Venusians: the Planet Venus in the 18th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became possible to believe in the existence of life on other planets on scientific grounds. Once the Earth was no longer the centre of the universe according to Copernicus, once Galileo had aimed his telescope at the Moon and found it a rough globe with mountains and seas, then the assumption of life on other planets became much less far-fetched, and,
