Inventing the Enemy: Essays

AN INFINITY OF WORLDS

Roaming among worlds constructed by the imagination, the imaginary astronomy of our forebears, shaded with hints of the occult, was able to create a revolutionary idea: that of the plurality of worlds. It was an idea already present among the ancient atomists—in Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. As Hippolytus tells us in his Philosophumena, if atoms are in continuous movement in the void, they cannot but produce infinite worlds, each different from the other; and some have neither sun nor moon, for others the stars appear larger than they do for us, and from others many more stars are seen. For Epicurus, it was a hypothesis that, since it could not be contradicted, had to be taken as true until shown to be false. In the words of Lucretius (De rerum natura, book II, lines 1050–51), “Nulla est finis: uti docui, res ipsaque per se / vociferatur, et elucet natura profundi” (“There is no limit; I have shown this, the facts speak for themselves, and the nature of the void is evident”). And he continues: “Thus it is increasingly necessary you recognize that other congregations of material bodies exist elsewhere in the universe, like this of our world, which the ether encircles in eager embrace” (lines 1064–66).

Both the void and the plurality of worlds were disputed by Aristotle and, as well as Aristotle, by great scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon. But when it came to the debate over the infinita potentia Dei, suspicions about the plurality of worlds would be expressed by William of Ockham, Buridan, Nicole Oresme, and others. Nicholas of Cusa spoke about an infinity of worlds in the fifteenth century, and Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century.

The deadly poison contained in this hypothesis would emerge more clearly when it gained support from the new epicureans, the seventeenth-century freethinkers. The idea of visiting other worlds, of finding other inhabitants there, was a far more dangerous heresy than the notion of heliocentricity. The infinity of worlds casts doubt on the uniqueness of redemption: Adam’s sin and Christ’s passion are either just minor episodes relevant to our world but not to other divine creatures, or else Golgotha would have to be repeated an infinite number of times on endless planets, removing the sublime uniqueness of the sacrifice of the Son of Man.

As Fontenelle would recall in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), the suggestion was already there in the Cartesian theory of vortexes, because if every star sweeps its planets into a vortex, and the star is swept away by a larger vortex, it was possible to imagine in the sky an infinity of vortexes carrying an infinity of planetary systems.

The idea of the plurality of worlds heralded the beginning of modern science fiction in the seventeenth century, from the travels of Cyrano di Bergerac in the empires of the sun and of the moon, to Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone and John Wilkins’s Discovery of a World in the Moone. As to methods for takeoff, we have not yet reached Jules Verne. Cyrano, the first time, attaches to his body a great number of ampoules filled with dewdrops, and the heat of the sun, attracting the dewdrops, makes him rise. On a second occasion he uses a machine driven by firecrackers. Godwin, however, proposes an airplane ante litteram propelled by birds.