To feel small, all we have to do is look up. The sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is. And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials.
Anaximander was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing
the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first protoscientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE.
Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. For someone who lived 2,200 years before Isaac Newton, this was a stunning insight. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.”
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