Aliens Ufo Gifs Animated: Extraterrestrials in Fiction (10 Gifs Animated)

Historical ideas

The fictionalization of extraterrestrial life occurred before the 20th century. The didactic poet Henry More took up the classical theme of Cosmic pluralism of the Greek Democritus in “Democritus Platonissans, or an Essay Upon the Infinity of Worlds” (1647). With the new relative viewpoint that understood “our world’s sunne / Becomes a starre elsewhere”, More made the speculative leap to extrasolar planets,

the frigid spheres that ’bout them fare;
Which of themselves quite dead and barren are,
But by the wakening warmth of kindly dayes,
And the sweet dewie nights, in due course raise
Long hidden shapes and life, to their great Maker’s praise.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life was a commonplace of educated discourse in the 17th century, though in Paradise Lost (1667) John Milton cautiously employed the conditional when the angel suggests to Adam the possibility of life on the Moon:

Her spots thou seest
As clouds, and clouds may rain, and rain produce
Fruits in her softened soil, for some to eat
Allotted there; and other Suns, perhaps,
With their attendant Moons, thou wilt descry,
Communicating male and female light,
Which two great sexes animate the World,
Stored in each Orb perhaps with some that live

Fontanelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” with its similar excursions on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, expanding rather than denying the creative sphere of a Maker, was translated into English in 1686. In “The Excursion” (1728) David Mallet exclaimed, “Ten thousand worlds blaze forth; each with his train/Of peopled worlds.”