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- [00:00]
A
If there are other intelligent beings on other worlds, they must be able to see. God gave us another chance. He sent us Christ. So what does it mean? The rest of the universe lives in harmony and we are the only fallen world.
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B
This is Ivano Dalprete. He's an astronomer and lecturer at Yale with a specialty in uncovering ancient texts. And today, he's going to take us through every medieval document that has any reference to other worlds. That's right. Back in the day, everybody talked about other worlds and they even speculated about human type creatures that might live on these distant planets, even maybe visiting Earth. He even explains what the most famous scientists and thinkers of that time thought about aliens and why they actually kind of believed in other worlds. Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Da Vinci, Galileo, the founding fathers, even the Pope all wrote personal thoughts about aliens, Atlantis and other worlds. What did they see? What did they know? And why did they write so much about it? Well, today, wonder no more. That's right, because we're going to be going through everything. And on top of that, Ivano is a beautiful, handsome Italian man. I trust him. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp Ivano Delprete. Thank you, sir. I pronounced it in my perfect Italian accent. You. You a. You are a professor at Yale. You're a PhD in the history of science. Is that a. Is that a fair.
- [01:31]
A
Yeah, that's fair.
- [01:32]
B
Okay. You study ancient texts for a living. I think that's reasonable to say. Maybe not ancient, but definitely old.
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A
Old texts for a living.
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B
Old text.
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A
That's right.
- [01:41]
B
Going through old texts and pouring through them. And while we were talking on the phone, you mentioned something to me that I did not expect, that I'm very curious to ask you about. What are the instances of extraterrestrials, aliens, UFOs, or other worlds that are mentioned in the ancient or old texts that you've researched?
- [02:06]
A
Okay, so when it comes to existence of other worlds, and I'm not saying extraterrestrial walking among us or roaming through our skies, but when it comes to the idea that other worlds like the Earth, with inhabitants like us, smart, intelligent people, could exist, this goes back to the Greek antiquity. As far as I know, the idea was first formulated around 450 BC. The first time that you see it put down on paper so as to speak.
- [02:41]
B
So it may have existed even beyond.
- [02:42]
A
That, that is unlikely. You know why? Because before you can conceive of other worlds like the Earth, you need to conceive of the Earth as a body in space, where there are Other similar bodies. You need to conceive the universe in a way kind of similar to how you conceive it. That is a geometrical space where you have the Earth that is kind of suspended in a vacuum or in the void or in space. And the other celestial bodies like the sun or the moon, are somewhat similar to the Earth itself. And this idea, this way of conceiving the universe was conceived in the ancient Greek world in the 5th century, before the current era, around between 450 and 400 BCE.
- [03:35]
B
Did the Egyptians not have an idea, the ancient Egyptians have an idea of these celestial bodies as being other places? Or do they just see them as, you know, sort of dots on the fabric of Earth?
- [03:47]
A
Yeah, more. Much more like that. I see much more like that. So you really have to develop a certain conception of the cosmos that is based on geometry, on geometrical bodies, on geometrical shapes. And this was the characteristics of the Greeks or certain areas of the Greek world. And when they say the Greeks could be their colonies in southern Italy or in what is today western Turkey, that were inhabited by Greeks in antiquity. And this was really conceived at the time. And the first, as far as I know, the first philosopher who apparently talked about the possibility of the existence of a different Earth like ours, possibly with inhabitants, was a philosopher of the school of Pythagoras around 450 BCE. And it is not surprising because Pythagoras, historically, or according to the legend, has been the guy who thought that geometry and numbers are the key to understanding the universe. So our idea that you had to use mathematics and geometry in order to understand the universe, which is what really Garile said that you need to mathematize physics. At his time, there was Aristotle's physics that was not mathematical, it was qualitative. It was qualitative, not quantitative.
- [05:12]
B
I see.
- [05:12]
A
But he said you need to quantify, you need to use numbers. The idea that you have to use mathematics went back to the school of these semi mythical Pythagoras. The guy of the Pythagoras theorem and one of the philosophers of this school did this. Philois was the first one to imagine the Earth as orbiting the center of the universe instead of being at the center.
- [05:37]
B
Oh, wow.
- [05:38]
A
Apparently he had not realized yet that the Earth is a sphere. He probably conceived of the Earth as a flat disk, like. And we live on one of the faces, the thickness probably one third the diameter. And he thought that it orbited around the center of the universe and that there must be another body for reasons of symmetry, probably, or of balance opposite to it, orbiting also the center of the universe. But since we live on this phase, we can never see this Anti Earth, as he called it. And as far as it's possible to understand, because we don't have complete works, we have fragments and citations from other authors. This Anti Earth was conceived as just another Earth. So they still hadn't figured out that the Earth is a sphere. That happened about 50 years later, but they were still putting it into orbit around another center of the universe, and they were already conceiving of the possibility of similar bodies with inhabitants.
- [06:49]
B
Interesting. But he just thought it was another Earth, just like our Earth.
- [06:53]
A
Yes, that's what is possible to infer from the sources. And more or less probably in the same years, there was another of philosophers in Greece proper, Anaxagoras, who was teaching that the moon was Earth and that the sun was just a fiery stone.
- [07:15]
B
It was justified stone.
- [07:16]
A
Fiery stone, Yes, a very bright and burning stone. And this idea that the Earth is Earth, that is like the Earth is made of the same elements. And again, we don't have his own work on this, but we have later quotations and accounts that suggests that he also imagined that there could be other beings like us on the moon.
- [07:48]
B
And what year is that?
- [07:49]
A
We are talking about 450, 420 BCE now. Yeah. By the time. We don't have to think that there were ideas that were commonly accepted that were kind of weird. Certainly, actually he was tried apparently for his ideas because traditionally the moon was venerated as a divinity and the sun as well. And traditional religion was considered important for the cohesion of the city and of the population.
- [08:19]
B
And so to say that the moon is just another mass that is material like our Earth is heretical.
- [08:26]
A
I would not use this term. Really has to do with Christianity. I wouldn't say it is heretical. But we know that he was tried because of this. Now, he probably was tried because he was closest to the most important political man in Athens at the time, Pericles. And they decided to attack Pericles by attacking this guy who was close to him that was vulnerable.
- [08:50]
B
And they couldn't attack Pericles because he was.
- [08:52]
A
He was too powerful. So Anaxagoras was sentenced to death, but Pericles had his sentence commuted into exile.
- [09:00]
B
You got sentenced to death for saying that there's people on the moon.
- [09:02]
A
Yeah. Or that the moon was another Earth.
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B
That it was material in some way.
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A
Yeah.
- [09:09]
B
Wow.
- [09:09]
A
Yeah. And we also know that because of a book that philosopher Plato wrote about a few decades later, the famous apology of Socrates, where he wants to show how ignorant those who wanted to to have Socrates sentenced to death. His beloved master. Where. And so one of the accusers said, Socrates, and you support. And you said that the moon is earth and that the sun is a fiery stone. And Socrates say, what are you talking about? This is not me, you dumbo. These are an axagoras, everyone knows that. You can go behind the theater where they are the booksellers, and for a few drachmas you can buy his books.
- [09:51]
B
That was not me, he's already dead.
- [09:53]
A
Yeah, and if you really want to have something against this, go to the booksellers that are selling the books of Anaxagoras that are full of these kinds of things. So that was about the year 400 BCE. But the fact that the ancient sources wanted us to know about this trial, it was that it was extraordinary. It was not normal at all. And in the following centuries there were different philosophical schools discussing the possible existence of other inhabited worlds. And they had all kind of different opinions. So, for example, the important school of the atomists. Yeah, they thought that the universe is infinite and eternal and that everything is made of by the cohesion and the formation of atoms of different size and different shape.
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B
The atomists.
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A
Atoms.
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B
And who were these atomists and where were they?
- [10:57]
A
The first well known atomist was a certain Democritus. He lived more or less in the same time of Anaxagoras. The most famous one is probably a certain Epicurus, hence the Picurians, because their ideas was that everything is made by atoms and void and their combination, the universe is eternal and infinite. There is no real God or God given law. And so what you have to do in your life, well, try to live happily, because there is no God given law, there is not God given ethics. Just try to live the best way you can.
- [11:36]
B
Interesting. This is how we get Epicurean ideas.
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A
That's right.
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B
I see.
- [11:40]
A
And they also thought that since the universe is infinite and everything is made by aggregation of atoms, there are infinite worlds that continuously form into space. And then forms of life sprung up on these worlds and then they run their course and then they dissolve and the earth is just one of them. And these were the atomists. They were also important because and famous because of a Roman poet, certain Lucretius, who wrote a wonderful scientific poem, more or less in the time of Julius Caesar, called On the Nature of Things. And he was an atomist and he wrote this poem in Latin. And somehow this absolutely atheistic poem survived to the middle Ages. Until in the early 1400s, a Florentine scholar discovered a copy in an abbey. In the library of an abbey. Yeah.
- [12:34]
B
And the poem is this.
- [12:35]
A
Is this. It explains how the universe works according to atomistic principles and that there is no creator God and that the Earth is just one of countless worlds that continuously form throughout time and space.
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B
Interesting.
- [12:51]
A
And that was one of the most important philosophical schools of the antiquity. The opposite was the big guy called Aristotle, who lived about 350 BCE, and he was of the opposite opinion. He thought that you can only have one world like the Earth. And he supported this idea with a series of reasoning. But the easiest to understand for us is that he said, well, you sit down and you see the heavens revolve around you, the universe revolve around you. Clearly, the universe is not infinite, otherwise it could not revolve around you. It would take an infinite time. Right. So it has to have a limited size. Right. What can be the shape of the universe?
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B
Spherical.
- [13:43]
A
Yeah. Looks like it's a sphere. Now, a sphere has only one center. Where is the center of the universe? Seems like us heavy things tend to fall down. He knew that the Earth was a sphere, okay? It was a trivial notion by his time already. He gives three proofs that the Earth is a sphere that were repeated in every medieval book that you study as a university student. But it says, sorry if I had to bother you with this evidence of such a trivial notion that the Earth is a sphere. But for reason of completeness, okay, I will give these demonstrations that the Earth is a sphere. And so if you go to the other side of the Earth, it's not like things kept going down. I mean, they go down, but actually they go towards a center. So there must be the center of the universe. So the Earth is motionless at the center of the universe just because this is where heavy bodies tend to fall. So if you had, by hypothesis, another Earth in the sky, it would just fall down to the center of the universe and you'll have a bigger Earth. Sounds right.
- [15:03]
B
Makes sense.
- [15:05]
A
If you accept his assumptions that are reasonable, he will start his chain of logical deductions. And he basically invented logics as a discipline. He wrote a book about logics, and he will lead you to these conclusions. And he thought he had demonstrated that logically that you cannot have other words, only one. But that was Aristotle. And there were a lot of different schools of thoughts.
