Citizens of Their Time

Citizens of Their Time

By and large Huygens imagined the environments and inhabitants of other planets to be rather like those of seventeenth-century Earth.

He conceived of « planetarians » whose « whole Bodies, and every part of them, may be quite distinct and different from ours… this is a very ridiculous opinion… that is impossible a rational Soul should dwell in any other shape than ours ». You could be smart, he was saying, even if you looked peculiar. But he then went on to argue that they would not look very peculiar – that they must have hands and feet and walk upright, that they would have writing and geometry, and that Jupiter has its four Galilean oceans.

A few others had held similar opinions. In his Harmonice Mundi Kepler remarked “It was Tycho Brahe’s opinion concerning that bare wilderness of globes that it does not exist fruitlessly but is filled with inhabitants”.

A Muse. Illustration by Elena

Christian Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing. Before he lived before Darwin, his speculations about extraterrestrial life are innocent of the evolutionary perspective. But he was able to develop on observational grounds something akin to the modern cosmic perspective:

What a wonderful and amazing scheme have we here of the magnificent vastness of the Universe… So many Suns, so many Earths… and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains… And how must our Wonder and Admiration be increased when we consider the prodigious Distance and Multitude of the Stars.

The Voyager spacecraft are the lineal descendants of those sailing-ship voyages of exploration, and of the scientific and speculative tradition of Christian Huygens. The Voyagers are caravels bound for the stars, and on the way exploring those worlds that Huygens knew and loved so well.