Tim Brinkhof - Did Ancient Greek Philosophers Believe In Aliens?

Tim Brinkhof - Did Ancient Greek Philosophers Believe In Aliens?

Speculation about the existence of aliens goes all the way back at least to the Greek philosophers. Their arguments will sound familiar.

Key Takeaways

• Speculation about alien life dates back to the ancient Greeks, and perhaps even further.
• The Scientific Revolution expanded our vision of the Universe and revived our belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
• Unfortunately, the lack of convincing evidence has ushered in a new age of cosmological pessimism.

Episode Transcript

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The following in foecast is a presentationof the Xloon Broadcast Network, Xoon TV
Channel and Roma McConnell Media Company,broadcasting from Canada to the world and beyond.

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Did ancient Greek philosophers believe in aliens? The concept of aliens is quite
old. Long before human civilization developeda scientifically accurate understanding of the cosmos,
people across the world looked up atthe sky and wondered what was out there.

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Some ancient societies populated this vast,mysterious expanse with gods entities responsible for
creating the sun and moon and stars. Others took those same celestial bodies to
be similar to Earth and therefore inhabitedby organisms not unlike ourselves. In his
book Extraterrestrials, science and technology writerWade Raush traces the history of alien speculation

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across nearly two and a half millennia. This history begins with the ancient Greeks
and stretches up until the most recentMars were over expeditions along the way,
Raush illustrates how the world we livein shapes the way we conceive of the
worlds that might exist in outer space. The history of alien speculation is not

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only the history of science, butalso the history of religion and popular culture
Greek antiquity. In the past,people were often persecuted for thinking differently.
This was true even in Ancient Greece, a setting renowned for its trailblazing philosophers.
When the philosopher Alexagoras, who soughtto provide scientific explanations for seemingly supernatural

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phenomena like eclipses and rainbows, suggestedthat the moon is not a god but
a great rock and the Sun ahot rock, he was arrested and sentenced
to death. Anaxagrius would have meta fate similar to Socrates, but was
banished instead of killed, thanks tothe pleading of his friends. Anaxagrius also
considered the possibility that the moon mightbe inhabited, a highly controversial supposition that

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contradicted the dominant view of the cosmosas outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Plato,
who separated reality between forms and shadows, refused to acknowledge the existence of
worlds other than our own. Aristotlealso rejected the so called plurality of world's
theory because it could not be reconciledwith his understanding of gravity, which posited

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Earth as the one and only centerof the universe. Our understanding of astronomy
rests not on the shoulders of Platoand Aristotle, but their oft forgotten contemporaries.
Anaximander writes, Raush was the firstto propose that Earth is a body
floating in an infinite void, heldup by nothing. Democritus, starting from

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the premise that there existed an infinitenumber of atoms, argued there must also
exist an infinite number of worlds.It seems absurd. One of his pupils
is believed to have said that ina large field only one stock should grow,
and that in an infinite space,only one world exists. Belief in
the existence of other worlds caught onwith a number of philosophers, including Epicurus,

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who once wrote to the historian Herodotus, that there is an unlimited number
of cosma, and some are similarto this one, and some are dissimilar.
This belief, however, faint,survived in ancient Rome. Nothing in
the universe is unique and alone,the Roman poet Lucretius once wrote, and
therefore in other regions there must beother earths inhabited by different tribes of men

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and breeds of beasts the Scientific Revolution. Although Plato and Aristotle lived in a
pre Christian world, their ideas aboutthe universe helped shape the doctrine of the
Christian faith during the Middle Ages.This faith proclaimed that Earth was created by
God as the center of the universe. The story of Jesus Christ, who

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sacrificed himself to absolve the sins ofman, re established humanity as the most
significant of all creations. If otherworlds existed, they could not possibly be
inhabited, for if they were,this would automatically diminish the significance of the
Crucifixion. Church doctrines did not stopPolish polymath Nicolo's Copernicus from writing on the

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Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, butthey did prevent him from publishing it.
The book, not released until hisdeath in fifteen forty three, mapped out
an interplanetary system organized not around theEarth but the Sun. This heliocentric model
explained phenomena the Aristotilian model could neveraccount for, including retrograde motion. It

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also confronted Copernicus readers, as Rashputs it, with the idea that we
live on a planet that is justlike any other. The Dominican friar,
mathematic Titian and cosmological theorist Giordano Brunodid not wait until his death to share
his ideas about the universe. Inthree dialogs published between fifteen eighty four and

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fifteen ninety one, Bruno speculated thatsome distant stars might be sons as well,
that these sons were orbited by planetsof their own, and, last,
but not least, that some ofthese planets might be inhabited by life
similar to Earth. While those viewsmight have been annoying to the Church,
Bruno's interest in magic and occultism isprobably what resulted in his arrest in fifteen

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ninety two. Refusing to recant,he was burned at the stake after seven
years of imprisonment and torture. TheGerman astronomer Johannes Kepler lived and worked under
different circumstances. Kepler was born inGermany after the Protestant Reformation, meaning he
could publish his research without fear ofpersecution. He was especially influenced by Galileo

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Galilei's discovery of Jupiter's moons, whichorbited the planet in much the same way
the Earth orbits the Sun. Eachplanet, Kepler concluded after reading Galileo is
served by its own satellites. Fromthis line of reasoning, we deduce with
the highest degree of probability that Jupiteris inhabited. A new era of disbelief.

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Not every participant of the scientific revolutionbelieved in the existence of aliens Galileo.
A devout Catholic, regarded speculation aboutaliens as blasphemous. The British polymath
William Wool argued against the pluralism ofworld's theory to defend the special connection between
God and mankind. Ironically enough,his religiously motivated thesis, outlined in an

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eighteen fifty three Booque titled of thePlurality of Worlds, proved to be more
scientifically accurate than the Heathen astronomers hewas criticizing. Raush summarized Wool's ingenious but
convoluted essay as follows. If Earthhad been in effect uninhabited through most of
its history, than it wouldn't besurprising if other distant planets were also empty.

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Most stars, Wool ads, inhis own words, are within a
nebular region which may easily be uninhabitable, and where this nebular region, marked
by zodiacal light terminates the world oflife begins mainly at the Earth. He
concludes that the absence of life doesnot make the cosmos any less interesting or

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majestic. Wool found an ally inAlfred Russell Wallace, a British naturalist co
credited with formulating the theory of evolutionthrough natural selection, alongside Charles Darwin.
Our Earth is almost certainly the onlyinhabited planet in our solar system, Wallace
rode in nineteen o three, atime when the scientific community was actively debating

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whether Mars was hiding intelligent life.Even if life existed elsewhere in the universe,
Wallace was of the unshaken opinion thatit could never tain the levels of
complexity we find on Earth. AlthoughWool and Wallace were ignored by their contemporaries,
their writings set the stage for anew age of cosmological pessimism, mainly

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an ongoing period in which aliens arethe stuff of science fiction, and each
increasingly comprehensive venture into outer space,whether through exploration or observation, fails to
yield even the slightest evidence pointing towardthe existence of beings that democratus and anaximander
believed ought to exist. To listento all the shows on the x Zone

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Our motto is dare to believe thereto be heard the x Zone searching

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