Abstract
This chapter provides a brief history of thinking in the West about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence from the Ancient Greeks to the present. The chapter emphasizes the idea that the capacity of humans to imaging extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has changed over time in relation to broader cultural themes. In particular, the Enlightenment shift from a geo-centric to helio-centric understanding of the universe opened the door for moderns to think about ETI and contributed to creating an imaginary that allowed people to contemplate the nature of and even search for ETI in nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In cultural terms, the Enlightenment is the process of creative destruction with respect to medieval “godly” theocratic culture, including art, philosophy, “Christian science” exemplified by geocentric astronomy and biological creationism…
(Zafirovski 2011: 8).
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Notes
- 1.
It’s interesting to note that as I write this page, NASA has just announced that the Voyager space probe has moved into interstellar space—the first human-made object to depart the solar system.
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Traphagan, J. (2015). A Brief History of Thinking About ETI. In: Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination. Space and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10551-2_2
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