In search of exoplanets

Abstract

From Democritus and Epicurus to Aristotle and Seneca, Greek and then Roman philosophers often aired the question of the plurality of worlds. For Lucretius, ‘there are, in other regions of space, Earths other than ours, different races of men, and different wild creatures.’ Diogenes Laertius wrote: ‘The Universe is infinite... of it, one part is a plenum, and the other a vacuum. He [Leucippus] also says that the elements, and the worlds which are derived from them, are infinite, and are dissolved again into them.’