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…
Richard Anthony Proctor
astronomer · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Richard Anthony Proctor was a Victorian astronomer and science writer who contributed to nineteenth-century speculations about extraterrestrial life and cosmic evolution, appearing in the readings as one of several thinkers (alongside Flammarion and Henderson) whose ideas about planetary and biological evolution preceded the full conceptual synthesis of cosmic evolution. The course draws on Proctor as evidence of how astronomical inquiry in the Victorian era was entangled with broader philosophies of progress and the possibility of life distributed across the universe. He functions here as a historical marker of how speculation about aliens and planetary systems became intertwined with theories of evolution and technological modernity.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Camille Flammarion 3Herbert Spencer 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