A British work, over 300 years old, speculates on the different forms of life that could inhabit other planets.
It’s a fascinating book that was discovered, or rather rediscovered, in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, during a pre-auction valuation scheduled for July 5 by Hansons Library Auction. Written in 1698, it is titled “The Celestial World Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets”, which can literally be translated as “The celestial world unveiled: or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants, the plants and the productions of the worlds on the planets”.
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As its title suggests, it is a precursor to modern work in exobiology, the interdisciplinary science that strives to predict the forms and processes of life on other planets or in different environments. radically different from ours.
The author of this work is however far from being unknown since it is the Dutch astronomer, physicist and mathematician Christian Huygens, famous for having discovered Saturn’s moon, Titan, and provided an incredibly detailed description for the epoch of the Solar System. A universal genius, close to Spinoza, he exercised his extraordinary intelligence and his devouring curiosity in almost all fields of science, even taking an interest in the nature of light, which he likens to a wave and of which he proposes the first complete theory.
No wonder, then, that this brilliant brain, unfortunately somewhat eclipsed by Newton, whose contemporary and rival he was, pushed the limits of his thinking to the point of speculating on different forms of life that could evolve on the planets he observed with the powerful telescope he had developed himself. Following in the footsteps of Giordano Bruno and his hypothesis on “the plurality of inhabited worlds”, Christian Huygens anticipates modern theories on the physical evolutions of possible forms of extraterrestrial life.
It presupposes, for example, a universal convergence of the main anatomical traits of a dominant species: “What could we invent or imagine that could be so exactly adapted to all the uses that the Hands are? Should we give them a proboscis (trunk) of an elephant?” Likewise, “heavenly beings” must have feet unless they have discovered the “art of flight”. He believes that these extraterrestrial civilizations also know the arts and sciences as well as war, poverty and afflictions of all kinds. “Because, he writes, this is where inventions and progress lead us”.
The copy for sale at Moreton-in-Marsh is the first English translation of the work originally written in Latin. This translation appeared in 1698 the same year as the original edition, published in The Hague, three years after the death of Christian Huygens, in 1695. Its value is estimated between 2000 and 3000 £, (2350 and 3350 euros). A straw for such a journey in the cosmos…