- [15:31]
B
Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because we got camp updates. That's right. We have amazing stuff going on here. At the campsite and all sorts of crazy things going on in history. 1941, Hitler took command of the German army. Whoa. 1997, Titanic premiered in the theaters. 1777, George Washington led troops into the winter quarters of Valley Forge. All of this stuff is fascinating. There's all these explanations for everything that's going on in our newsletter. That's right. That's where I learned all this. And I just dropped this information anytime I'm hanging out. Maybe you could do it. You go on a first date and you're talking to a girl, you're like, hey, did you know? 1941, Hitler took over Germany today? Whoa. And she's probably like, that's you. You're an awesome guy and you're an interesting dude. I appreciate you brought that up on our first date. I know I was talking about my family and how many siblings I have and that my sister's doing pills, but thanks for bringing up that interesting fact about Hitler. You could be the most interesting person on every date. Get laid easier and make more friends if you subscribe to the newsletter. Not only that, I'm sure you've seen I've been wearing merch. I've been wearing sick brand new merch on episodes of Flagrant. I'm sitting right next to 50 cent in this picture right here wearing brand new merch. And you're going to get first dibs if you subscribe to the newsletter. That's right, you're going to be finding out about all the merch. And on top of that, 2025, I'm going on the road. I'm going to be torn all over the United States of America, continentally, sorry, Alaska. But if you want to get first access to those tickets, go to the newsletter. Everything that's going on in the camp world, in my world and in our world is going on in the newsletter. Smore camp. Click on the link in the description below and I'll see you there. Let's get back to the show.
- [17:05]
A
A few centuries later, a Greek writer, certain Plutarch, who lived during the Roman Empire, wrote a fantastic book, a dialogue called on the Face, in the sphere of the Moon, in the orb of the Moon. And so there are a few friends that meet for dinner. And as it happened at the time, women cooked and did all the work, and they were free or enslaved people. And they were free to converse and discuss about philosophical questions. And so they start discussing about the nature of the moon. And you have different philosophical schools that debate. There is the Aristotelian, there is epicurean. But the thesis that the author himself supports is that there is not only one center of gravity in the universe, there must be more, and that the moon must have his center of gravity. And then the moon is probably made of the same elements as the earth, just in different proportions. And that could be inhabitants on the moon. And so this. These ideas circulated a lot.
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B
Now for Plutarch and Rome, this was not sacrilegious because they didn't at this time accept the Greek philosophy that this was some type of divine being.
- [18:23]
A
No, they had no problems. I mean, religion was important. Keeping the traditional piety and devotion towards the traditional gods was important. But these philosophers could easily accommodate the traditional gods, because the Greek and Roman gods are just very powerful beings that happen to be mortal. They are not even eternal because they are born. The Roman and Greek gods do not create the universe, do not make the universe, do not rule the universe.
- [18:51]
B
They exist as a. Yeah, they're just super powerful being.
- [18:54]
A
In the Iliad, at a certain point, they are the gods that are fighting against each other because some support the Trojans and some support the Greeks. And it's a mess. At a certain point, Jupiter, really, Zeus actually really got upset about this. So he summoned them on the top, on the Olympus and tell them to stop doing that, because the sword of Troy has decided already. There is the fate which is above them, and there's nothing they can do about it. Troy will fall whatever you do, because there is this fate that is more powerful than us, even more powerful than me. And so they just had to accommodate these super powerful beings. Not a big deal. But Plato, for example, is already a monotheist. He thinks that the universe was created out of initial chaos by a benevolent creator. Because he saw geometry in the universe. He also followed the. He learned. He studied with the Pythagorean philosophers. So he also thought that geometry and mathematics are the key to understanding the universe. And he saw a mind behind the universe that understood mathematics and geometry. And so this must be the creator.
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B
I see. And that was Plato.
- [20:15]
A
Yeah, that was Plato. And the Creator made the universe according to mathematical principles. He made spheres. He made geometrical shapes. And so you have this discussion about the possibility of the existence of other worlds. They are mostly academic discussion. Interplanetary travel was not in the cards. And to my knowledge, no one ever thought that we could be visited by extraterrestrial life. But there are works that we could call science fiction that describe travels to other worlds. Yeah. There is another Greek author, more or less in the Same time as Plutarch, Lucian. And he writes satirical writings, really. And he uses what looks like science fiction to criticize his own society, which science fiction has always done. And so he imagines that someone travels to the moon, and he found other people on the moon and empires and on the other celestial bodies and the other planets. He finds other people around and so on. It doesn't mean that they thought that you could be visited by them. This was a completely flight of fantasy.
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B
Does he say in the text or in the dialogue, like, oh, this is purely an exercise in philosophy?
- [21:36]
A
No, it doesn't say. As far as I remember. It doesn't say that explicitly. I don't remember, you know, But I think it was always understood that it was a flight offensive, that there is no source, to my knowledge, at this point, that talks about the possibility of us being visited by extraterrestrial beings. Now, an interesting thing is that all of these philosophers were studied, even by Christians, when Christianity starts spreading. And so the possibility of other worlds is also discussed by the fathers of the Church and by other Christian authors. Why? Because pagan philosophers that they read talked about it and they expressed their opinions. And the existence of other worlds, or lack thereof, could be imagined in very different ways. So some authors imagined other worlds not as coexisting at the same time in space, but as successions of worlds in time. So you have this universe. At a certain point, it grows, it stabilizes, but at a certain point, it will dissolve again into chaos, and then it will reform again into a more ordered world where you can have again an earth with life. And so there will be other people, there will be other life forms in time, these things in time, rather than coexisting at the same time in different place.
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B
And these are the pagan philosophers.
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A
Even a Christian philosopher like Origen, one of the first Christian philosophers, he thought that there was this cyclical universe.
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B
Does that in any way counteract the belief or the Christian dogma at the time?
- [23:23]
A
That's a very interesting question. And if you don't mind, I'll come to that a little later.
- [23:29]
B
Sure.
- [23:31]
A
So a very interesting thing is that at a certain point, clergymen in the church start thinking seriously about the possibility of other worlds. And this happened when Aristotle became important in European universities starting from the 1200s. Okay. And they read Aristotle mostly from translations from the Arabic by Islamic philosophers, like Ibn Sina, a Persian that lived around the year 1000, or Ibn Rushd, who lived in Muslim Spain about 150 years later. And since Aristotle discusses the problem of other Worlds, they also do. And so this problem was discussed in European universities. Now, Islamic theologians had big problems with Aristotle's demonstration that you can have only one world, because Aristotle thought that nature is what it is and you cannot have other worlds otherwise incur into logical contradictions. And even God must be self consistent. So there is a supreme being in Aristotle, but he cannot change the laws of nature. This is a big no, no for Christians, for Jews and for Muslims. God is outside nature. He makes nature. He. He can do whatever he wants. If he decides that the speed of light is 40 miles per hour, he can do so, it will be a different universe. Of course, he wants to make a universe where we can live. And so he made different rules, but it is a choice. He decides that the universe is like this. And so Islamic theologians, and then later Christian theologians argued that no God, if he wants, can make other worlds. And maybe he did, maybe he did only one. But you must allow for the possibility that there must be other worlds, because this is within the capabilities of God, right?
- [25:32]
B
It would restrain God's omnipotence to say he can only make one world.
- [25:36]
A
God will not be omnipotent again. Now there is an important date in, very important date in the history of medieval science, which is 1277. And at the time there was a lot of turmoil about these teachings by Aristotle that were taught in universities in Christian Europe. Many of them looked really heretical. And so the Pope orders an investigation and the Archbishop of Paris produces a list of Aristotelian theses that must not be taught, that mass be condemned. One of the thesis was that the universe is eternal, it was not created. Well, it is understandable, right? The Christian God made the universe. Another thesis that there was never first man. For Aristotle, the earth is eternal and all the forms of life and the species are also eternal.
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B
But we need Adam.
- [26:33]
A
We need Adam. I mean, or someone that you can call Adam, right? And maybe there was, which is now what many Catholic theologians think there was, maybe evolution. But at certain point there was this being that received an immortal soul and consciousness is. And consciousness and intelligence. And he was no longer an animal. He received a spark of God. There must be someone that you can call Adam. And another of these things that were condemned is that there cannot be other worlds.
- [27:05]
B
On what grounds?
- [27:07]
A
Because God can make other worlds. So he cannot say that it is impossible for other worlds to exist.
- [27:13]
B
Oh, I see. Oh, wow. So they say you need creation, you need Adam, and you need to allow.
- [27:19]
A
The possibility at least that other worlds can exist.
- [27:22]
B
That's interesting. So it was the early church hierarchy that was almost aiding this idea that we have to be open to this, that we have to be open to other worlds.
- [27:31]
A
It is very counterintuitive to us. It is one of the other things that I want to debunk. It was not me. I mean, it has been known for a long time, okay.
- [27:40]
B
But I feel like there's a streak within Christianity, at least amongst people I would talk to, that would say God created humanity specifically and specially, and we are his divine creation, and there is no other creation because we are his chosen people. And this is like a modern idea. I've heard people say that is, it seems like to be in contradiction to what the early church was saying, which was be open to the idea.
- [28:06]
A
I mean, this idea that you talked about actually is contradicted by the revelation, because God made other beings that are not humans and that they are intelligent beings, what are angels.
- [28:22]
B
But I guess they exist in some type of ephemeral or I guess some type of other liminal space. They exist in the heavens, or they exist with God outside of time, outside of reality.
- [28:33]
A
This was not what was what was said at the time. When they said other worlds, they meant other places, like the earth, somewhere else. And the idea of other worlds implied the existence of intelligent life on these worlds, because the idea was that God would not make another world just to leave it empty, right? So there must be these other worlds. And the idea of the possibility of the existence of other worlds in a time when every philosopher was an Aristotelian, basically was kept alive by the Church for theological reasons. So most natural philosophers would write, okay, let's see how other worlds could, in theory exist. And they will give you a list, and they will have long discussions of how other worlds exist. But some of them will conclude, but of course, this is just an academic exercise. God can make other worlds, but he made only one for a range of reasons. But not everyone said the same. And actually, theologians, more than natural philosophers, took the idea seriously. So, for example, in the 1400s, there was one of the preeminent theologians of the time, a French called Vorilong, who wrote a theological treatise. And in this theological treatise, it also addresses the problem of the existence of other worlds. He considered that as probable. It is likely that God could have created as many other worlds as he wanted. And he starts speculating on the inhabitants of these other worlds. What he says is that, of course, this is speculation because there is no way you can know about them. Space travel was not in the Cards. Radio astronomy was not in the cards. There was no way we can communicate with them. He said that explicitly. Unless some angels come down and tell us about them, because the revelation does not say anything about them. And natural philosophy can only allow for their existence. We don't have any strong evidence, but their existence seems likely. Okay, but then there is a problem, a big problem for the Christian theologian. If there are other intelligent people.
- [30:57]
B
What.
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A
Does it mean to be intelligent? For Christian theology, it means that you can choose between good and evil. God makes Adam and Eve and plants the tree of the good and evil in the Garden of Eden, because Adam and Eve must be able to make a choice. He tells them, don't touch this tree, don't eat, because it is not good. They must. And he left them free to make this choice. They did their own choice at a certain point, and humankind failed. But if there are other intelligent beings on other worlds, they must be able to sin. What if they sin? God gave us another chance. He sent us Christ, who incarnated on the earth as a human being, to save us from our sins and gave a possibility of redemption. And being God good, it must have given a possibility of redemption even to them. So what does it mean? That Christ must continually reincarnate and be crucified another world to save them?
