Lonely Planets

by David Grinspoon

  subliminal indoctrination, it is hard for us to imagine the frightening

  disorientation that Copernicus’s theory produced in the minds of his

  contemporaries. I’m not sure what the equivalent theory would be

  today, but its author might be ridiculed as a New Age flake, dismissed

  as a dreamer or pitied as a babbling, delusional acid casualty. It would

  have to be a theory that suggested that much of our shared reality is

  illusory. Copernicus took contemporary common-sense conceptions

  (about “the world,” the Sun, up and down, the human place in the

  grand scheme, and what it means simply to stand still and watch the

  stars), turned them on their head, and sent them spinning.

  Because it sparked a complete shift in worldview that has long since

  been accepted by all but a few Flat Earthers and Republican senators

  and was the first step in a drastic descoping of human importance and

  influence in the universe, De Revolutionibus is a good candidate for

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  Most Radical Book Ever Written. Copernicus himself never had to deal

  with the upheaval caused by his revolution. He received the first

  printed copy of his new book in May 1543, on the day he died.*

  Astronomers didn’t immediately embrace the new system of

  Copernicus. It didn’t actually do a good job of predicting the motions

  of the planets—supposedly its major selling point. That was because

  Copernicus, like Aristotle nineteen hundred years before him and every

  philosopher in between, assumed that all shapes and paths in the heav-

  ens were drawn in circles. In the Copernican system, the Sun occupied

  the exact center of perfectly round concentric orbits on which Earth

  and the other planets traveled. And so it remained, until a mad scientist

  named Kepler came along and squished those circular orbits into oval-

  shaped ellipses.

  L O V E 2 2 A N D K E P L E R ’ S L A W S

  Johannes Kepler was a late-sixteenth-century philosopher/freak who

  walked the fine line between genius and delusion. He had a lifelong

  conviction that a secret, simple mathematical order lay hidden just

  beneath the confusing, chaotic surface of the universe. He found it hard

  to find steady work and, like many astronomers of his day, kept a day

  job as a court astrologer, casting fortunes for the rich and famous.†

  With a seamless blend of mysticism and science he pursued his search

  for the numerological and geometrical designs of creation.

  The more I learn about Kepler’s actual life and work, as opposed to

  the filtered version we are taught (and then teach) in Astronomy 101,

  the more he reminds me of guys like Love 22. When I was in college

  in Providence, this jovial crazy person named Love 22 hung around

  Thayer Street preaching the gospel of the number 22 to all who would

  listen. He lived in a red-white-and-blue converted school bus, and

  though his material possessions were few, he knew the secret of cos-

  mic harmony and wisdom. It all had to do with the number 22.

  Wearing his trademark Uncle Sam uniform, he handed out $22 dollar

  bills and showed how the number 22 is hidden in the names of presi-

  dents, prophets, and all phrases of spiritual wisdom. He ran a perpet-

  *In 1686, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote of Copernicus’s death, “He didn’t want to rebut all the contradictions he foresaw, and he skillfully withdrew from the affair.”

  †Today we just write grant proposals.

  Spirits from the Vasty Deep

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  ual campaign for president and governor, on the Love 22 ticket (Love

  for Gov!). Love was quite the comedian but he seemed sincere. My

  friends and I thought that he was rather sweet and enjoyed talking to

  him.*

  There is only one Love, but there are many like him. There is a person-

  ality type—and you’ve got to have it to go in for this kind of existence—

  that is remarkably impervious to the fact that virtually everyone thinks

  you’re out of your mind. These self-appointed misunderstood geniuses are

  convinced they’ve discovered some system of knowledge that humanity

  needs. I’ve met them handing out pamphlets in cafés in San Francisco,

  Tucson, Providence, Cambridge, Boulder, Ann Arbor, and Madison, trad-

  ing wisdom for cash to buy food or wine or to Xerox more pamphlets.

  Often, more than money, they want a sympathetic ear. An earnest fellow

  in Boston once showed me mathematically detailed plans for faster-than-

  light starships and time machines.

  Because I’ve published articles in popular-astronomy magazines, I get

  letters from people all around the world with elaborate theories of

  everything. I don’t throw them out. I keep them in a file labeled Kook.

  Maybe somewhere in the kook files of the world’s astronomy writers is

  an obscure tract containing the seeds of the next Copernican revolu-

  tion. Kepler, the father of planetary physics, if he were alive today,

  might well be living in a converted school bus on the outskirts of some

  college town peddling mystical pamphlets, living off donations, and

  spouting cosmic wisdom to anyone who would listen.

  Kepler is a missing link between the two modern sources of belief in

  aliens. The man who worked out the mathematical laws of planetary

  motion was motivated largely by a desire to cast more accurate horo-

  scopes. Today, two separate strains of believers about alien life coexist

  in our culture: rationalist scientific followers of SETI (the Search for

  ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) and mystical, New Age UFO believers.

