Huygens and His 17th Century Space Aliens

Christiaan Huygens 1629-1695 was a Dutch astronomer who made great strides in understanding the rings of Saturn.  His father Constantijn Huygens was a patron and friend of artists, poets, writers, philosophers and scientists.  And Holland at the time was a liberal center for the arts and scholarly pursuits.  It was in this nurturing environment that Huygens imagined life was possible on other planets in our solar system, and he imagined that it was possible that planets orbited far away stars.  He wrote and published a book about his speculations in the 1690s shortly before his death.  He did so without fear of persecution.  That’s astonishing when you consider women were being hanged as witches here in this country at about the same time Huygens’ book was published and that Galileo was found guilty of heresy for claiming the Sun was at the center of the universe when Huygens was a child.