- [32:04]
B
Or is it possible that they never sinned in the first place?
- [32:07]
A
Yeah. And this is the possibility that he takes refuge into. Maybe the rest of the universe lives in harmony with the creation and with the plan of God and we are the only fallen world.
- [32:21]
B
Wow, that's a fun theory.
- [32:23]
A
Yeah. Now, if you are into classic science fiction, in 1938, C.S. lewis, who was a colleague of Tolkien at Oxford, published a science fiction book called out of the Silent Planet. It is about human beings traveling to Mars. And they found there a world that has never fallen. Intelligent beings on Mars, intelligent races that still live in harmony with the creation. But they say there is a world that does not take place in the harmony of the universe. There is this silent world. The silent world is the Earth, the only world who fell. Now, C.S. lewis knew all of this story, and so this idea. He was a Christian, a devoted Christian, and he basically both into the solution, the possible solution given by 40 long. That is, maybe we are the only world that has fallen.
- [33:29]
B
Wow.
- [33:30]
A
But the important point is, by that time, Christianity had no problem with the existence of other worlds. And there is someone who had even more fun theories. A certain Von Kues. He was a cardinal. Actually, he was a high clergyman. And he wrote A book. And in this book, we are still in the 1400s, about 1440, and these books, he talks about a very bold conception of the universe. And he thought that the universe doesn't have a center, really, and that the Earth and the stars just move around in the universe, and then the stars are places like the Earth, and they are all inhabited. Now, what terrible things happened to him for saying things like that, that the Earth moves around in the universe and the other places the other stars and planets had have their inhabitants. He became a cardinal. He worked with four popes.
- [34:38]
B
Oh, wow.
- [34:39]
A
No one had a problem with that.
- [34:40]
B
Interesting. And where did he get these ideas from? Was he reading these other classics?
- [34:44]
A
Yes, he probably knew Pluto. I don't know his new Plutarch. Plutarch was also discovered in Europe during the 1400s. He was especially well known in Florence, I think. I'm not sure exactly of his own sources. But, you know, even if there were the mainstream ideas that were at the time, Aristotle's okay, that there is just one world. You cannot have other worlds. This is what was normally taught in universities. It doesn't mean that there weren't other strengths that were not that mainstream, perhaps, but still existed, and they were talked about. And so a great guy who probably read Plutarch or heard about him and also wrote about the Moon as an earthly place was Leonardo da Vinci around 1500. So you see, there is a continuity. These theologians wrote in the 1400s, around 1500s, Leonardo, clearly, he knows notes. He never published anything, but he scribbled a lot. And in his notes, he clearly thinks that the Moon is a body like the Earth, or similar. Somewhat similar. And he bases his idea, certainly on the fact that his idea circulated. Plutarch was pretty popular in Florence, but also on his knowledge of how bodies reflect light. He didn't know much Latin. He didn't know much of the quiditas of light, of the essence of what light is. But he said, you can take from me, I'm a good painter. And I spent my time studying how bodies reflect light. And what I can tell you is the Moon does not reflect the light as a perfectly spherical and smooth body, which is what Aristotle thought of it would do. Imagine, or maybe you have it. Imagine a pool ball, okay? A table pool ball, okay? You shine light on it, okay? You see a bright spot in the center, in the center, and then the rest is much darker, progressively darker. The Moon is not like this. The Moon is like a surface that is uniformly shiny with some dark spots, but not with this kind of symmetry. And so what Leonardo thought is that on the moon probably there are oceans, and these oceans have waves and motions, and so these waves can reflect light in different directions. And so some of this light will always reach the earth. And he has drawings and sketches where he shows how it happens. And even someone who didn't know Latin and who was not considered a natural philosopher, didn't never attend university, but he could know these kind of things.
- [37:51]
B
That's a clever idea. I mean, was it well known at the time that the sun was reflecting. That the moon is reflecting the sun's light?
- [37:57]
A
Oh, yeah, of course.
- [37:58]
B
And when was that? That was accepted by?
- [38:01]
A
Since Greek antiquity.
- [38:02]
B
Oh, really?
- [38:03]
A
Yeah. That's how he explained the phases of the moon.
- [38:06]
B
So that was always known. That it was a reflection.
- [38:09]
A
Yeah, that the moon reflects the light of the sun.
- [38:11]
B
Interesting.
- [38:12]
A
Of course, that's how you explain the phases of the moon. This is the only way it makes sense.
- [38:17]
B
Interesting.
- [38:18]
A
And you ask whether these ideas were well known. Now, we don't know much about it. What we know is that when it comes to someone like Leonardo, we are probably seeing the tip of the iceberg. We had to think of him not like a genius, centuries ahead of his time. He was a genius. Of course, he was considered genius in his time. But as someone who elaborated in original ways, notions and sources that were available to him. Now, a fun thing is that one century later, in 1604, someone published a non muse book, saying more or less the same things, that there are arguments of optics that tell us that the moon must be a body similar to the earth or not a perfectly smooth bodies, there must be irregularities. It could be an earthly body.
- [39:13]
B
Valleys.
- [39:14]
A
Yeah. That book was published anonymously. It was also always suspected that the author of this book was Galileo at the time, was not famous and he had not published absolutely anything. A few years ago, a couple of Years ago, a PhD student in Venice found probably the smoking gun, a document saying, showing that this must have been Galileo, the author, the anonymous author.
- [39:42]
B
And what was the document?
- [39:43]
A
It is a book that he published in Florence. He was still a professor of mathematics at Paolo University. He had not discovered a telescope yet. He was not famous. His paycheck was half as much that of the professor of Aristotelian philosophy. He was much more prestigious as a chair and he published his book. Now, what we know is that Galileo had a lot of contacts with the artists in Florence and the environment of Florentine artists. He never read Leonardo. He could not have read Leonardo. His notebooks were not accessible at the time. And so one possibility is that these were ideas that we are discussing in the context of Florentine artists and that he learned them from these artists that he frequented. He was a very good draftsman as a professor of mathematics. He also taught technical drawing. Drawing was an important part of what professor of mathematics taught at the time, especially in Italy. And his watercolors of the moon are beautiful. He was a very good artist. And one of his closest friends was actually an artist, an important artist who was also from Florence and worked in Rome. And he got from. He was one of the first persons probably that got a telescope directly from Galileo.
- [41:10]
B
Oh, wow.
- [41:11]
A
Yeah. And in 1611, a few years, just one year after Galileo published his observations of the moon, he had a commission to. To paint, to do a painting in Rome in the largest temple dedicated to the Virgin to Mary. And he frescoed one of the domes of the temple. And in this dome he painted a traditional subject, the Virgin of the Apocalypse. In the Apocalypse of St. John, he describes the arrival of a woman that will arrive shrouded in light and her with a crown of 12 stars and her feet on the Moon. That this is. That's similar. There's not this theme. There is no moon, there is no crown of stars.
- [42:04]
B
This is Guadalupe. But it said that she's standing on.
- [42:07]
A
But it has an air of familiarity, shrouded in light.
- [42:10]
B
It said that she's standing on a crescent moon is how it's known.
- [42:13]
A
Oh, that's. Yes, that's the version of Apocalypse. That's the subject. The moon was usually painted as a sphere or as a crescent. And Ciguli painted the moon with craters and mountains like you can see them in Galileo's telescope.
- [42:28]
B
Oh, wow.
- [42:29]
A
That was in 1611 in Rome, in the most important temple dedicated to Mary in the fall of Christianity.
- [42:36]
B
Was that a problem?
- [42:37]
A
No.
- [42:38]
B
Wow.
- [42:40]
A
It was not a problem. Okay, it's not a problem. And actually the Jesuits of the Roman College that were the central university of the Jesuits in Rome, were asked by a very important cardinal who had a big role in the prohibition of Copernicanism a few years later, what they thought of the discoveries of Galileo. And they answered that he was right, that there are mountains and valleys on the moon, that it is an earth like body. Now, if you want to say that, then the Earth as well revolves around the sun instead of being still at the center of the universe. This is more problematic because this is not by itself evidence that the Earth moves. It just makes it more plausible. It just makes it clear that There are places in the universe that are like the Earth. And so it makes of the Earth a planet, if you want. But there is no strong evidence really for the motion of the Earth. But they confirmed that the Moon has craters and mountains, and the Church had no problems with that.
- [43:47]
B
Did Galileo speculate if anyone lived on the Moon?
- [43:50]
A
Yes, of course.
- [43:52]
B
What did he say?
- [43:53]
A
So there are always this kind of speculation of other worlds. Now, in most cases, when they imagine other worlds, they will think of other worlds as bodies in a solar system like we think of them in most cases, not always, but in most cases, think of the traditional geocentric universe. You have the Earth, the celestial spheres around them, kind of a self enclosed universe. Right, okay. They would think of other worlds as many self enclosed universes.
- [44:23]
B
I see, okay. So not a part of our universe.
- [44:27]
A
They will still be part of the universe, but the universe is made by planets, by worlds like the Earth, with their own, each one of their own.
- [44:33]
B
Orbit and their own solar system.
- [44:35]
A
Yeah, not everyone, for example Cardinal from QS didn't think this. They thought that all of these planets, like the Earth, moved around freely in space. Okay, Leonardo certainly don't think so. He looked at the Moon. Plutar did not think so. He looked at the Moon. It was another place like the Earth, we would say, in the same solar system, so as to speak. So as soon as Galileo published his observations of the Moon, they were a bombshell. I mean, he became overnight the most famous man in Europe, because everyone had evidence that indeed the Earth is a place, the Moon is a place like the Earth. And so of course everyone started speculating that there must be inhabitants on the new on the moon. And that was really natural. I mean, it happened every time. And this time maybe it was not just speculation, because we have evidence that you have an Earth like environment. And so in 1615, a friend writes to Galileo. He didn't talk of life on the moon in the study. Messenger, okay? And he told me, look, Galileo, be careful when you talk about the Moon, because when you just discuss a resemblance between the Moon and the Earth, some other people, we start thinking and saying that then there must be other people on the moon and men like us, and maybe descendants of Adams. How did the sandals of Adams, men like us, end up on the Moon? Maybe Genesis had it all wrong. So be careful because other people could use this, these observations to speculate against the revelation. So when he wrote his dialogue on the systems of the world, there he discussed the possible inhabitation of the Moon, and he describes the Moon in A very reasonable way says, I don't see much evidence of a thick atmosphere on the Moon. If there is an atmosphere, it must be thin, large bodies of water. I don't see much evidence for them. This does not mean that there cannot be other intelligent beings on the moon. They'll just be different from us. Their bodies must be different, probably lighter, probably adapted to the environment of the Moon. He just said, they are not men like us. And that was enough.
- [47:02]
B
Like animals, other creatures, other aliens, but not sons of Adam extraterrestrials, not sons.
