Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2024

10 MARCH-APRIL 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING thought and religious be- lief. It is only after the fif- teenth century that the Aristotelian cultural legacy faded, thanks above all to the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Ke- pler and Galileo Galilei, together with an evolu- tion of the philosophical and theological mentality, which led to a new vision of the cosmos. Theolo- gians applied the “princi- ple of fullness” (attributed to the aforementioned Augustine) to the celestial kingdom, concluding that the Creator could only have distributed living beings wherever conditions comparable to those on Earth arose (a very current concept today). Indeed, those thinkers became convinced that any planet devoid of life would entail an unacceptable waste of divine energy. Starting from the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus or- bium coelestium , the Sun began to be conceived as one of many stars in the celestial vault, and the Earth as one of the many planets that could orbit around those stars. It is well known how the Roman Catholic Church opposed that new vision of the cosmos. The most famous victim of the so-called “Holy Inquisition” was Gior- dano Bruno, a fervent supporter of the plurality of worlds, who ended up burn- ing at the stake in 1600. The obscuran- tism of the Roman Catholic Church per- vaded much of the seventeenth century and also affected Galileo, who was forced into a historic abjuration. In the eighteenth century, the scientific vision of the universe progressively de- molished ecclesiastical preconceptions, and thanks to the works of enlightened figures (from Thomas Wright to Im- manuel Kant, from Johann Heinrich Lam- bert to William Herschel, from Voltaire to Thomas Paine, just to name a few), the awareness that there could be other Earths inhabited by other thinking beings was definitively established. In the nineteenth century, the possible existence of ex- traterrestrial life began to become a topic of real de- bates, sometimes character- ized by resurgences of re- ligious orthodoxy, such as the episodes that had the Reverend William Whewell as their protagonist in the middle of the century. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Augustine of Hippo Origen Aristotle Plato Democritus Leucippus