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18 felt lost in an immense universe: “Our world is terrifying in its insignificance.” What could one do to give purpose and human relevance to such a fearful void? “Perhaps just because the silent emptiness of Newton’s infinite universe threatened to engulf and utterly lose so petty a planet as Earth,” theorized historian William McNeill, “the 17° and 18" cen- 14 we ° 1 turies were particularly prolific of new religious movements and sects, all of them emphasizing a direct, emotionally charged experience of God.” There also was an implied tension between feeling isolated in a vast universe and being insignificant and anonymous in a cosmos infinitely inhabited by other beings. “I was afraid of being overlooked amidst the immensity of nature,” wrote Joseph Addison, “and lost among that infinite variety of creatures.”* There were hints of other consequences. The jubilant feeling of cosmic brotherhood, suggested Guthke, can easily give way to fear of intelligent extraterrestrial beings that are no longer subject to the wise surveillance of a Creator-God. What if such aliens were more powerful than we are? Te nen Ld 2 AL tn one OT te tte te De Fontenelle had one of his characters say “Tis no great matter whether we go to them, or they come to us, we shall then be the Americans,” that is, the weaker party.*” Intellectual dilemmas persisted. The Age of Reason sought to leave behind the traditional Christian concept of human nature by making Man the measure of all things. The possibility of alien intelligences challenged this belief; we could not be the measure if extraterrestrial beings were superior to us.** By the end of the eighteenth century, the dominant cosmology assumed that physical and evolutionary laws were the same throughout the universe, that the building blocks of life were plentiful everywhere, and that a uni- verse teeming with intelligent life was overwhelmingly likely. The concept of a solitary planet in an immense ocean of space, commented Thomas Paine, was giving way to the cheerful idea of a society of worlds.*” This vision was revived in the modern debate. Pluralism seemed to be in the ascendant. However, eighteenth-century pluralists left two problems for their nineteenth-century successors: reconciling pluralism with Christianity, and the lack of astronomical evidence.” Whewell’s Challenge William Whewell, Master of Cambridge’s Trinity College, published a major anti pluralist treatise in 1853. Attacking the use of analogy to draw scientific conclusions, he may have been the first to look critically at the empirical evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence, as opposed to A Belief in Other Minds