  The roots of science and pseudoscience are completely intertwined in

  Kepler’s work. Like a modern scientist, he was seeking the simple pat-

  terns underlying apparently complex phenomena. Like a modern New

  Ager he was obsessed with numerological coincidences and convinced

  they had cosmic significance.

  *I hadn’t heard of him in, well, nearly twenty-two years, but today, thinking about Kepler, I searched for Love on the Web and learned that he’s in Key West, still doing his 22 bit with what seems to be a larger comedy factor than I remember.

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  Kepler believed in the Copernican system, for reasons that were

  essentially mystical. The Sun should be at the center of everything, he

  felt, because it is the symbol of God and the source of heat and light. In

  his restless, obsessive quest to explain the proportions and motions of

  the planetary orbits, he crafted innumerable schemes, most of which

  seem today to be elaborate, colorful nonsense. He wondered why there

  were six planets (Earth plus the five visible to the unaided eye). He

  wanted to find the significance of this number and an explanation for

  the five distance intervals between the planets, a simple geometry that

  would make it all fit together and reveal the plan of the creator. At age

  twenty-four, in a fit of inspiration, he thought he found the answer.

  He seized upon the fact that there are five “perfect solids” (pyramid,

  cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron) and also (get this)

  five unexplained distances between the planets. Coincidence? He didn’t


  think so. He constructed a model of the solar system with the five per-

  fect solids stacked tightly inside one another, like a cubist set of Russian

  dolls. When he discovered that the relative sizes of the shapes in this

  model are exactly the same as the size ratios of the planetary orbits, it

  blew him away. This was the secret structure to the universe he had

  been searching for. “The delight that I took in my discovery,” he wrote,

  “I shall never be able to describe in words.”

  Today Kepler’s solar system model, like most of his other discoveries,

  is seen as a wacky and amusing dead end. Yet, Kepler considered this

  model, not “Kepler’s laws” that we teach in every astronomy course

  today, to be his greatest achievement. This design for the solar system

  and the rush he got from its discovery inspired a lifelong, and ulti-

  mately successful, quest for the laws of planetary motion. Though his

  genius was profligate, undisciplined, and borderline crazy, his keen

  intellect was less bound by convention than that of his contemporaries.

  Kepler was bothered by the failure of the Sun-centered solar system

  model to predict planetary motions accurately. The planet Mars, in par-

  ticular, strayed from the sky path prescribed for it by the Copernican

  model. In his determination to save the Copernican system, Kepler tried

  innumerable mathematical schemes to make it work, often obsessing

  maniacally for months on a new idea, only to toss it out and start on

  another. Finally, in a classic example of out-of-the-box thinking (in this

  case the box is round), he calculated the motions that Mars would

  exhibit if its orbit were not circular but egg-shaped, elliptical. Eureka!

  Spirits from the Vasty Deep

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  Image unavailable for

  electronic edition

  Suddenly it all worked. Mars and the other planets moved exactly as

  predicted once Kepler liberated them from Aristotelian circles and

  allowed them to follow elliptical paths in a Sun-centered system.

  It worked. But was it real? Were the planets—Earth among them—

  really moving around the Sun in this manner? Could our world, our

  rock-solid, all-encompassing Earth, truly belong to the same class of

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  objects as those ethereal little lights roving the night sky? The answer

  was not long in coming.

  T H R O U G H T H E L O O K I N G G L A S S

  In January 1610, Galileo Galilei swung his crude telescope skyward,

  smashing the perfect, crystalline celestial spheres of Aristotle,* and

  knocking the Earth off its immobile, biblically enshrined pedestal.

  Galileo’s early observations of Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon were nails

  sealing the coffin of the pre-Copernican worldview.

  Studying Venus, Galileo saw what anyone with a small backyard

  telescope and the patience to watch for a few months can see today: the

  evening star is approaching and receding from Earth. He realized that

  Venus is shining by reflected sunlight and, from Earth’s perspective,

  passing alternately in front of and behind the Sun. This only makes

  sense if Venus and Earth are both traveling around the Sun.

  Turning his glass toward Jupiter, Galileo discovered that the giant

  planet was attended by four tiny companions that tag along on its

  orbit, rearranging themselves night after night. He had found the

  moons of Jupiter, the first new worlds. The existence of moons orbiting

  Jupiter showed that not everything travels around the Earth. This

  spelled doom for the old Earth-centered cosmos of Aristotle.

  The surface of our Moon, viewed through Galileo’s telescope, dis-

  played a complex topography of shadows, pits, and mountains. This

  was not the flawless, smooth sphere required by Aristotle’s dichotomy

  between a perfect, spiritual celestial realm and an imperfect Earth. The

  Moon’s “flaws” suggested to Galileo that it was a world like Earth.

