Back when Copernicus was blowing minds with his heliocentric view of the solar system and reigniting the old Greek concept of the plurality of worlds, the idea that we, as a planet, weren’t all that special after all came to the forefront of the thinkers of the time. This idea persisted for a few hundred years and got into the brain of William Herschel. Herschel was an astronomer who discovered Uranus (hey-ohhh!)… but he also reasoned that if the Earth had its multitudes, then obviously the other known planets and moons did, too. He was so enamored with this idea that not only was he pretty sure he saw forests on the Moon, but he theorized that the Sun was nothing more than a very bright planet with a hot outer atmosphere shielding a more temperate inner world that you could sometimes glimpse through sunspots.
About 50 years later Thomas Dick took it even further and made estimates of planet-wide populations by extrapolating that the population density of the UK (where he lived) would be the same average population across any other celestial body (it was at this point that my brain exploded). So, armed with this mathematical certainty, he calculated that Mars had 15 billion inhabitants, Jupiter 7 trillion, and the rings of Saturn (expensive property but with amazing views) hosted 8 trillion happy Saturnlings.
I love thought experiments like this. To me they speak to humanity’s deep desire to just not be alone in this massive existence. Surely there are other beings out there… how could there not be?? We can’t be alone, obviously, and that other people stubbornly refuse to visit us is only a symptom of them being busy with their own internal strife and worries just as we are.
And man, thinking like this is so comforting… when I try to wrap my brain around the shear size of even just our own solar system, with it’s vast distances between planets and even vaster distances out to the heliopause that marks the official end of our neighborhood, then on to the next closest solar system, then galactic center, then other galaxies, and on and on and on and think of the trillions of stars and planets that we would pass along the way, and to not have even an inkling that a single one of them has any kind of being approximating life on or around it is just staggeringly lonely. If only everyone would think about it, maybe we’d get how precious each of us are to one another, and we’d support each other instead of clawing our way into tearing each other down.
The one thing that gives me some kind of hope, though… as silly as the idea of trillions of people going about their lives on the Sun is now, back then it was a fairly reasonable assumption. So, even though we’ve mostly proven to ourselves that we’re alone in this solar system, there’s a fair chance that we’ll look back on that idea with a laugh and a smirk too when we’re sharing a hot tub with the locals on Europa.