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19 the philosophical or theological arguments. He was the first to argue that life could develop only on planets within the boundaries of certain conditions, a concept that evolved into today’s zone of habitability. Whewell also recognized that the existence of life on another world does not necessarily imply intelligent life. He pointed out that Humankind was very recent; for most of Earth’s history, there were no intelligent beings on our planet. As a practicing Christian, Whewell believed that, were worlds other than ours populated with intelligent beings, they would have some kind of relationship with God. That would dilute any special relationship we humans claim to have.’ Whewell was not the only skeptic. American astronomer Denison Olmsted argued that “The telescope ... has added nothing to the amount of evidence in favor of the doctrine that the planets are inhabited. It has, in fact, greatly diminished that amount, since the points of dissimilarity to the Earth . . . have increased faster than the points of resemblance.” More than a century later, other skeptics revived the idea of our Earth being a ene hae Before the nineteenth century, observed McNeill, men had seldom taken seriously the obvious proposition that all things in the universe, and the universe itself, have a history.** Arguments about extraterrestrial life had taken place in a static context; humans and other living things were always as they are, created at one moment. After Darwin and Wallace, the idea that life on Earth is the result of a miracle or of a rare chance event was replaced by an evolutionary narrative, giving plurality a new boost. However, the concept of natural selection highlighted the probability that the evolution of life elsewhere in the Universe would be quite different than on Earth.“ Natural selection also implied competition, inspiring a harsh social and political doctrine: The fittest will survive, and the less fit will die out. Evolutionary theory had a broader impact on our view of the cosmos. Instead of being a static structure with fixed properties, the universe became an entity whose characteristics changed over time. Nineteenth-century science gave us new tools. Armed with devices for spectrum analysis, astronomers were able to prove that celestial bodies were made up of the same chemical elements as our Earth, both within our solar system and beyond it. If life could evolve from those elements here, it might evolve on other planets as well. Science popularizer Camille Evolution and Sharpened Questions Tare phenomenon. Evolution and Sharpened Questions