Although the question of extraterrestrial life is very old, the concept of a full-blown cosmic evolution—the connected evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and life on Earth and beyond—is much younger. As historian Michael Crowe has shown…We have already hinted at why this coalescence had not happened earlier, Spencerian philosophy and the ideas of Flammarion, Proctor, and Henderson notwithstanding. Although the idea of the physical evolution of planets and biological evolut…5. Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 224–225, 274–277, 464–465. Simon Schaffer has shown the place of the nebular hypothesis in a general “science of progress” i…
Camille Flammarion
astronomer · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Flammarion was a 19th-century astronomer and science popularizer whose ideas about extraterrestrial life and cosmic evolution shaped early conversations about life beyond Earth. The course readings invoke him (alongside Proctor and Henderson) as a historical figure whose speculative cosmology preceded but didn't quite synthesize into modern cosmic evolution theory. His significance here is largely genealogical—marking an intellectual lineage that the readings trace through Michael Crowe's historiography of the plurality-of-worlds debate.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Herbert Spencer 3Richard Anthony Proctor 3Bernard Lightman 2John Fiske 2Carl Sagan 1Charles Darwin 1Michael Crowe 1Pierre-Simon Laplace 1Robert Chambers 1J. R. Moore 1James Strick 1John C. Greene 1Michael J. Crowe 1Robert Stawell Ball 1Simon Schaffer 1Henry Norris Russell 1Kaj Aage Strand 1Peter van de Kamp 1Thomas Henderson 1