  Suddenly, it didn’t seem at all preposterous that the other planets might

  be Earth-like. The abstract Copernican universe became real. Galileo

  concluded that the other planets are worlds, and that “the world”—our

  Earth—is merely one of many planets circling the Sun.

  Galileo caught hell from the Church. In what has become a modern

  myth of science’s collision with biblical authority, he was brought

  before the Inquisition, forced to recant his Copernican beliefs, and lived

  out his days under house arrest.

  *Aristotle’s spheres were made of crystal because they had to be solid to hold up the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars, yet transparent since we can see through them.

  Spirits from the Vasty Deep

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  P L A N E T - H O P P I N G J E S U S

  Largely because Aristotle was invulnerable, early Christian scholars

  almost unanimously denied the existence of other worlds that might be

  occupied by rational beings. In the tale of Genesis, God creates the

  Earth for human habitation, and other worlds are not mentioned at all.

  Like hand in glove, this human-centered narrative fits snugly into

  Aristotle’s cosmos in which perfect, untouchable heavens envelop an

  Earth that is unique, central, separate, stationary, and inferior.

  Furthermore, the possibility of intelligent creatures on other worlds

  presented paradoxes for anthropocentric Christianity. If Jesus died for

  our sins alone, would intelligent aliens on other planets be damned by

  his neglect? Or are they free from sin? If so, why did we get such a raw

  deal? If not, was Christ a planet-hopper who managed to be incarnated

  on all such worlds?

  St. Augustine, widely recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of

  Christian antiquity, argued that if other worlds were inhabited by

  humanlike creatures, each would need a Savior, which was impossible

  because Christ was singular. Several scholars, however, found clever

  loopholes through which to admit intelligent extraterrestrials into a

  Christian universe. The most common argument was that other worlds

  would not need a redeemer because mankind’s sin was so original.

  More specifically, aliens could not be sons of Adam and did not inherit

  his sin, so they were off the hook.

  Aristotle’s hold on the Christian imagination began to loosen when

  some scholars pointed out that a universe with only one world implied

  limits on the creative powers of God. In 1277, Etienne Tempier, the

  bishop of Paris, issued a proclamation declaring Aristotle’s terrestrial/

  celestial dichotomy a heresy. This precipitated a sea change in attitudes

  toward other worlds and alien life. Many Christian scholars began

  breaking from Aristotle, and numerous treatises were published argu-

  ing that God could make as many worlds as he damn well pleased. He

  is, after all, God.

  Was the existence of alien life forbidden by the uniqueness of Christ’s

  incarnation or required by God’s omnipotence? In 1440 Nicholas of

  Cusa, a German ecclesiastic, wrote Of Learned Ignorance, a widely cel-

  ebrated book that exuberantly rejected Aristotle’s hierarchical, Earth-

  centered cosmology, advocating in its plac
e a universe bustling with life

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  L o n e l y P l a n e t s

  on every star. But Cusa was not scorned by the Church hierarchy for his

  belief in life elsewhere. On the contrary, after writing Of Learned

  Ignorance Cusa was made a cardinal. So why did the Church celebrate

  Cusa and, 150 years later, condemn Galileo?

  There are several reasons. First, Galileo was somewhat of a tactless

  boor—a quality often left out of the Galileo myth—and his obnoxious-

  ness helped seal his fate. Perhaps if he had put the right spin on his new

  discoveries, Rome would have showered him with praise and rejoiced

  in the addition of new worlds to God’s creation. Instead, he seemed to

  go out of his way to piss off the Church authorities with his know-it-all

  comments on Scripture. He might have fared better if he had kept a lid

  on it and not told the clerics how to interpret the Bible.

  In his Dialogue concerning the two Chief World Systems (1632),

  Galileo popularized his findings and proselytized for Copernicanism. In

  this book, the character who played the role of doubting the

  Copernican system was a pompous ass with the unflattering name

  Simplicio. In an impolitic move that well illustrates his arrogance,

  Galileo had Simplicio give voice to the anti-Copernican views of Pope

  Urban VIII, mirroring the pope’s words so closely that His Holiness

  became convinced that Simplicio was created to mock him. The infuri-

  ated pope was all too eager to preside over Galileo’s sentencing.

  Galileo was also a victim of bad timing. He challenged authority at a

  time when the Church was threatened by the Reformation. Even worse,

  Galileo’s world-shaking telescopic discoveries were made before heretic

  monk Giordano Bruno’s ashes had cooled. Bruno, a Dominican friar

  who was condemned and burned at the stake in Rome on February 17,

  1600, believed in an infinite cosmos filled with life virtually every-

  where—on planets, stars, meteors, you name it. He is often mentioned

  in the same breath with Galileo as another martyr for Copernicanism

  and science in general. In reality, his colorful advocacy of other worlds

  and alien life was seen by his persecutors as a minor offense compared

  to his sorcery, pantheism, and denial of Christ’s divinity. Bruno was

  murdered by the Church, first and foremost, for espousing superstitious