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The Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of Other Solar Systems  by Sylvia Engdahl (1974) ~ Page 1 of 8 |
Introduction
This book was published by Atheneum in 1974. (The title was taken from a poem by Tennyson, which you can find on my Early Space Poetry page.) It contains three parts: “The Vision of the Past,” “The Knowledge of the Present,” and “The Questions of the Future.” The first part is the longest, with six chapters as compared to two in each of the others, and is the one still of greatest interest; the second and third parts are now partially outdated. It covers the history of beliefs about planets of other suns, including a lot of information that’s not readily available elsewhere.
At the time I wrote the book, in 1973, much of this information was not available at all except in the actual books and magazines of past centuries. I spent many months on library research, almost all of it in what scholars call “primary” sources, that is, the original writings of the people quoted, rather than historians’ reports of what they wrote. Because The Planet-Girded Suns was published as a book for young people, I wasn’t able to use nearly all of the material I gathered, and what I did use had to be presented without formal citation of sources (although I was allowed to incorporate references for exact quotations into the index). I intended to write a second, more scholarly, book for adults. But scholarly books are not easy for people without academic credentials to get published, so I never did; and since then, several books about the subject by scholars have appeared, so there’s no longer a great need for the one I planned.
However, those more scholarly books are not likely to be read by the general
public, and certainly not by the teens for whom I wrote this one. It will
never be reprinted because of the outdating of its other parts, and since
the facts about past views about extrasolar worlds aren’t widely known,
I am making its historical section available here in permanent form. (I have
not revised it; therefore the text often uses “man” in the sense of
“humankind,” which was customary in the 1970s but may be jarring to
today’s readers; try to overlook this!) Below is part of the original
Foreword.
Surprising though [the current interest of scientists in other solar systems] is to some, a still greater surprise to most people of today is the fact that belief in inhabited extrasolar worlds is not really new. The idea was not, as is commonly believed, invented by science fiction writers. On the contrary, it was accepted by the majority of educated people from the late seventeenth century until the early twentieth century. Scientists, philosophers, clergymen and poets wrote a great deal about it. When in the 1850s the head of a well-known college wrote a book suggesting that there might not be other inhabited worlds, he published it anonymously because he felt it might damage his reputation—and indeed, most of the book’s many reviews were disapproving. A prominent university’s magazine declared that plurality of worlds was a subject on which “until now it was supposed that there was scarcely room for a second opinion.”
This fact does not appear in history books. The information is to be found mainly in the books and magazines of past centuries. Famous authors of those eras sometimes mentioned their belief in other worlds, but they spoke of it briefly and casually, thinking it too commonplace an idea to merit much discussion. The writers who went into detail about it are no longer famous. Their books, many of which were best-sellers in their time, have been nearly forgotten. They remain in the collections of large libraries, rarely called for, in some cases with bindings so old and brittle that they fall apart in one’s hands when one first opens them to read.
Such books are not science fiction. Some are “popular science” works; others are religious ones, reflecting their authors’ conviction that God would not have created the stars merely for people on this one small planet to look at. All contain speculation about the inhabitants of other planets that was intended to be taken seriously. Readers did not laugh at speculation of that kind, for none of it—even the portions concerning life on the moon—was contrary to the science of its time. Later scientists, who knew more, looked upon it with scorn. Several generations, the generations that came of age during the years between the two world wars, got the impression that science had always laughed at talk of “space people” and that it always would; only recently [as of 1974] have respected authorities begun to speculate again.
The speculations in old books, and in most modern scientific ones, have nothing to do with UFOs. The question of whether there are inhabited worlds elsewhere in the universe is separate from the question of whether or not any of those worlds’ inhabitants have ever visited our world. Nonfiction of past centuries about extrasolar planets does not mention such a possibility. The idea did not occur to people until about the time of World War II. Since then, many men—some of whom are scientists—have investigated records of strange objects seen in the past, and have suggested that these might have involved alien visitors. But science considers the existence of other civilizations far more probable than the notion of their representatives’ having come here. And during the former period when almost all educated people were utterly convinced that superior civilizations exist, actual contact between the ones of different solar systems was not even imagined.
Searching for the old writings about extrasolar worlds is a little like a treasure hunt: one cannot predict just where they will be found, and one must look in many places without finding anything. Libraries have reference tools that help, but these tools are only a beginning; often they provide merely clues leading on to other clues. Occasionally one is led to a dead end, such as a work of which the only existing copy is in an inaccessible museum. Yet an astonishing number of relevant volumes are available. One can go to a library shelf, take down a magazine printed over a hundred years ago and turn to an article that thousands of people must have read when it was new—and that nobody, perhaps, has looked on in this century. The wording of the article may seem quaint, and its author may have been ignorant of facts that are now known, but the idea expressed is often closer to what scientists are saying today than to what they said when one’s [grand]parents were young.