- [47:10]
A
Of Adams, not men like us. And the definition of human at the time really was more theological than biological. That means descendant from Adam, from the first created couple. Maybe there was another creation and God put on these places other beings that are adapted to the conditions of that world. And that became, throughout the 1600s, kind of a standard statement among astronomers, because.
- [47:40]
B
It was theologically safe, that there's people up there. They're not humans.
- [47:44]
A
They're not human beings. They're not the Son of Adam. There are other people. And the idea was extremely popular, and everyone talked about that, including clergyman. A very popular book in the 1600s, Great Britain, was the Discovery of Another World in the Moon. It was published in the 1630s, I think 35 or 37, by a bishop.
- [48:11]
B
Wow.
- [48:12]
A
Wilkins. And it also became a play later. And in the late 1600s, one of the greatest scientists of the time, the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, wrote a book on the habitability of other worlds. And he started from the idea that other worlds must have inhabitants because they thought that God doesn't make other worlds to keep them empty. It didn't make much sense to them. It was illogical. And what he said when discussing Saturn, for example, he was the guy who discovered. Who figured out that there is a ring around Saturn.
- [48:55]
B
Oh, wow.
- [48:56]
A
In the primitive telescope, it was not clear. There was something weird about Saturn. Kind of couple of handles at times, and then they disappeared. Because sometimes the ring is visible head on from the Earth. And so it's very thin and can't see it anymore.
- [49:13]
B
I see.
- [49:13]
A
Okay. Next year it will disappear, for example. And he knew that it was very far from the sun and much bigger than the Earth. And so he said, certainly the inhabitants of Saturn must be especially adapted to survive the long and excruciating winters of this place. But the idea of extraterrestrial life was commonsensical.
- [49:37]
B
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- [51:14]
A
The most important book, the most famous book of scientific popularization of every Time. It was not written by Carl Sagan. Forget about Tyson. It was published in 1686 in France by a certain Fontenelle and the title was Dialogues on the Plurality of the Inhabited Worlds. It was written in French, of course, not in Latin. It was translated in every possible language. In the following 150 years had probably 150 editions and it was a basic reading for every educated girl. Because the setting is this. There is a charming marquise that on summer nights is entertained by her knight, by her lover, let's say, close companion on discussions about astronomy and the cosmos. Since she's a woman, the author assumes that she doesn't know anything about modern astronomy. But she's smart and witty. It is because of the education, not because women are intellectually inferior. She's very smart. And so his knight explains to her modern universe and that the Earth revolves around the sun, that the moon is A place like ours, and then there are inhabitants on any of this world. And this book was also considered a perfect handbook of polite conversation.
- [52:56]
B
Wow.
- [52:56]
A
Yes. So it was a very recommended reading for educated girls.
- [53:01]
B
Interesting.
- [53:02]
A
Yes. And it had a lot of sequels and a lot of authors, a number of authors at least, wrote similar books. And that was super popular. It was still printed in the early 1800s when that astronomy was surpassed. They just printed the book with annotations at certain point explaining that though this theory is surpassed, now we know this and this and this and so on.
- [53:29]
B
Was the dialogue written as a legitimate astronomical literature, or was it just like a fiction?
- [53:37]
A
No, no, no. It was written as a book that you can read to learn about astronomy. It doesn't talk of interplanetary travels. There is this fashionable setting where you are in the high society and you're spending your summer in your summer state. This is an aristocratic woman, and you have this dialogue that is a way to make the book more vibrant, more easy to read. Instead of writing a treatise, write a dialogue. It's much more lively, much more interesting. Right. You have two characters, you can have conversations.
- [54:16]
B
It's like a play, in a way.
- [54:17]
A
It's a play, yeah, it's like a play in a way, but it conveyed legitimate scientific knowledge. And in 1700s, it was common sense. They believed in the existence of extraterrestrial life more or less the way we do, and with the same evidence, it is zero.
- [54:42]
B
Did anyone beg the question, like, oh, have they visited Earth? I'm sure there's people in this time had been, oh, I saw something in the sky, or I saw something, you know, a light that flashed by.
- [54:54]
A
No, not like that in satirical literature. Yes, not as realistic space travel, but in the same way as Lucian had written of a human visiting other worlds in Roman times. So he had to think of these books not as modern science fiction. Think of that as the equivalent of Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver goes in other places and visits these places, and in these other worlds, really, there are these strange creatures. And he uses this book to criticize his own country and his times and his own culture.
- [55:40]
B
Interesting.
- [55:41]
A
And these books did the same. Voltaire, the famous Voltaire, the French philosopher, wrote a book like this. He imagined that an inhabitant of Saturn visits the Earth and gets totally mad at the stupidity of human beings. When he arrives, there is a war between Russia and the Turks for the control of Crimea. This visitor from space is a gigantic being, and these tiny creatures are killing each other furiously to decide who will be the owner of this piece of mud.
- [56:19]
B
Interesting.
- [56:20]
A
Are you kidding me? So not as realistic space travel, not as visitors coming from space, Simply because space travel is not in the cards. It was not considered technically plausible or scientifically or technologically plausible.
- [56:38]
B
And this is sort of related. But I'm curious also, like, Plato's account of Atlantis kind of falls under maybe the same classification where he's using Atlantis as a way to describe the hubris of Athens. And I don't know if you've read his account on this.
- [56:53]
A
Oh, yeah, of course. And it could be a way to see it. And I never thought of it, but it's. It's a possible way to see it. Atlantis has another word. An interesting thing is that when they say they use the term world, that is not necessarily meant a place distinct from the Earth in space. A world in one of the meanings of the word, of this term in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, is a place that has never had contacts with the places that we know and are familiar with. So, for example, another place on the Earth that never had contacts with Europe or Africa or Asia, that would be another world, because if there are inhabitants there, then you have to assume probably another creation.
- [57:52]
B
So Australia, for example.
- [57:54]
A
Why do you think America is the new World and not the new continent?
- [57:57]
B
Right.
- [57:58]
A
This is the reason.
- [57:59]
B
Right.
- [58:00]
A
And so there is a reason why, for example, the title of Bishop Wilkins book that he published in 1636, I think, was the Discovery of Another World in the Moon. Not on the Moon, because they can discover other worlds in the Earth. And one of the ways in which other worlds could be imagined was that there are other worlds within the Earth because the Earth can be hollow. The idea was pretty common until 1700s. And there can be great subterranean cavities with running waters, maybe oceans. Think of Travel to the center of the Earth by Jules Verg. He's recovering this ancient theory that the interior of the Earth is hollow. And actually, at a certain point, the travelers. It is briefly mentioned. The protagonist seems to see beings like humans, and he kind of refrains in horror from the idea that there can be a whole humankind that spent all its existence within the Earth. That would be another world. That would be another way to imagine another world. It must not necessarily be another place in the space outside the Earth.
- [59:26]
B
Did they. Who. Who discussed these ideas of. Of extraterrestrials, so to speak, or other worlds inside the world? Like, who are some of the.
- [59:34]
A
Started very early already with, I think, Anaxagoras.
- [59:38]
B
Oh, really?
- [59:38]
A
Yeah. So the guy who Was sentenced in Athens for saying that the moon is. Is Earth. And we have later sources, actually, they may be accurate or not saying that. He also speculated that he can have other worlds within the Earth, not just outside the Earth.
- [59:55]
B
I see.
- [59:56]
A
And this is cast in Middle ages. So there is a guy who in the around 1380, wrote for the King of France a commentary in French, a discussion of an Aristotle book called on the Heavens, where he describes, well, the heavens, how the cosmos works. And in this book he has a lot of discussions of all the possible ways in which other worlds can exist. And one of these way against Aristotle, and one of these ways is that you can have other worlds within the Earth.
- [60:29]
B
And was there ever discussion of can we go to that Earth?
- [60:33]
A
Can we not there?
- [60:34]
B
No.
- [60:35]
A
So at the time there were discussions on the possible existence of the Antipodes. With the Antipodes, they did not mean just a place that is on the other side of the earth compared to where you are. They meant if there can be a continent, for example, okay. On the other side of the Earth that you have never visited, that has never been touched. And before 1400s, the common idea was that you cannot, you cannot sail the ocean, you cannot travel across the Atlantic. Okay, this is technically impossible. You can do it. No one can do that. And so theologians tended to reject this idea. Because if there is a place at the Antipodes, with another world, without beings like us, they could not receive the Christian revelation because they cannot travel to there. And so most theologians didn't like this idea too much. Not necessarily. Some didn't have problems with that. But this is an idea when other worlds can be conceived. Indeed, when it was found that America is actually an isolated continent and not part of Eastern Asia as Columbus thought, one super big problem is how is it possible that we have found humans there? We have no evidence of anyone crossing the Atlantic before recent times.
- [62:10]
B
Do you have a theory?
- [62:11]
A
Oh, a lot. One of the theory was that the craziest one, it is another humanity that doesn't have any relation to us.
- [62:25]
B
Aliens kind of aliens.
- [62:27]
A
They are biological, similar to us. We can even interbreed with them. But they're not descendants of Adam and Eve. They were the result of another creation, independent creation, or they were generated. There was a theory of spontaneous generation. Have you heard of it? Like bugs or small animals. For Aristotle could generate from organic decomposing matter a lot of horse manure and immediately plenty of animals around it.
- [63:00]
B
Right. You can cover it up.
- [63:01]
A
Yeah. They thought that they, these small creatures could be born from Especially fertile decomposing matter. And this was definitely disproved around 1700. Okay. But before it was common knowledge, and some speculated that after some great geological cataclysm, after the Earth is renovated, the soil can be so fertile that it can even produce superior animals.
- [63:30]
B
Interesting.
- [63:31]
A
Yeah. This is how the followers of Epicurus, the Atomists, conceived the origin of life on the Earth and of other planets. After the Earth formed, it was so fertile in the beginning that it produced every sort of living creatures.
- [63:48]
B
Spontaneous generation.
- [63:49]
A
Spontaneous generation.
- [63:50]
B
Interesting.
- [63:50]
A
Spontaneous generation. And not only bugs and small creatures, but superior creatures and even human beings. And then as the Earth became less and less fertile, many of them would not adapt to the environment. Many of them were just wrong. Like they had eyes that could maybe you see the light of infrared stars, but not the light of our sun. They could not find food by themselves. They. They would starve. But some could survive. And even human beings, in order to adapt to a decaying world, had to invent agriculture. Because the Earth no longer produced spontaneously all the fruits that in the beginning they could just take from the Earth and so on. And maybe this is how American were born. Or maybe there was some way they could cross the Atlantic. One possibility was there was once Atlantis. And so you can see maps speculating on the aspect of the continents before the great flood. And some of these map put at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantis. And the idea of some authors was that there was Atlantis that acted as a bridge, so you don't have to cross the whole Atlantic. It feels much easier. And by using Atlantis you can go from Europe to America. And then there was a great flood and Atlantis disappeared.
- [65:23]
B
I see.
- [65:24]
A
Or maybe after the flood, there were still some continental bridges, so to speak, that later disappeared. But for a while it was possible to migrate, for example, from Europe to America.
