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\t\tBy Maria Popova<\/p>\n
\t\t\tIt is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the notion of a galaxy is still more than two centuries away. The universe is as big as our Solar System, which has six planets orbiting a sun we have only just conceded, after burning the seers at the stake, does not revolve around us.
\nAgainst this backdrop, having set the Scientific Revolution into motion with his landmark contributions to optics, mechanics, and astronomy, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens has just finished his most daring work: Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets \u2014 our world\u2019s first treatise speculating on the existence of life on other worlds not from a theological but from a scientific standpoint.
\nAlthough Huygens outlived his era\u2019s life expectancy twofold, he never lived to see its publication \u2014 published in Latin and English by his brother at his own expense, Cosmotheoros entered the world like a shockwave three years after Huygens\u2019s death, changing not only the course of science but of art. It was the spark that led Shelley to scandalize Georgian England with the \u201cplurality of worlds\u201d he augured in his philosophical poem Queen Mab. It was the seed for the marvelously multifaceted field of astrobiology, at the beating heart of which is the question not of where life is but what life is.<\/p>\n
More than three centuries later, Chilean artist Alejandra Acosta conjures up the visionary spirit of Cosmotheoros in a gorgeous Spanish edition illustrated with her intricate embroideries of the life-forms Huygens imagined inhabiting other worlds, radiating a lovely strangeness partway between Borges\u2019s imaginary beings and the creatures of Indian folk mythology, yet entirely original, as daring artistically as the book was scientifically. <\/p>\n
Without the concept at the center of Cosmotheoros, we wouldn\u2019t have one of the finest metaphors in all of literature: \u201cThere is nothing new under the sun,\u201d Octavia Butler wrote, \u201cbut there are new suns.\u201d <\/p>\n