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15 Galileo’s discoveries greatly strengthened the credibility of Copernican heory. Although they did not prove definitively that the Copernican model was right, they made it possible for the interested public to believe that it was real. Speculations about inhabited worlds could move beyond imagina- ion to become extrapolations from fact. The Galilean telescope came along at the right moment in history, argued astronomical anthropologist Anthony Aveni. Innovative ideas, ully formed, were ripe for empirical testing. After Galileo, the sky was no onger a place filled with moving lights that affect our destinies and pas- sions; it became a vast domain populated by worlds like our own, with surfaces, atmospheres, mountains, cores, and mantles—worlds that whirl around one another under a different rule of law, one of unseen powers hat are part of a natural rather than a divine order.” Galileo gave new weight to a distinction that has been central in the debate about extraterrestrial intelligence, between what we believe to be true and what we can actually detect. He pointed out that there were no sure observations on the question of inhabitants of other worlds; the astronomer cannot affirm that something exists merely because it is logically possible. If life existed on the Moon, he thought, it would be extremely diverse and far beyond our imaginings.” Meanwhile, the European age of discovery and conquest had added other dimensions to the debate. Vast realms of our own planet, previously unknown to Europe, were found to be inhabited by strange peoples and alien societies that had developed independently of Eurasia. Saint Augustine had con- demned the belief in the very existence of such “Antipodeans.” Confronted with reality, Europeans had to ask if these creatures were as human as they were, or of a separate, alien nature. In 1537, the Church decided that Christians could regard the beings they encountered in the Americas as human.”* The revival of the plurality of worlds enabled authors to explore the imag- ined features of other planets and the nature of their human or quasi- human inhabitants. Many used fictional aliens as critics of human follies—or as models for rectifying them. Some exploited the fictional cosmic voyage as a literary vehicle. Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream), written in 1609 but not published until 1634, described an imaginary journey to the Moon, which he imagined to be inhabited by intelligent analogs to humans. Kepler made the bold proposal that life may have originated in a spontaneous, mechanical fashion on Earth; by implication, it might arise elsewhere. Another Keplerian specu- lation was to resonate loudly in the twentieth century: Space travel would enable people from “our species of Man” to settle other worlds.* Fictional Aliens Fictional Aliens