- [65:38]
B
And these people were the descendants of the Atlanteans, or people who, after the.
- [65:43]
A
Catastrophes, who, after the flood, while the Earth was still young and there were still these continental bridges, could go from. From Europe to. To America, even though we have no evidence of this. Or maybe there was another idea that started to be floated. Later they passed through the Strait of Bering, which was, according to one of my colleagues, this was a better received idea, because this way you don't have to think that the Americans were actually Europeans that went there. They belong to another stock, they belong to. They were East Asians. So in their categorization, because it is a time when you start to form racial thinking, they were inferior to Europeans, who are closer to the original Adamic stock.
- [66:35]
B
Ah, interesting.
- [66:36]
A
They degenerated after Adam transmigrating to other places. And the Chinese or the Mongols, certain point, Were able to cross the state of Bering and populate America.
- [66:48]
B
So regardless of whichever interpretation you take, the natives that were seen were subhuman in some capacity or inferior. Either they are not the son of Adam, or they're, you know, a sub, you know, or an inferior race that, you know, walked over.
- [67:04]
A
Like you had to figure out some justification to enslave them.
- [67:07]
B
Yeah.
- [67:08]
A
And actually, the Pope had to. To. To emanate a series of decrees in the 1500s, clearly clarified that the Americans are human beings.
- [67:22]
B
Oh, really?
- [67:23]
A
They are descendants of the atoms. Stop with the nonsense that they are just animals, that they are unrelated to us. I don't know how. I don't know how America was populated. Not my business. But these beings must be humans like us.
- [67:40]
B
Wow. The Pope, he had to do that.
- [67:42]
A
Because there was a conflict of interest between the settlers and the Spanish Crown. The settlers wanted to enslave them and consider them subhumans. The Spanish Crown wanted to justify the occupation of America with the conversion of the infidels. Well, if they are not people who can receive the Christian revelation, if they are not descendants from Adam and Eve, well, the original sin doesn't touch them. And so the Church and Catholicism and the King of Spain can have no claim on them.
- [68:21]
B
Interesting. Yeah. That creates a tricky political conflict. So the Pope had to come out and be like, all right, no enslaving them.
- [68:29]
A
Yes. And to be fair, it was in the tradition of the church already. St. Augustine said, if there are people at the Antipodes or we find in distant places people who are very similar, who are like us, we should consider them human beings 100% and descendants of Adam and Eve. And so, to be fair, in all fairness, that was also part of the tradition of the Church. It also happened to favor the interests of the Spanish Crown, which was. Which was good.
- [69:03]
B
Yeah. In a way, it justified the occupation, but it didn't stop necessarily the enslavement in that time.
- [69:09]
A
Yeah. And there were also pushback at the time we start have some pushback. There were times in the. In the Christianity when there was pushback against the idea of extraterrestrial life. One of the big problems with the extraterrestrials was the problem that already very long mentioned. That is okay. If there are other extraterrestrials, intelligent life, and they can sin. I mean, what do we make of the incarnation of Christ? It may not be A unique event. Maybe it happened even other worlds. That's a big problem. So Melanchthon, who was a theological mind behind Luther, for example, was opposed to the idea of the existence of other worlds, and this idea sometimes resurfaced. One of the times where this happened was in the early to mid-1800s, when, especially in Protestant countries, especially in the United States or even in Great Britain, there was a. Some pushback against the existence of extraterrestrial life on basically the same ground.
- [70:19]
B
Interesting.
- [70:20]
A
And this could have contributed to the perception that traditionally, Christianity was opposed to extraterrestrial life because of the idea that we are the pinnacle of creation and the universe is made for us. Historically, this is not what happened most of the times.
- [70:38]
B
Interesting. Was there ever any, I guess, like, religious conflation based off of ancient biblical text that led to any of these theories or any of these writers? Like, it's, you know, people mention, like, the Book of Enoch. I don't know if you're familiar with that text, that you have this idea of, like, the watchers that come down to Earth and they interbreed with the humans and they create the nephilim. And people sometimes point to this as, like, an ancient literature, some type of, you know, extraterrestrial event. Did any of, like, the scholars of the time discuss this literature in any serious fashion to, you know, contribute or sort of dissuade this idea of extraterrestrials.
- [71:18]
A
Not as people coming from other. Other worlds or other places of the Earth? I am not aware of any of these literature.
- [71:30]
B
Interesting.
- [71:32]
A
Yeah. I mean, I just may just be too ignorant to know it, but, no, I'm not aware of that. And I know that a lot of these literature and accounts are now. Now interpreted in these terms. Why? Because we are so advanced now. We know that interplanetary travel can exist. Now we know that extraterrestrial life can exist. And so we can conceive of extraterrestrial coming to Earth, but at the time, they couldn't. And so they interpreted these visitors from the sky in a different way.
- [72:04]
B
Interesting. Did any of the early American philosophers or American political framers like Thomas Jefferson or any of these people, did they speak to this idea if it was Thomas Paine? Thomas Paine, Yeah. What did he say?
- [72:18]
A
Thomas Paine? He wrote that. He wrote against Christianity. And one of his arguments is that we all know that there can be extraterrestrial life, but it is incompatible with Christianity. And he used the idea to attack Christianity. Historically, it's not really true, but this idea was Gaining momentum. And it was especially widespread in the early 1800s that Christianity should not admit until 1850, more or less. It is called the Whewell debate. There is a big historian who wrote. Who wrote a book about that. And, yeah, this is one of the examples that come to my mind.
- [73:09]
B
That's interesting. Yeah. Because you had mentioned that it was fairly widespread around the 1700s that people were, you know, aware of this. I'm curious, as the, you know, as America is getting founded and you know that there's settlers in America, if there was a common sensibility amongst colonial America about this idea, did they kind of have the same European mindset? They're like, yeah, there's probably extraterrestrials. Or did the puritanical element change?
- [73:36]
A
You know, who talks about extraterrestrial life as a course, as a thing that, of course happens? The Book of Mormon.
- [73:45]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [73:46]
A
Yes.
- [73:47]
B
Joseph Smith.
- [73:48]
A
Yeah, Joseph Smith.
- [73:52]
B
And does he write about it in the Book of Mormon or does he write about it in.
- [73:55]
A
I don't remember, because American history is not really my strong suit. I deal with the older stuff usually.
- [74:01]
B
Yeah.
- [74:04]
A
I knew that. I forgot about it. I forgot the details. Yeah. I'm not sure if it is the Book of Mormon, but I know that among Mormons, in that literature, extraterrestrial life is considered a given.
- [74:24]
B
Yeah. I believe that there's an interplanetary component to the afterlife that in Mormonism, upon death, if you've lived a good life, you can go and inhabit some other type of celestial body, I believe.
- [74:37]
A
And there is this idea, this was an old, very old idea, comes even from antiquity, that souls after death go and inhabit other worlds. One of those who seem to have supported this idea was the astronomer Kepler.
- [74:52]
B
Oh, wow.
- [74:53]
A
Yeah. There is a fun letter that a guy wrote from Prague, where Kepler was the court astronomer basically, of the emperor. Rudolf ii was a guy very much interested in esoterism, astrology, alchemy. And Kepler had just got a telescope, and so he was showing to this other guy who is writing a letter from there, the moon. And he said, and this astronomer kept telling me, you can see there are mountains and valleys. And I said, I couldn't say much, honestly. And I said, yes, yes, sure. And he wanted to convince me that souls will go and live there after the death. But I pushed back here and I cited the revelation against him, because the sky and the heavens are not eternal. They will collapse and there will be the end of the world. So the moon is not a good place to inhabit after death, because for Eternity, because the moon is not eternal.
- [75:53]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [75:54]
A
But you know where you can find egos of this idea? You know, Bradbury, the Martian Chronicles.
- [76:02]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [76:03]
A
Ray Bradbury.
- [76:03]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [76:04]
A
Okay. In the Martian Chronicles are a collection of short stories about this hypothetical human colonization of Mars. And one of the first missions finds that their ancestors, that their loved ones that have died are now on Mars. It was the Martians that had telepathic minds, and they wanted to get rid of them. And so they were using the telepathy to convince them, to show them that they actually were back in the town of their childhood, that they could meet their mothers, their brothers, their grandfathers that were dead. And they asked him, how did they end up here? You know, God wanted to give us another chance and to put us here after death. Why should you inquire? But it comes from this ancient idea that souls after death can go to live on the moon or on other celestial worlds.
- [77:12]
B
Oh, interesting. It's so fascinating how so much modern science fiction is predicated on these much older texts. And they kind of borrow ideas and expound upon them.
- [77:23]
A
Maybe the transmission is not direct, you know, maybe Bradbury didn't read those ancient texts. I don't know exactly where his idea comes, but you can clearly see that there is a lineage. Yeah, there is a. There is a continuity.
- [77:37]
B
Did Isaac Newton ever speak about this or did he speculate on other worlds?
- [77:41]
A
Not in person, but at a certain point. There was the famous physicist Robert Boyle, who died in 1691, and the guy of Boyle laws of pressure. He experimented a lot with the air pump and gases. And he. He left a sum that was to be used to give what. They became known as the Boyle lectures, that is, sermons that some clergyman should give in order to show that the Newtonian universe is compatible with Christianity. The first Boyle lecturer was very smart guy, and he wrote to Newton himself and he said that he wanted to show that his universe was compatible with Christianity and explained that in his sermons. And Newton was enthusiastic at the idea. He can totally use my physics and my astronomy to support Christianity. I think it is a great idea. And so in his sermon, he talked about the fact that other stars are just other suns by the time it had become accepted, and these other suns can have other planets and can have the other forms of life. And he said, whatever kind of laws this have, whatever plans God have for them, it is not our business, but they can absolutely exist. And it's not a problem for Christianity. And almost certainly Newton agreed with that. They kind of approved that because this scholar wanted to make sure that Newton was fine with the way he would be using his physics and astronomy.
- [79:39]
B
That's interesting. Did any popes ever, in any direct way, endorse this idea that you know of?
- [79:47]
A
I don't know. Direct from a pope, maybe, but I don't know.
- [79:50]
B
So interesting. It's just. It's fascinating that it seems like through all, basically from Plato, even beyond. Even before Plato.
- [79:59]
A
Pythagoras, before Plato doesn't talk much about.
- [80:02]
B
Extraterrestrial life, but from Pythagoras to, I mean, 1700s, 1800s, it's fairly broadly accepted, specifically within Western Europe and amongst the Christendom, that this. Yeah.
- [80:14]
A
With back and forth, you know, ups and downs. So at certain point when Aristotle is really mainstream, probably most people thought that there can only be one word but fair. And even before. And even, yes, God can make other worlds, but there are reason to think that he probably created only one, even though his powers allow him to create.
- [80:39]
B
Other worlds, which is a reasonable assessment. Like, if you're going to build a house, would you just build a room and then put nothing in it? Yeah, that wouldn't make sense.
- [80:46]
A
Does make sense. And he considered God to be a perfect architect and someone who does nothing in vain. Right. Everything must have a purpose in the universe.
