Extraterrestrial life and our view of the world at the turn of the millennium / by Steven J. Published by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries Printed in the United States of America Funding provided by The Dibncr Fund. HUl1lanity 3000 will at least know if it is alone in space or not. In 1992, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries inaugurated a series of annual lectures on a variety of topics, all of which have in common the element of using the rich resources found in the Dibner Library of the History of Sci.
Although this booklet contains the ninth Dibner Library Lecture, it is the first in a series of published lectures, which is also generously supported by The Dib. To support his topic of "extraterrestrial life and our worldview at the turn of the millennium," Dr. Dick presented as authorities several treasures in the Dibner library, including the works of GaWeo, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Fontenelle and Descartes.
Bern Dibner is the person responsible for bringing together the remarkable collection of books now housed in the Dibner Library of the His. This beautiful donation is the heart of the Smithsonian's first rare book library and contains many important works from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in the fields of engineering, transportation, chemistry, mathematics, physics, electricity, and astronomy.
Extraterrestrial Life and our World View
The connection between the Naval Observatory and Smithson could be the subject of a substantial lecture, but I have chosen another interest of mine that may have broader appeal: "Alien Life and Our Worldview at the Turn of the Millennium." This episode is described in Patricia Jahns, Matthew Fontaine Maury & Joseph Henry: Scienlists of the Civil War (New York, Hastings House). 2. We remember that I proposed to write the history of the alien life debate as a dissertation. in the Department of History of Science at the Indian University, I was initially told that there were two problems: it wasn't science, and it had no intellectually significant history!
Greene, president of the History of Science Society around the time of the Nor. First, I would like to expand on my claim that we are now in a situation similar to that of the seventeenth century, when two competing worldviews took center stage, and one gradually won out. According to a news article by Peggy Polk, "Four centuries later, the Vatican still condemns the heresy of Giordano Bruno," as the mayor of Rome laid a wreath at the foot of the bronze statue on the 400 ton.
The genie was out of the bottle and gone - there was no way to put him back in it. In this sense, astronomy is really the archeology of space as we peel back the layers of time. Ironically, we gained our knowledge of the royal realm of the stars much earlier than we did of the planets, since stars are bright enough to be seen from space.
Comets, dirty snowballs that roam the kingdom of planets, occasionally providing a dazzling display as seen from Earth. Like the planets, the kingdom of stars includes substellar and circumstellar objects, and interstellar matter, the latter extending from dust to Gi. The kingdom of galaxies includes the largest known objects in the universe, with a diameter of about 100,000 light-years or more (Figure 19).
If one considers the formation of the three kingdoms, a fifth Family can be added to each king.
Medium Deep Survey
The length of the Big Bang 'trunk' is several hundred million to a billion years. Nevertheless, we can approach the problem of the biological universe in the same way as we do the physical universe, by discussing its size, content, and evo. So the size of the proven biological universe is currently limited to one planet in the universe: Earth.
So now we have refined our question: what is the evidence for the weak version and for the strong version of the biological universe. But it is precisely what we are trying to prove under the name of the biological universe, and so it cannot be assumed. But it is the driving force for many scientists and the public, and it is one of the few arguments based on the solid biological universe—that extraterrestrial intelligence must exist.
One of the most striking features of life on Earth is its diversity; Harvard naturalist E. Our understanding of the earth's tree of life and the very existence of the three kingdoms has developed over centuries of observation. For an overview of the limits of life, see John Postgate, The Ollter Limits ofLife (C"mbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 <)<)4).
On extremophiles in the context of the origin of life debate, section Iris Fry, The l ;'/IIcrgence oj Life on Earth:A Historical and Scientific O"cr"iew (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 2000). And so at the end of the twentieth century we are left with two world views - the physical universe and the biological universe - neither proven. The passionate nature of the ongoing debate stems from the fact that much more is at stake than new facts or theories: as in sev.
A biological universe would be significantly more interesting, and perhaps this is one of the psychological reasons why many favor it. The problem of the consequences of a strong biological universe was studied in particular by a NASA team in the early 1990s and can be investigated systematically. First, by comparing similar entities, we can analyze the acceptance of past worldviews and ask how this might relate to the acceptance of biological unity.
Another advantage of the biological universe as a worldview is that elements of the discussion make more sense when seen in the context of an exploration of im. Wells's The kVar of the Worlds (r 898) expressed a startling possible outcome of this worldview.
Three Epistemological Worlds
In the tinal analysis, the problem reduces to a question of extraterrestrial epistemology, or ways of knowing. Finally, I must say that I am among those who believe that there is such a thing as progress in science and such things as facts in the world; either we live in a physical universe or a biological universe, or there are extraterrestrials, or there aren't, and one day we will know. There are no Chinese laws of gravity, no Islamic laws of thermodynamics, no Egyptian theory of relativity.
If not, there may end up being many world systems, as many as there are cognitive systems. Ultimately, interest, need, and desire may serve religion, but they are not criteria for truth. And while the truth about Galileo's two major world systems is now known, the truth about the two modern world systems remains a mystery.
This is exactly my point: that we are teetering on the edge of a new worldview that can change everything in its strong version, and even a lot in its weak version. Olaf Stapledon's vision of 'interplanetary humanity' fifty years ago will be extended to 'interstellar humanity', in which our philosophy, religion and science are much more attuned to the cosmos. By then we will know whether we live in a physical or a biological universe, and we may even have traveled to the nearest stars.
It is becoming a new window on traditional theological concerns as scholars open up the subject of "Cosmotheology." 34;Horrors' Changing Views of the American Victorian House" in conjunction with the Washington College of the Humanities Lecture Series on Changing Perspectives in History, Culture, and the Arts, May 21, 1999. 1997 Technology and Invention (Centenary of Birnth Henry Petroski (Duke University) on "Pencils, Paperclips, and Inventions," Nov. 18, T997.
Robert Hazen (Carnegie Institution of Washington Geo. Physical Laboratory and George Mason University) on "Earth Sciences, Unanswered Questions, and the Dibner Legacy." Bernard Carlson (University of Virginia) on "Making Connections: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, and Thomas Edison and the Race to the Telephone," March 17, 1994. University of Missouri, Kansas City) on "Encounters with Emblematic Animals: rewriting the book of nature in the Late Renaissance".
