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14 theology; if there were intelligent beings on other worlds, we might not be God’s unique and central concern. The Passionate Monk Forty years after Copernicus published his great work, the itinerant monk Giordano Bruno was forcefully advocating a decentralized, infi- nite, and infinitely populated universe. Believing that the supreme char- acteristic of the cosmos is its homogeneity, the intellectually passionate Bruno argued that the physical composition of all heavenly bodies is essentially the same. He declared that the fixed stars are suns and sup- posed, by analogy, that they are orbited by planets. For him, those planets were worlds, every one inhabited. He ridiculed the assumed centrality of Humankind by proposing that those who inhabit the moon “without doubt” believe themselves to be at the center of the universe. These radical ideas may have awakened the Catholic church to Copernicanism’s heretical implications. Bruno was put on extended trial by the Inquisition for a variety of offenses, including attacks on some basic tenets of the Christian religion such as the uniqueness of the Incarnation.” His grim fate—being burned at the stake in 1600—may have been inevitable even if he had never campaigned for a plurality of inhabited worlds. Meanwhile, Copernican theory had stimulated new ways of looking at the heavens. Tycho Brahe, watching the skies without a telescope, spotted a comet traveling within the planetary system, puncturing the assumed etherial spheres of the Ptolemaic universe. He also observed a new star (nova) that remained visible for over a year in the supposedly immutable realm of the fixed stars. The stage was set for the greater revolutionary, alta. Galileo. Galileo initiated a new age of astronomy when he scanned the sky with his simple telescope, particularly during the winter of 1609-1610. He observed that our Moon had mountains and plains like the Earth and thought he had seen seas as well. He reported planets as spherical objects; he saw that Venus went through phases as it would if it orbited the Sun. He detected moons orbiting Jupiter, proving that not all bodies revolved around the Earth. A Belief in Other Minds The Triumph of Observation