Aliens and time in the machine age

Abstract

The 19th century saw sweeping changes for the development of astrobiology, both in the constituency of empirical science encroaching upon all aspects of life and in the evolution of ideas, with Lyell's Principles of Geology radically raising expectation of the true age of the Earth and the drama of Darwinism questioning biblically literalist accounts of natural history. This paper considers the popular culture spun on the crackling loom of the emergent aspects of astrobiology of the day: Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), which foretold the race of the future, and satirist Samuel Butler's anticipation of machine intelligence, ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, in his Erewhon (1872). Finally, we look at the way Darwin, Huxley and natural selection travelled into space with French astronomer Camille Flammarion's immensely popular Récits de l'infini (Stories of Infinity, 1872), and the social Darwinism of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). These works of popular culture presented an effective and inspiring communication of science; their crucial discourse was the reducible gap between the new worlds uncovered by science and exploration and the fantastic strange worlds of the imagination. As such they exemplify a way in which the culture and science of popular astrobiology can be fused.