On this 4th of July, when the smoke from the last of the fireworks drifts away and you can once again see the starry sky above, it may be worth reflecting on the fact that America’s founders were pretty sure that those stars were home to an immense population of space aliens.
Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a “chorus of worlds” just like ours. Ethan Allen, the self-taught leader of the Green Mountain Boys, insisted that the inhabitants of these other earths included intelligent beings just like us. David Rittenhouse, the famous Philadelphia inventor and astronomer, made it official in a 1775 lecture that was reprinted for the benefit of the Second Continental Congress. “The doctrine of the plurality of worlds,” he said, “is inseparable from the principles of astronomy.”
The space aliens of the American Revolution, to be clear, weren’t little, green, or three-eyed, and they definitely weren’t a saucer-flying menace to the American way of life. They were our brothers and sisters in the contemplation of nature’s endless bounty. They were just as good as us, maybe even a little better. As Rittenhouse explained, if extraterrestrials were unfortunate enough to visit Earth, they might find themselves enslaved in America “merely because their bodies may be disposed to reflect or absorb the rays of light in a way different from ours.”
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