Why Ask, “Are We Alone?”

I found an article on astro-ph last week, in which Jean Schneider at the Paris Observatory asserts that the question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe was until recently, only asked in Western cultures. Of course, all cultures have had their own notions of deities and spirits. However, those aren’t what the article is about. Deities and spirits are something apart from us; they are part of another realm. What Dr. Schneider was interested in is the concept that life like us exists in space.

The article asserts that speculation about extraterrestrial life stretches back to the ancient Greeks in Western literature (here, Arabic countries are included), but that before 1900, Dr. Schneider hasn’t found any reference to aliens outside the West. If anyone is reading this and knows of a counter-example (aliens, not deities or spirits), please do leave something in the comments.

Dr. Scheider then goes on to propose an explanation for why only those cultures that were influenced by the Greeks have wondered about aliens. In order to consider aliens, it seems logical that one has to have a concept of space as something fundamentally the same as the Earth. The Greeks had this concept, thanks to Euclidean geometry, in which all points in an abstract space are considered equal. In contrast, non-western cultures thought of the sky and the stars as being part of a different realm, a heavenly one where deities and spirits lived. They didn’t ask if there were aliens, because in their thinking, everything apart from Earth was different.

It seems like an interesting example of how culture and language can influence science, by defining which subjects are thought about. My own opinion is that science will inevitably correct its own blind spots, but then again. . . how can I know?