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10 universe? The answers to those questions have powerful implications for the probability of contact with extraterrestrials, and for its consequences. The prehistoric universe was an intimate one; for the vast majority of human beings and for most of their history, there were no other worlds than Earth. Not until the ancient Greek rationalists do we have docu- mented evidence of a belief in intelligent beings on other worlds. Some of the Pythagoreans of the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. speculated that the Moon and stars were peopled with humans or similar beings.* The later Greek Atomists gave us the first arguments from probability. Democritus argued that there must be an infinite number of worlds because space and time are infinite. “Nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of worlds,” wrote Epicurus in his Letter to Herodotus. “We must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world.” The Roman poet Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) spread the Atomists’ themes in the first century B.C., expressing an argument that still under- lies much of the thinking about the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence: It is in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created... You are bound therefore to acknowledge that in other regions there are other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of beasts... . Nothing in the universe is the only one of its kind, unique and solitary in its birth and growth.”* Speculation was not limited to Greece and Rome. The Vedic worldview of eighth- to twelfth-century India envisioned a hierarchy of planets encom- passing 400,000 humanlike races and 8,000,000 other life-forms. Muslim natural philosophers speculated about a hierarchy of intelligences sup- posed to animate the successive planetary spheres of the pre-Copernican universe.° None of these visions—Eastern or Western—were confirmed by observation. The Wisdom of the Buddha Consider Siddhartha Gautama’s vision of the universe in the sixth century B.C. The Buddha’s concept embraced billions of “minor world systems,” each of which resembles our own planetary system. In the infinite space of the universe there exist billions of suns, billions of moons, billions of inhabited regions. “It is amply clear,”astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe told us, “that Buddha viewed life and consciousness (which he thought to be associated with all life) as cosmic phenomena, linked inextricably with the structure of the Universe as a whole.” A Belief in Other Minds