- [80:55]
B
Right? Yeah. It's an interesting idea. And then I guess people just kind of lose faith in these ideas, it seems like through the 1900s, and I know this is maybe a little bit outside of your area of expertise, but I guess out of the 1800s into the 1900s, it seems like most people don't really have any. Any clear. Like, I don't know. I guess they don't have any type of clear fascination with extraterrestrials. And it kind of is like a taboo topic. And it seems like it comes back in. In the 60s. No, that's not the case.
- [81:30]
A
No, that's not the case. Not at all. Actually, that period in the early 1800s when there was some pushback among Protestants, especially in the United States and Great Britain, against idea of extraterrestrial life, they didn't last much. Didn't last much. And it came back in a big, very big way in the 1870s. Because in the 1870s, in the late 1870s, there was an Italian astronomer, actually, who was probably the best astronomer of his time, who started observing planet Mars seriously. And he really founded planetology in a modern way, in the sense that they started studying Mars, as it were, on Earth. So he produced cartographic maps of Mars, he determined with great accuracy, its poles, its rotations. And he produced the first maps of Mars in a cartographic projection, as if it were the Earth. And you also saw lines that crisscrossed the surface of Mars. And other astronomers could see them. Straight lines. Now, if you look the Earth from outside, okay, if you look at the river, it is always kind of meandering. The straight lines are canals, artificial canals. If you look at Mars, Mars looks like a desert. The color of Mars. It's kind of ochre, reddish, orangish, like a terrestrial desert. But it has two bright polar caps. And when it's spring, you can see the spring cap that shrinks, and they are very bright. And we know now that they are made mostly of frozen CO2, even water, but mostly frozen CO2. But at the time, it seemed totally reasonable that we are made of frozen water. So this is a desert where the only reservoirs of water really seems to be the polar caps. And we have these crisscrossing lines. And some started speculating that, that there was a civilization on Mars that were fighting against climate change. The planet was becoming drier and drier. Mars is smaller than the Earth, and so it evolves geologically quicker than the Earth. And so maybe there was this advanced civilization that built a planetary network of canals to distribute water from the melting polar caps to regions that are more favorable to habitation. Because Mars is also farther from the Earth, so it's colder. It was known. And so perhaps the Martians like to live closer to the equator, and it is where their fields are. Now, this sounds like a crazy idea, but if those lines are real, then it is hard not to think that they must be artificial. And there was an immense debate on the canals of Mars at the end of the 1800 and in the early 1900s. And this is why the extraterrestrial. Extraterrestrial, by definition, almost is the Martian, right? It comes from there. And this is why, in 1896, he Wells writes the War of the Worlds. So again, it is science fiction, but based on a lot of ideas that circulated at the time. And he imagines that the Martians at a certain point are sicker, tired of fighting against drought and against a dying planet. They take not a spaceship. They are basically because rocket science was not in the cards, but artillery was. So they use big cannons to catapult the spaceships to the Earth and invade the Earth and take a world that is full of life and full of water. And it is predicated on the astronomy of the time. Now, the most fervent Disciple of proponent. Sorry. Of an advanced civilization on Mars was an American, Percival Lowell. You know Lowell, Massachusetts?
- [86:08]
B
Yeah.
- [86:08]
A
It used to be a center of the American textile industry. It was founded by his grandfather.
- [86:13]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [86:14]
A
He was a prominent Bostonian, had tons of money, one of the very rich families in that time. They were the new riches, the barons of steel and oil that were overtaking the old families of the Bostonian aristocracy from New York. But still he was one of those highly educated Bostonian who could travel, who was fluent in French at the age of 10. And at a certain point, he got news of these observations of Mars and he decided to build an astronomical observatory to study the planet Mars. And he built it in Arizona, close to Flagstaff.
- [86:56]
B
And this is 1900s.
- [86:57]
A
Yes, in the late 1800s, in the 1890s, on a place that is called Mars Hill. And now it belongs to the University of Arizona.
- [87:07]
B
Oh, wow.
- [87:07]
A
Yeah, it's still there. You can still go there and look through his telescope.
- [87:12]
B
Oh, that's so interesting.
- [87:13]
A
Yes. And he went there because he wanted a place that was better than the cities where the old astronomical observatories were placed. And by the time they were polluted, there was a lot of industrialization going on. So he moved his observatory to Arizona. And he dedicated the last 20 years of his life, he died in 1916, to the study of Mars to prove that these canals were real and that it can only be explained with an advanced civilization on Mars. This was a big thing. This was big. And he wrote books that sold a lot. He gave conferences everywhere. And I mean, it was in the newspapers.
- [87:52]
B
Wow.
- [87:53]
A
You can take the hard fork current and they will have articles on Percival Owens and his ideas on Mars and Schiaparelli, who was the prototype of the positivist scientists that really wanted to stick to facts. The Italian astronomer that first saw these canals of Mars was a bit more prudent. But he said, I don't want to fight this idea, which is not necessarily unfounded.
- [88:22]
B
And so what are those canals? Do we note that optical illusions. Really?
- [88:27]
A
Yes, I've seen them. You can still see them with a backyard telescope. He pointed Mars must be good enough like 10 inches for underpowers. You can still see these canals of Mars and in many cases in the same places where Schiaparelli placed them. So what happens is that Mars is a very difficult subject for the eye. And you try. It's very small, very bright, and on this very bright surface, it tries to figure out details that are very low contrast. So sometimes there are details at the edge of perception and the brain trying to interpret them, it cannot see clearly what is there. And what the brain does is to connect whatever seems to be there into a straight line. This has to do with the physiology of vision.
- [89:22]
B
Interesting.
- [89:23]
A
It still happens. You can still see them.
- [89:25]
B
So if you look at them now, do they look perfectly?
- [89:28]
A
Don't see them always, but you can still see the canals of Mars in the place where they were placed in the maps by Schiaparelli.
- [89:35]
B
Do they look perfectly straight?
- [89:39]
A
It isn't interesting. They tend to follow the curvature of the planet, so they tend to be straight at the center of the planet, and they become more curved towards the edges, which is what should happen based on the. On geometry, if they. If they are real. Because, of course, there are many of them are based on actual details. If you magnify hard enough, okay, these. These canals will dissolve into smaller details. And astronomers began to figure this out in the early 1900s. But when he died in 1916, Schiaparelli was still certain that. Sorry, Llewell was still certain that he had discovered or contributed to the discovery of an advanced civilization on Mars.
- [90:30]
B
What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because if you're anything like me, you're probably running late all the time. I am. I'm always leaving right when I'm supposed to be somewhere, and I never have time to sit down and grab a nutritious meal. And that's why I want to talk to you about this little product right here called Huel. Huel is absolutely amazing. It's got everything you need, all the essential vitamins and minerals, all the nutrients, all the protein you need in a regular meal packaged in this beautiful, convenient little bottle. That's right. No more. The days of you running out the door being like, oh, I'll just grab some fast food or something. Oh, I'll have, like, you know, the leftover cheeseburger in the fridge. No, no, no, no, no. With Huel, it's healthy, nutritious. Everything you need to power through the day served in this little bottle right here. I mean, this has got 35 grams of protein, 7 grams of fiber, 27 vitamins and minerals. Everything's right on the back. And this will help you get through the day. It'll help you perform better, not only in the workplace, but also in the gym. I mean, at this point, I think they've sold over 400 million meals. I mean, that's. Is it 400 million? I mean, that's amazing. 400 million meals. So why not you take control of your health, be a little bit more time efficient and get all the essentials that you need in every little bottle. If you're Interested, go to huel.com use the promo code camp. That's Huell. H u e l.com use the promo code camp and get 15% off your first order. Check it out right now. Get control of your health. Get control of your life and stop being so late. Let's just fix that. Also, be on time. All right, set an alarm. Let's get back to the show. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I wanna help you make sports more fun. That's right. If you like watching sports, there's a way to make it 10 times more fun with Prize Picks. Prize Picks is the largest independently owned daily fantasy sports platform in North America. It's absolutely super fun and super easy to play. All you got to do is pick two to six player stats and hit more or less and you can watch the winnings roll in. And to be honest with you, I've. I'm pretty good. I've been winning some money, but I've. I've lost more. I'll be honest. I'm bleeding money right now. I'm terrible at this game. I know nothing about sports. I'm awful. I. I always click more or less on the wrong things. So whatever I do, do the exact opposite. Up. There's some people that are making, you know, they turn ten dollars into a thousand dollars in just a few taps. Not me. Maybe you. Maybe you could figure it out. I don't know how to do it. All right, guys, this week we got Broncos Chargers. I'm going to say Bo Nicks. I'm going to be honest, he's been looking pretty good for Denver. That's. Is that true? Hell yeah. He's been looking amazing. I'm going to say more. Bo Nicks. What a name. Chargers. Justin Herbert. I don't. Herbert is a tough name. Old Herbert. I'm going to go less and then court. Cortland. Cortland. Who's that? Sutton Cortland. Sutton. Is that. Is it Sutton Cortland? Regardless, I'm saying more. All right, guys, if you want to make these picks and more, go to the App Store, download the Prize Picks app on your mobile device, use the promo code Camp C A M P. And with your first $5 lineup, you will get $50 instantly deposited into your account that you are able to play with. That's right. I mean, here I am giving the good people some funds to play with, so you're welcome. Let's get back to the show.
- [93:44]
A
Now, think of John Carter of Mars. Have you seen the movie or read the books? Okay, so Tarzan of the Apes, OK, the author of Tarzan of the Apes in 1930s. No, starting from the 1910s, became famous first by writing about John Carter of Mars, a Virginia adventurer that some way finds himself catapulted on Mars, and there he has all kinds of adventures. Of course, he marries a hot princess. All this kind of stuff kills a lot of Martians. And the basic idea is that these are a dying planet with a lot of competition for resources. And the only good Martian is a dead one because it's one less competitor for scarce resources. And his geography of Mars is based on the maps of Mars and the geography of Mars that was elaborated by 19th century astronomers.
- [94:41]
B
Wow, that's interesting.
- [94:42]
A
It was super popular. It was super duper popular in the 1920s and 1930s. If you ask the people in the 1960s that, the astronomers, the scientists that prepared the first interplanetary missions that send the first probes to Mars and would ask them, say, Carl Sagan. Okay, how did you first got in touch with the idea of extraterrestrial life? Oh, when I was a kid, I read John Carter of Mars.
- [95:11]
B
Interesting.
- [95:12]
A
Or I read Amazing Stories, that was a science fiction magazine that was very popular with kids and published science fiction stories.
- [95:21]
B
Oh, wow. So in a way, those stories did contribute to great scientific achievement because those people, those people were inspired.
- [95:29]
A
You know what, as crazy as they may have been, they contributed to make the idea plausible and possible.
- [95:38]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, that's. I'm curious, are there any texts that you've read throughout history at any time that talk about this specific topic, whether it's extraterrestrials, other worlds, or extraterrestrials visiting Earth that you find bizarre or unexplainable?
- [95:57]
A
You mean current literature or sources or.
- [96:00]
B
Things that you've read? Sources specifically from antiquity.
- [96:04]
A
Bizarre in what sense? They could have been interpreted as they thought they might have been visited by aliens.
