The Great Moon Hoax and the history of our cosmic imagination
Thursday Theses: Giordano Bruno, Percival Lowell, and Thomas Dick
It’s 1845 and you’re reading in the paper that the moon is populated with life.
There are manbats and unicorns roaming the face of our solar sibling.
There are critters of all kinds and sorts, including some weird birds.
There are monsters that spark deep wonder living on our Earth’s loyal follower, Luna.
Or, that’s what The Sun reports.
Naturally, if this hadn’t been fake news, we’d be living very different lives here almost 200 years later.
It’s hard to imagine an alternate history where two distinct planetary populations are aware of one another.
Perhaps we would have had life forms swapped between the Terran and Lunar biospheres.
Maybe we would have just wiped the monsters out.
Our conception of the universe has been intensely earth based for thousands of years.
So at times, if astronomer Percival Lowell thinks he sees canals on Mars or scientist Rev. Thomas Dick says there are 22 trillion beings living in our solar system, it sparks the public imagination.
Fast forward a century and the public imagination explodes with possibilities, from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the Blob to the Day The Earth Stood Still to It Came From Outer Space.
The idea of other life, which evokes an existential quandary, is gets a large, societal response.
In the history of ideas, the West has not entertained the idea of cosmic pluralism too seriously.
But boy has our way of looking at the earth changed over the years.
With the macrocosm-microcosm analogy, the historic thinkers conceived of the universe as mirroring the human form from the top of the head to bottom.
At other points, we have seen the heavenly bodies as perfect spherical forms, which Galileo dispelled.
And of course, there was the idea of the musica universalis, the music of the spheres.
The perfect harmony of the universe was expressed in a heavenly ringing beyond our skies.
Our forbears had beautiful ideas.
There was a Dominican Friar during the Scientific Revolution named Giordano Bruno.
He was a proponent of cosmic pluralism and the idea that the universe is infinite.
But he was a heretic about much more than just that, so the powers of the time put a stop to that.
They lit up his life, if you catch my drift.
Bruno saw a universe with other populated planets and other creations.
Aristotle wouldn’t have been much of a fan of cosmic pluralism, seeing as how his view of the world involved several concentric spheres.
There’s reason to believe the universe is not, in fact, infinite though.
A static universe, which has always existed, would be flooded with light from its infinite stars.
Or so the theory goes from one German astronomer.
This idea is called Olbers’ Paradox, named after Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers.
If the universe has always existed, and if there are infinite stars, by now the light from all of the stars filling that infinite space will have blanketed our night skies with starlight.
A truly wild thought.
Anyway, what’s the point of this?
Well, the point is more of a question: could you imagine living through any of these points in history, with such seismic shifts in how you see the universe?
Could you imagine earth going from the center of the a finely-tuned universe to being on an island Earth — or Spaceship Earth if you’re more of a Buckminster Fuller persuasion — out in the arm of a random galaxy?
Attempting to sympathize with the minds of history can help to shake up how we see the world.
You can climb Everest or you can hang upside down from a tree, but whatever you do, try and see the world afresh.
No picture is as moving as the Big Picture.
And seeing that picture shift over the millennia sets the wheels to turning.