Abstract
Now that historians have completed surveys of the extraterrestrial life debate such as Dick's Plurality of Worlds and The Biological Universe, and Crowe's, The extraterrestrial life debate, 1750–1900, we can begin to study the possible lessons learned from that history. In this chapter we make that attempt in three overlapping areas: (1) the problematic nature of evidence and inference, and its relation to scientific preconceptions; (2) the role of theory in raising expectations, interpreting observations, and generating conclusions; and (3) an evaluation of the success or failure of some of the debate’s most general arguments, including the principles of plenitude and mediocrity and “Goldilocks-type” arguments that life occurs under such tight constraints that it is rare in the universe.
First published as part of “The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate: Major Themes and Lessons Learned,” in Astrobiology , History and Society: Life Beyond Earth and the Impact of Discovery Douglas A. Vakoch, ed. (Springer: Heidelberg, 2013), pp. 133–175.
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Dick, S.J. (2020). Lessons Learned from the Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate. In: Space, Time, and Aliens. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41614-0_39
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