- [96:12]
B
Yeah. Or that you've read. You're like, huh, this is.
- [96:14]
A
No, but a lot of these texts, a lot of these things have been interpreted recently as visits by aliens on the Earth.
- [96:25]
B
What do you mean?
- [96:25]
A
For example, one of the ways of which this literature has been reinterpreted is what you mentioned already, the Book of Enoch and the biblical stories and. Or the ancient gods. So there is a whole strand of literature starting especially from the late 1950s or early 1960s, that reinterprets the history of humankind in terms of our civilization being kickstarted by aliens from outer space. Authors like Colossimo or especially Von Deniken, who wrote a super famous book called Chariots of the Gods. Now, if I'm lucky, I can sell 2,000 copies. Chariots of the Gods probably sold the like or the other iteration. Other editions of Chariots of the Gods that are more or less the same thing. The first was published in 1968. Probably sold like 100 million copies.
- [97:28]
B
100 million. Wow.
- [97:30]
A
60 million. 100 million.
- [97:32]
B
Multiple millions. Wow.
- [97:34]
A
Yeah. Now, what is the idea behind it? This idea that our civilization was kickstarted by visitors from outer space? Have you seen that movie Prometheus?
- [97:46]
B
I'm familiar with it. I never saw it.
- [97:48]
A
Yeah. Okay. The first scene is that of some alien, some extraterrestrial humanoid that is standing on a plate that looks like the Earth with water and waterfalls, but still bare rocks, without life, apparently. And then he drinks something and his body starts decomposing, and his DNA got spread in this environment that is favorable to life. But life has not appeared yet. Or at least humans have not appeared yet. So this is one of many versions of this idea. And this idea became popular when space travel became a technical possibility. And the first literature, really, talking of space travel or aliens that could come to Earth appeared, as far as I know, in the 1860s. Yeah. There was a French novel talking about a mummified being found on Earth that turns out to be a Martian. And then you have the War of the worlds, like 30 years later. Think that maybe advanced Martians could use very advanced artillery, in this case to shoot spaceships towards the Earth and invade it. And when rocket science start becoming a thing, especially 1920s and 1930s, you start having movies talking about extraterrestrials or travels to the moon. So Fritz Lang, for example, German movie maker, is famous for Metropolis. Yeah. Great artist of the image is also filmed later a movie entitled the first man on the Moon. And it is about space travel and a rocket being built on the Earth that is thrown on the moon. And he used as a technical consultant, he hired some German scientists that in the early 1930s were actually working at rocket propulsion. At the time, Germany was the most advanced country. But they were really nerds, amateurs that had this vision of improving rockpaw profession, small engines, really. Some of them lost eyes or fingers or even their life, because these things tended to explode more often than not. But they contributed to make together with these movies and these literature to making the idea of interplanetary travel possible. In both ways, of course. Now, one of the of the kids that worked at these rockets was a certain Werner von Braun.
- [100:43]
B
Oh, wow.
- [100:44]
A
Yes. And when there was the Great Depression and German economy collapsed, these people had to try to find out how to make a living. So this molamotoric society, it was just a group of nerds. They did these kind of things, high level nerds, but still nerds dissolved. But then Hitler came and the German army started receiving a lot of money. And so von Braun was able to convince the German army to finance the development of rockets as kind of long range artillery. He was the. Not only him, but he and others were the minds behind the famous V2s, the rockets that Hitler used to bomb London and other places in the last year, more or less of World War II. And at the end of World War II, there was a famous operation paperclip, of course, that is, you bring them and take them to America. And so von Braun was behind the development of the moon rockets.
- [101:47]
B
Wow. I mean, that's wild. So he was at that original facility. Von Braun was. And he was just as a young.
- [101:57]
A
Student, he was born in 1912. So in 1932, he was 20.
- [102:02]
B
Oh, wow.
- [102:03]
A
And when he started working for the German army at rocket developments, he was like 24. And when World War II ended, he was 32.
- [102:13]
B
Wow. And so when he came to America with Operation Paperclip, he was in his 30s. Wow. Still a young man.
- [102:21]
A
Yeah. And there he started working, not only working of rocket engines, mostly for the army, but also he tried to build plausibility around rocket science. These are not just toys. We can go to space with it, we can. Making interplanetary travel possible. And so he became even a familiar person on tv because Disney produced a series of documentaries starring him with his German accent, explaining how rockets work and how we can use rockets to go into interplanetary space. That was before Sputnik and before the Soviets did it. And at this point, NASA was founded and they got a blank check.
- [103:12]
B
Yeah. To figure out. Wow. I wonder if von Braun ever talked about extraterrestrials. I wonder if he had any thoughts or the early.
- [103:20]
A
He must have. I don't know, honestly. Yeah, he must have.
- [103:24]
B
That's just a fascinating trajectory.
- [103:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, it is a fascinating trajectory, but I mean, that is the key. American kids in 1930s, 1920s, even during depression, something they could read was this.
- [103:38]
B
Science fiction magazines that were inspired by.
- [103:41]
A
They were inspired by John Carter Or Mars. But all of the great controversy on the canals of Mars. By the 1930s, most astronomers thought that they were optical illusions, probably, but multiple illusion, probably based on actual details that exist on the surface of Mars. So when the first probes were sent to photograph Mars, they were still using as a reference a map of Mars that showed the canals. And there is a nice picture that saw once of a big globe, like maybe 10ft across of Mars and with people gluing photos of certain details of the surface on this globe.
- [104:28]
B
Oh, wow.
- [104:29]
A
Yeah. And the globe was a traditional map of Mars with the canals and so on. And in the. In the right. At the right coordinates, they were gluing the first pictures. They were taken of Mars by the first space probes.
- [104:41]
B
And so who was the first person to identify these canals again?
- [104:46]
A
This Italian astronomer whose name was Schiaparelli.
- [104:49]
B
So Caporelli.
- [104:50]
A
Schiaparelli.
- [104:51]
B
Schiaparelli.
- [104:51]
A
Yeah.
- [104:52]
B
Identifies these canals.
- [104:53]
A
Yeah. He saw these straight lines and he called them canals.
- [104:56]
B
Right. These straight lines that then becomes a topic of scientific literature, which then becomes. Which then becomes science fiction.
- [105:05]
A
That's right.
- [105:05]
B
Which then inspires Wernher von Braun or.
- [105:09]
A
Tons of other people.
- [105:10]
B
And tons of other people who then contribute to the deaths in World War II. Who then contribute to landing men on the Moon.
- [105:18]
A
Yeah.
- [105:19]
B
Wow. It's a pretty wild chain of events. So it's really Schiaparelli's fault. It always is. The Italians I knew, actually the Italian word for.
- [105:28]
A
For canals means either canal or channel. So when he used Italian word does not convey necessarily a meaning of an artificial construction. He never said explicitly, this must be artificial construction. He maintained that they must be real. He always thought that it must be real. He never thought they must be. They can be optical illusions. But as to what they are, that's a different matter. However, once he was asked by a popular magazine to write a couple of articles about life on Mars. Okay, now I will run wild. Okay. And try to explain how Mars life could be on Mars. Okay. This is just speculation. The only thing I know is that there is this crisscrossing network of lines on Mars that might be of artificial origins, but that's what we know. Okay. But now I will speculate of what they can be. And so starting from that starting, measuring and discussing how much water actually can recover from the polar caps when they melt, how this water can be conveyed to equatorial regions. And said, you know, even the thinnest lines we can see on Mars must be like 30 or 40 miles across as seen for the Earth, we cannot see anything that is smaller than 30 miles across. So probably what we see are not actual canals. They might be a strip of cultivated land that borders those canal that can be much larger than the canal itself. Think of Egypt had Nile and strips of cultivated land on the sides of the Nile.
- [107:30]
B
Wow.
- [107:32]
A
And he could figure out, based on the size of the polar caps, he could measure them and how fast they melt, and you could make some speculation on the thickness. So you could get estimates for how much water you can use and how much water the Martians could be using. And then he went further. He said, well, from this we may infer that this is a global network. This can only work if there is a central organization. There must be. If my speculation, if the basis of my speculation are correct, which is hypothetical, okay, but let's assume that those canals are of artificial origin. Okay? If so, there must be a central government on Mars. There cannot be nations waging war onto each other, because this global network can only work if you have a global authority. Someone must decide when to open the gates of the canal, how to distribute the water, and so on. So this could be a great example for us of a civilization that is fighting against, instead of fighting against themselves, as nations on Earth did at the time, they're fighting, they're united, and they're fighting against hostile nature.
- [108:59]
B
Wow.
- [109:00]
A
And he also used words like this must be the paradise of socialists, because socialism, the theory was that wars would exist because of capitalistic nations that wage war onto each other to maximize each one profits against the other. And that when socialists will be fine, when socialism, it will be finally realized all across the globe, then there will be a world government and not the capitalistic nations waging war onto each other.
- [109:34]
B
Was he a socialist?
- [109:37]
A
No, I don't think so. But he lived. The city where he had his observatory as the economic center, was the economic center of Italy. And at the time it was experiencing, experiencing very fast industrialization. And there was a lot of struggles. In 1898, there were big riots, and even more than riots against the government because of the increase of the prices of bread. People couldn't live. The government was taxing bread, and the army just opened fire on the crowd with cannons, with guns. And he was there. I mean, he could see that from his windows, more or less.
- [110:21]
B
So once again, a science writer used this metaphor and this sort of speculation as a way to heed warning on the people of Earth, just as many other philosophers have done before him.
- [110:33]
A
It gets even better, because in Soviet Union, there was a Certain Bogdanov, who was close to Lenin and to the elite of the Communist party in the 1920s, who wrote novels about Mars entitled, guess what? The Red Planet. He was red because it looks red, reddish at the telescope. But also he built on this literature, on this astronomy to indeed take the further step and imagine a socialist society as it could have developed on Mars.
- [111:04]
B
On Mars. Oh, that's hilarious. Wow.
- [111:06]
A
Yeah.
- [111:07]
B
So it seems like everyone, not everyone, a lot of people throughout history have had some type of tacit belief in extraterrestrials, with the exception of Aristotle and the time that his school. But screw Aristotle, you know what I mean? I think he's a hater. But it is an interesting idea that the church, the early church, didn't really see any issue with it. And so many philosophers and scientists of the time were open to the idea, much like we are today. And I don't know, it's just fascinating. It's an interesting thing to speculate on and to look at these older texts and to say, oh, wow, this is what they thought at the time. And once again, it doesn't seem like we've changed too, too much.
- [111:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, there is always this problem when you look at ancient civilization and ancient sources and you assume that we are not as smart as us or not as advanced as us. And so they were more credulous or they mistook what might have been actually extraterrestrial beings or spaceships for gods because they could not imagine extraterrestrial life, which is not really true. And we tend also to assume that we are the pinnacle of history and we have the right science and the right technology and we now can understand what was going on. But we are. We are part of history. We are in the flux of history. And it is a historical certainty that future centuries will look back at us and laugh of many things that take for granted scientific theories that to us are common sense because it has always happened and we are not different. It will happen to us. It is basic uncertainty. Speaking as a historian, and that's why.
