Life, Technology, and the Cosmos

Life, Technology, and the Cosmos

Cody Webber

        Ever since the dawn of man, we have been wanderers. Curiosity is what fuels us to discover, adventure, and innovate. Humans have changed drastically from the primitive age to now, but one aspect has remained the same throughout all of our years: we are always searching and learning. One of the most scientifically invigorating things that we are searching for nowadays is life on other planets. We might find it one day, but only if we keep fueling the programs of discovery.

A Brief History of Cosmology

In the 16th century BC, the Mesopotamian culture believed the Earth as being flat and circular. From their standpoint, that is the only way that they could make sense of the world. It took 12 centuries for Aristotle to propose an Earth-centered Universe, where the Earth is stationary and the universe is finite. Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Sun is the center of the universe, rather than the Earth being the center in the 3rd century BC. Moving ahead to AD 964, there were the first observations of the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda Galaxy, done by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer. This showed that our galaxy was not the only one in the universe. In the 12th century, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, a Persian philosopher, said that there were more worlds than just Earth, and space is infinite. He also mentioned that there could be an infinite number of universes. In the next century, Nahmanides, a Jewish Philosopher, said that the universe itself is expanding, and there are not 3, but 10 dimensions. Nowadays, we have proved that the universe is expanding, and some theoretical physicists discuss the possibility of 10 dimensions.

In the 1500’s, evidence was provided by Ali Qushji, a Persian astronomer and mathematician, that proved that the Earth rotates on its axis, and disproved Aristotle’s theory of the Earth being stationary with everything else moving around it. Come 1543, right after the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus died, he published De revolutionibus, a book that proposed a heliocentric universe, where all of the planets orbit the Sun in circular paths. He published it after he died due to the profound and negative impact it had on the Church, and he was afraid to be condemned and humiliated. 41 years later in 1584, Giordano Bruno, an Italian astronomer, proposed the idea that our solar system is not the center of the universe. Rather, it is just one star system amongst many, many more star systems.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists. He figured out when working with telescopes and other optics that white light is composed of a mixture of many different types of colored rays. He also presented the idea that the orbits of the planets were not circular, but elliptical. A few months later, he figured out why these orbits are elliptical rather than circular. In order to explain why the orbits are like this, he invented integral and differential calculus. Newton was widely considered by many to be a genius because of his work in calculus and the three laws of motion that he established.