The Plurality of Worlds Trivia Quiz

Answer: Giordano Bruno

Bruno had, you see, argued that not only were there other inhabited worlds besides Earth -- but also that God didn't necessarily love us best.

Answer: Johannes Kepler

Kepler's 'Somnium' was a description of what life might be like on the moon - it turns out that the inhabitants thereof are miserable wormlike creatures whose only joy is their view of the Earth. And in his 'Conversation', he makes the argument that humanity is the apple of God's eye, as we are in the center of the planets orbiting the sun -- and that the Galilean moons were created for the inhabitants of Jupiter as a compensation for their inferior position.

Answer: Tommaso Campanella

Campanella's 'Apologia pro Galileo' was a spirited defense of reasoning and the scientific method, but it ran afoul of the Church's traditional reliance on Aristotelian logic (not that Campanella's reputation as a rebel helped). The same year the 'Apologia' was written, the Church issued an edict declaring heliocentrism (the belief that the sun is at the center of the solar system) a heresy.

Answer: John Wilkins

Anxious of his reputation and the approval of the Anglican Church, Wilkins took care to distance himself from his own logic, repeatedly crediting previous philosophers (like Campanella, Kepler, and Bruno) with his own lines of reasoning.

Answer: Francis Godwin

Godwin had his story published posthumously, so he didn't need to worry about ecclesiastical retribution. The tale, written in the first person, describes how Gonzalez harnesses himself to a flock of spacefaring geese who transport him to the moon - how his food supplies are cursed by demons on the way up - and how the people of the moon are thirty-foot-tall Anglicans who venerate Queen Elizabeth I, whose heights vary according to their virtues, and who exile their shortest children to Earth where they pose as human.

Answer: Cyrano de Bergerac

De Bergerac uses the format of a space odyssey to cleverly skewer human society. A high point occurs when the birds who inhabit the moon put the protagonist, Dyrcona, on trial for humanity's habit of killing and eating their kind.

Answer: lobster

Many find it surprising that Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock, could have such a failure of imagination that he literally could not conceive of any way to put together an intelligent entity that was not basically human.

Answer: Laputa

Laputa, as much like a spaceship as it is like a planet, is kept above the Earth by an oddity in the local magnetic field. Brobdingnag is the land of the giants Gulliver encounters after the Lilliputians, Balnibarbi is the land ruled by the Laputans, and the Houynhnhnms are the intelligent, virtuous horses whom Gulliver meets last of all.

Answer: 'Micromegas'

Micromegas is the name of the Sirian, who encounters a shipful of human philosophers. The ensuing debate is a clever rail against the egoism of human thinkers - one such man, standing in Micromegas' massive palm, has the gall to insist that the alien, his home star, and all in the universe was created for humanity's benefit.

Answer: Mars

Lowell seriously believed in what he thought he saw, but his observations were so tenuous, and his claims so wild, that his books 'Mars' and 'Mars as the Abode of Life' must be regarded as early science fiction. He had a lively (and hair-trigger) imagination.