There are many current science books about extraterrestrial life. This, however, is not a science book. It is the history of an idea. Not all men and women with important ideas are scientists; science studies only that which can be systematically observed. Long before the invention of the telescope made it possible to observe distant parts of the universe—long before the belief in other worlds became popular—there were men who thought about what might lie beyond Earth. Some had followers, but others were ridiculed or persecuted and at least one was put to death for his theories. Since that time more facts about the universe have been learned; present views of far-off solar systems have scientific foundation. Still, the question of what inhabitants of those solar systems are actually like cannot yet be studied scientifically. When scientists give opinions on it, they are speaking not as authorities but simply as members of the human race, just as their predecessors did. They are expressing not proven truths, but thoughts. This book is the story of mankind’s thoughts about the worlds of other suns: past thoughts, present thoughts, and thoughts that will be investigated in the future.
Thoughts about the unknown concern not only science, but religion. For many centuries all speculation about astronomy was inseparable from religion, since the mysteries of the heavens could be explained only in religious terms. Today, when more scientific data can be obtained, there seems to be a firm line between the two. This does not mean that astronomers of today have less religious faith than those of the past. Some do, and others do not. In the past, however, people who drew a line between religion and other affairs placed the subject of other worlds on the “religious” side of that line, while it now usually falls on the “scientific” side. Unlike their predecessors, modern scientists who believe that the universe was created by God do not spend their time debating about whether the various features of it could have resulted from what they think God must have done; they accept their observations as evidence of what God did do. In other words, they study what exists and form their theories from its nature—not God’s, which they do not expect to explain scientifically.
To men of past eras such reasoning would have seemed backwards. They felt that they knew a great deal about God, and they realized how little knowledge they had of the universe. At first they did not guess that it was possible to obtain more. Gradually, as science did acquire more knowledge, certain ideas about God had to be discarded; and although some people lost faith in all religion when that happened, others came to feel that less had been known of God than had been supposed. They developed new ideas about religion as well as about astronomy, sometimes disagreeing strongly with the established churches. But until the twentieth century, few if any people separated their personal religious beliefs from their thoughts about what the universe is like. Even those who paid little attention to religion in everyday life considered cosmology—the nature of the cosmos—too unknowable to be viewed as a purely scientific matter.
That astronomical discoveries came into conflict with the religious view current at the time of Copernicus and Galileo is a familiar fact of history. It is often said that learning that the earth moves around the sun lessened man’s feeling of central importance. Many historians, however, feel that the relation between the earth and the sun was not the real issue. More upsetting was the discovery that there are other suns, and therefore, perhaps, other earths—innumerable earths, all of equal importance in the universe. Yet though this was a blow to human pride, before long people began to look upon the existence of countless worlds as proof of God’s power and glory. Not everyone agreed with that idea, but by the nineteenth century most religious leaders favored the view that God had probably created inhabitants for many worlds besides this one. Such a faith was shared by people who did not accept any church’s definition either of God or of “religion” itself. When no scientific evidence is available, faith of some kind is the only basis for believing in the unseen.
Near the end of the nineteenth century another crisis occurred, one that has not been discussed often. People had been saying for two hundred years that a world would not be created for no purpose, and the only purpose anyone could think of was habitation. Travel from one world to another was not thought possible. So when scientists concluded that the moon and nearby planets are not inhabited, it was natural to start wondering whether the universe is really purposeful. The most common argument for extrasolar life seemed less convincing than before. Furthermore, around the turn of the century a new theory was adopted about the origin of planets. Astronomers began to think that solar systems came into existence accidentally. Such accidents were considered rare; even among people who still viewed cosmology in a religious way, there were many who abandoned their faith in worlds of other suns.
Today [1974], the opposite situation prevails. Scientists believe it is highly unlikely that ours is the only inhabited planet in the cosmos, for they consider solar systems common. This opinion is held by men and women of differing faiths, and also by those with no religious faith. Theologians have again begun to give thought to extrasolar life; most feel that there may be sentient species elsewhere in the universe. Yet the Soviet Union’s philosophy of dialectical materialism supports the same idea. A Soviet astronomer has written, “The thesis of the existence of life outside the earth is shared in our epoch . . . in equal measure both by the materialists and by the idealists.” There are few issues of such importance on which people of conflicting philosophies can so readily agree.
If life does exist in other solar systems, our view of it is surely
important. This book tells the story of mankind’s view.
Lots more that I have written, or collected, about space!
Chapter One
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| Chap. 2 | Chap. 3 | Chap. 4 | Chap. 5 | Chap. 6 | Conclusion |