This is full of distortions and omissions.

Firstly, an "earth centred" cosmology did not assume all things were made for man. It held the earth was a small part of the solar system, which in turn was surrounded by far larger (infinite?) heavens.

It is also worth thinking about what Medieval people place at the very centre of the earth, and therefore the exact centre of the universe.

She mentions some possible answers to why Christ came to earth. One possible answer is that HE did not only come to earth. Another is that other species are redeemed in different ways. Another is that they will hear of Christ from us.

I think the Sumerian clay tablets (that is the bible is partially based of) reveal a lot more about the origins of human civilizations.

What’s most fascinating to me is the certainly with which they believed that other worlds were inhabited. Horace Walpole, for example, even abandoning his faith over the theological difficulties it presented. Hundreds of years later, however, we’re left with the Fermi Paradox.

"There must be some more land somewhere", a very old idea.

The idea that other worlds would be your deal breaker on Christianity is strange. They were fine with two continents needing over a millennium to first hear about Jesus, but a plurality of worlds would be "irreconcilable."

Maybe they couldn't imagine space travel ever being possible?

odd to say Newton wrote nothing about "celestial" life when the volme of his esoteric work outweighs his scientific work by orders of magnitude. aliens don't really break any theologies either, as the idea of people being vehicles for God's ethics vs. that of the rest of nature tracks across most of them.

I love alien theories because they are the perfect example of a critical theory that provides a post-hoc explanation to literally everything as the logic of the idea. Astrology is another one, conspiracy theories about a malignant state is another, dialictic materialism and its transhumanist descendents just happen to be the prevailing one, simulation theory is an emergent one.

whats nice about the aliens one is that if there were aliens among us, the implications about how we must seem to other beings on earth is an analogy, and it asks us to consider how we would hope for our own stewards to behave toward us and what ethical ownership should be.

Sometimes reading things like this from the Enlightenment period, I wonder how humans can move backwards so much. Within last 100 years we developed atom bomb, went to moon and yet we can still have the current anti-science religious radicals in the US. They can be driving a car full of technical marvels, and have an iPhone, but still believe in creationism and that the earth is 6000 years old.

Then, see article like this, and realize, people were having some pretty advanced ideas in the 1800's.

[dead]

Disappointed, I thought this was going to be about the window manager. /s

I wonder how much articles like this are popping up as the hive mind of humanity becomes aware of the phenomenon that exceeds our physics watching us as years of government suppression finally cracks. Watching Lue Elizondo going on the daily show with his clinical understatement being met by the interviewer yelling "you're talking about fucking aliens man!"

Its been wild to me to see people start to grapple with the evidence. Good to know the thought of life elsewhere has a long pedigree.