Nearly at the same time that Charles Hinton (1853-1907) popularized the concept of extra dimensions, and specially the fourth dimension, Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), a French astronomer began publishing books about life in other worlds, and Edwin A. Abbott was publishing his famous book: Flatland.
Hinton's and Abbot's publications are about extra non-ordinary dimensions, but Camille Flammarion's publications are not. The fourth dimension —as an extension of our tridimensional world— and life out of our planet are totally different concepts, but both ideas are representative of the way that some open-minded people think.
About two centuries before than Hinton, Flammarion, and Abbott, near 1686, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French astronomer and writer, wrote his all-time famous book: Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds), speculating about life in other planets and their inhabitants.
Possibly influenced by Fontenelle's book, Flammarion later also wrote another book: La pluralité des mondes habité (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds), published in 1862, that initiated him as a great science fiction writer and a leader of the Pluralism. The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds has been translated into many languages and reprinted many, many times.
The titles of both books are very similar, but in spite that Fontenelle's book came earlier, the idea of life in other planets, specially in the Moon was not new to Flammarion, not even for Fontenelle.
Fontenelle's book was one of the first literary works that defended Nicolas Copernicus' theory of heliocentrism, stated about a century and a half earlier. The book was not only a groundbreaking in the aspects of extraterrestrial life and the heliocentric view of the Solar system; it was written in French, not in Latin, the official language of the Church and the academia. On the other hand, Copernicus' revolutionary theory (1543) was written in Latin; that's why the book was titled: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).
Fontenelle's arguments for supporting life in the Moon are very weak. Some extracts from his book tells it all:
What accounts do you receive? enquired she. Those, I replied, that are given us by the learned who travel there every day by assistance of telescopes. They tell us they have discovered in the moon, earth, seas, lakes, elevated mountains, and profound abysses.
....
The illustrious M. Cassini, who has acquired a greater knowledge of the celestial bodies than any man in the world, discovered in the moon something which separates, then re-unites, and afterwards loses itself in a a cavity.
.....
in fact our description of the moon is so particular, that if a learned man was to take a journey there, he would be in no more danger of losing himself than I should in Paris.
Another argument he uses advocating for support for his belief of life in the Moon is the story of a man called Astolfo, a character of the epic Orlando Furioso (Furious Orlando) by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. (Click the image to see it bigger.)
Below is a passage of Fontenelle's insertion on his book of Ludovico's Orlando story.
Astolfo, a valourous knight-errant was one day carried by his hippogriffe ["A legendary creature, supposedly the offspring of a griffin and a mare"] to the terrestrial paradise, which was at the top of a very high mountain: there he met St. John, who informed him that it was necessary, in order to cure Orlando of his madness, for them to take a journey together to the moon. ... his astonishment however increased when he saw in it rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, and, what I should have been equally surprised at nymphs hunting in the forests. But the most curious thing of all he saw was a valley in which was to be found every thing that was lost on the earth...
For Fontenelle, every star is another solar system like ours. The illustration shown here was used in one of Entretiens' edition. Note that the planets are orbiting around the Sun. The Sun, as postulated by the Copernican theory, is at the center of the Solar system. Note also that all other stars are solar systems, each one has planets or orbs orbiting around them. However, our Solar system is at the very center of the universe. Somehow, Fontenelle was unable to liberate himself from the archaic Greek and Ptolemaic theories of an Earth-centered solar system: at some place or another the universe must have a center.
But there is a virtue in this book that makes it outstanding: it was written with the female readers in mind, and with the intention that it should be easily understood by everybody; not only experts in the field of astronomy. Centuries later, Camille Flammarion, was going to repeat what Fontenelle did for the ladies of his times: Flammarion was going to write his famous Astronomy for Women.
The "other worlds" to which Fontenelle refers are simply the nearby planets. Now, in our modern times, when people speak of "other worlds" are referring to extrasolar planets in other solar systems.
Next to this paragraph is shown a 1791 colored engraving titled: Fontenelle meditating about the plurality of worlds. The print depicts Fontenelle with a telescope and —possibly— his dog, meditating about life on the Moon. Note the curious the way in which Morret portrayed the Moon: the Moon is framed within a clouds frame, like emphasizing the idea of two different worlds; its a frame within another frame.
But more than this, the moon is also contemplating Fontenelle. (Click on the figure to see it enlarged).
But the engraving conveys more than we see at first glance:
Are there other astronomers on the Moon looking toward the Earth in the same way as he is doing looking to the sky? The logic is straightforward: if other worlds are inhabited and we are contemplating them from Earth, then from those worlds somebody must also be looking at us.
But besides his wrong ideas (more justly said, extravagant ideas, but not a "lunatic") of life in the Moon and other nearby planets, at his time he was right about some of the future humankind's achievements:
The Europeans ... did not find their way to America till six thousand years had elapsed; they were all that time in learning that art of navigation so completely as to pass over the ocean ...
We do more than conjecture the probability of rising in the air ... The art of flying is but in its infancy; in due time it will be brought to perfection, and some day or other we shall get to the moon.
At right is shown the photo of a footprint of an astronaut during their Moon landing. This and other photos are still under controversy for a supposed NASA scam, but it does not matter if the landing was true or not, what matters is that sooner or later, someday, all planets and moons of our solar system will be visited or "landed" because extraterrestrial traveling has been a dream of all mankind for all its history.
E. Pérez
10/10
Also in this Website—
About Edwin A. Abbott:
Resources for the study of Flatland
About Charles Hinton:
Can there be different fourth dimensions?
About Camille Flammarion:
The strange extraterrestrial worlds of Camille Flammarion
About life on the Moon:
What do you know about the Moon Trees?
What do you know about the pyramid inside the Moon?
What do you know about the first burial on the Moon?