- [112:53]
B
We should laugh at ourselves now.
- [112:54]
A
Yeah. It is important when we talk of all the ethological literature and all of these documents and all these doc. Evidence that seems to exist about extraterrestrial being visiting us or other sources that seem to make a case for this. We must be always self critical, very self critical. And really look at what these sources say and what the data are, because one thing is to say that I see a light coming down and then going up and I don't know what it is. But to say it must be an extraterrestrial spaceship, that's different. Now we are speculating. What we have is this light in this camera that goes up and down. What created it is a different matter. So we always had to be very careful of distinguishing what we see from what is behind that. Otherwise, you do like the astronomers that saw the canals of Mars and were unable to tell what was on Mars from what was in their head. So there was an astronomer that once skipped that. The canals of Mars are certainly a sign of intelligence. The problem is what side of the stereoscope intelligence is.
- [114:23]
B
That's great. Ivano. This is amazing. Thank you so much for your time, brother. This was excellent.
- [114:28]
A
That was a pleasure.
- [114:28]
B
Yeah, thank you so much. And eventually, when we discover extraterrestrials, I'll have you back on.
- [114:34]
A
That would be great. I'll be very happy. I don't think there is any real evidence for that, honestly. And there is one thing that it would be interesting to talk about if you had time. Maybe next time. But a parallel that I like is that with the weird creatures that you can find in Renaissance books on natural history, like mermaids, mermen, dragons. And apparently, there is plenty of evidence for the existence of these creatures. And we'll have authors citing all of these people who cited dragons, all these people who saw basilisk. There will be that naturalist that once found a basilisk that is a small dragon and dissected it and then embalmed it, and now it is in his museum.
- [115:24]
B
Wait, what? There's a basilisk in a museum?
- [115:27]
A
Yes. I mean, I saw one. Yeah. One of these museums where a pharmacist actually had the basilisk was in my hometown. And now it is in the Museum of Natural History of my hometown.
- [115:41]
B
And what do they say that it is?
- [115:43]
A
Oh, it's a fake.
- [115:44]
B
Okay.
- [115:46]
A
Of course it's a fake. And it was known that it was a fake. But basilisk dragons were hard to come by and to find. And so sometimes they would make these small dragons out of ray fish, basically, with other parts from other animals, just to give an idea what they could look like.
- [116:04]
B
Oh, wow. Yeah, I've seen this with the mermaids that they take, like, a capuchin monkey and a fish, and they kind of sew it together, and they go, look at this thing.
- [116:12]
A
And you can even have abductions. You have relations of. For example, a guy in Switzerland in the 1600s was abducted by two dragons, a couple of dragons, and he spent six months in their cave. They didn't harm him until he was able to escape. And the naturalist that reports all of these witnesses saying, you see, there is so much evidence about the existence of these creatures, you cannot really doubt it because we have too many people who saw them. You know, another funny story, around 1730, French sailors that were sailing from America to France saw a merman, a big one, much larger than a human being, but otherwise, from the torso up, very much like a human being. They couldn't see the rest because it was underwater. So they tried to catch him. Yes. One sailor harpooned the creature and they tried to put it on board, but the creature was very strong, and they started shrieking and crying in a terrifying way, and they let it go. So they come home and they tell the admiral what they had seen, and the admiral got mad at them. What the heck? You found. You saw merman and didn't capture him. Why didn't someone just shoot him and then put it on board like you do with a whale? So I can have it in my museum? That would be terrific. And then there are naturalists that don't cradle at all that are very ground to her people saying, oh, I have parts of a merman in my museum. There were speculation as to are these creatures kinds of humans or completely different species? Are they humans that are adapted to life in water the way you are adapted to life on Earth, or are they a completely different species? Do they have rational reasoning?
- [118:15]
B
What do you make of that story? Like, why would they say that story?
- [118:18]
A
That's an interesting point. What were they saying? What were they seeing? Sorry. What they make of it is that there's a lot of things. Some could be just fakes, but it could be a simplistic explanation. The fact is, there are a lot of strange things that we see, and we tend to interpret them in terms of what is plausible to us, what we know is possible. So at the time, mermaids and monsters and these kind of weird creatures were considered possible. And so what they saw was interpreted in these terms. So one of these basilisks or some strange animals that were found, dissected, they could have been genetic anomalies, some creatures, unfortunate creatures. A lot of these monsters, yes, were, for example, conjoined twins or deformed human beings or fetuses did not develop properly. But many others were considered to be species of animals that were plausible. And yet, centuries later, we had never found the skeleton of a dragon. We never found the skeleton of a basilisk. We have some basilisks, but all the basics that came down to us they're all fakes. We're all made up. And when you read this author, maybe you think they are on the edge of finally having the creature on the slab.
- [119:47]
B
Yeah.
- [119:47]
A
Okay. The final evidence that no one can doubt. And, you know, it looks so similar to what we are thinking and seeing us when it comes to extraterrestrials. And sometimes I think that our aliens visiting The Earth, our UFOs, are our monsters, actually, because we are not anthropologically different. We just interpret them and what we see and we cannot understand in terms that to us are plausible. And as once Carl Jung said, the famous psychiatrist, everything technological goes well with the modern man. So a colleague of mine, Professor Carlos Eire at Yale, recently published a book on levitating saints. And he has plenty of evidence of mass witnessings of holy men levitating or doing all kinds of miracles. What we do with these mass witnessings, we have mass witnessings of UFOs, we have abductions. It is not too different from what you see in ancient sources. And if I had to judge from the documents we have and the kind of evidence we have and the documents they used to have about monsters or tritons or mermaids, they probably had more evidence for their monsters than we have for our aliens. And so I'm not saying that all of these strange appearances, the radar tracks, those mass witnessings, are not extraterrestrial spaceships. Maybe they are. But the evidence I see is not nearly good enough. And I know that because we have examples in history where very similar things happened. And we know that there were nothing behind it, that somehow they were wrong. Who knows what they were seeing? They also had their liminal creatures that lived at the margins of the known universe, whose existence was debated, but some considered them plausible. And by some, I don't mean people on the margins of scholarship or science or academy. I'm talking the greatest naturalists of the time in many cases. One of them wrote a history of monsters, a big book. It's fantastic. It's probably the favorite book of my students. When I show it to them, you see every kind of monster. And then he also wrote A history of dragons, where he collected all the possible evidence and discussions and what was said and told through history about these creatures. It was not necessarily all true. He did not necessarily support all of it, but he wanted to collect all of these evidence. And, wow, you can make big books with that. And sometimes we open these books and we see certain images and we think they must be faithful reproductions of what they saw. And this is not true, because this is another problem. We need context. Images are always coded. And so what happened is that in many cases, these images of these monsters are just a traditional representation of, in literature of this kind of creature. It's not necessarily something that they saw. But for two or three centuries, for example, this particular monster or this particular animal has been represented this way. And so this is the way they are normally shown, not because they necessarily reflected those beings. And there is in ufological literature, you can find authors taking these books and saying, oh, look at this guy. This must be an alien. There were aliens on the Earth at the time. And this is a problem where we are not an historian, because you need to know the context and how these images were produced and why and how images were used at the time. Or, for example, you can see, oh, you see, there is this black thing in the sky and there is a laser ray coming down. This was a ufo. It is a Renaissance painting, actually. This was how Holy Grace, the center of Holy Grace was represented. That was actually a cloud shrouded by light, kind of a hole in the sky. And from then, that thing that we look at it and you see, oh, it's a laser beam. To alt is a laser beam. But to artists of the 1400s or 1500s, this is how they represented divine grace that descends upon Mary, for example.
- [124:35]
B
Interesting, huh?
- [124:37]
A
And so you need to know all of these contexts, which is often completely ignored. We just open these texts, open these sources.
- [124:44]
B
We make our own stories.
- [124:45]
A
And we make our own stories, oh, it looks like an alien to me. So he must be an alien. It doesn't work like that. It is very important that you have some knowledge of the context of how these images were made.
- [125:02]
B
That makes a lot of sense.
- [125:04]
A
Yeah. And again, I know that there are a lot of people that, in complete good faith, think that there is just too much evidence of extraterrestrial visitors to ignore it. And there must be something to it. And maybe they are right. Maybe they are on the verge of finally having the alien on the slab. But what I see as a historian of science, I've seen that other times, another mermaid. And the same kind of evidence. Witnesses, mass witnesses, mass witnessing, crazy stories, people abducted by dragons or mermaids. Another crazy story. Someone fishes out a mermaid. And this mermaid lives in the northern sea. And this mermaid lives for six months in a barrel of salty water in Bremen in northern Germany. What do you make of these accounts? Many of those accounts were given by people considered reliable. Or think of the French sailors that saw this mermaid. This Merman. Okay? And sometimes you can think of pilots seeing weird things in the sky. They are qualified to say that this thing is weird. This is an anomaly. I've been flying all my time, all my life, okay? So I am a very qualified witness when it comes to things that go around the sky. Well, these various sailors were qualified witnesses as to what is going on in the sea and about sea creatures. What do we have to think of that? So sometimes one can argue. What do you want? You're too much of a skeptic. Do you want the alien on the slab? You know, a naturalist said that he had a dragon on the slab, and they dissected the dragon and then embalmed it, and you can see it in his museum. These are not come. This specific dragon has not come down to us. So apparently they had the creature on the slab and still they were wrong. It was not drag. What did they see?
- [127:12]
B
That's the question.
- [127:12]
A
That's a big problem. Some of my colleagues think that this was probably a fake and not even a very good one. But this naturalist did this. Yeah, this dragon that was dissected. But this naturalist, in all of his writings, including manuscripts, I think, that were never published, never raises doubts that this was a real animal.
- [127:33]
B
I guess I'm more curious. What did they see? What did these sailors, when they tried to harpoon this mermaid, maybe they hoped.
- [127:41]
A
That would get some kind of reward. And instead it turned out that the admiral got mad of them because they didn't get it. And maybe there was some deformed, some big animal.
- [127:53]
B
Yeah.
- [127:54]
A
And some weird kind of sea creatures. And what can it be? And at certain point, they start scanning about all of the possibilities. Possibility alien is not there. They don't have it. Visiting alien. Possibility merman is there. This is plausible. This can happen. And so let's say that is a merman. We decided what we see is a merman. We all the time decide what we are seeing.
- [128:23]
B
Interesting. That makes a lot of sense, actually. I appreciate the framework, and I think it's a helpful perspective to go into looking at these types of specifically, like ancient literature with an eye of. Okay, what did they mean? What was their interpretation? And if their interpretation is extraterrestrial or paranormal in some way, is that just because they witnessed something in reality that they ascribed whatever their story of the day was? I think that's an interesting assessment. Ivano, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for sharing this with me. I had a lot of fun, a lot of fun discussing this. This is awesome. Thank you so much.
- [129:04]
A
I'm glad. I'm a nerd of his stuff, so he just asked me to nerd it out, so I couldn't be happier.
- [129:09]
B
It's perfect. Thank you so much, bro. Let's do it again soon.