[are] farther from the centre than near it’ (Kant,  1981:  167). This hierarchy of being stretched from the dullards to the near  Divine. Crowe (1988:  52) draws attention to two assumptions underpinning Kant’s pluralism: ‘[1] the great chain of being, and [2] the idea that from the type of matter dominant on a planet, one can make inferences about its inhabitants’. The first assumption is seen in Kant’s comment that: ‘From the highest class of thinking beings to the most abject insect, no member is indifferent to nature; and that nothing can be missing without breaking up the beauty of the whole, which consists in interconnectedness’ (Kant, 1981: 185). The second assumption is found in Kant’s formulation of a rule according to which intelligence is assessed in relation to the position occupied by living beings in the universe. As Kant says: ‘the whole range of their perfection stands under a certain rule, according to which these become more excellent and perfect in proportion to the distance of their habitats from the Sun’ (ibid.: 189). From this perspective Kant’s Mercurians and Venusians are dullards. We on Earth, however, occupy the ‘middle rung’, but the Jovians and the Saturnians are greatly superior beings. He states: ‘From one side we saw thinking creatures among whom a man from Greenland or a Hottentot would be a Newton, and on the other side some others would admire him as [if he were] an ape’ (ibid.: 190). Anticipating Carl Sagan’s immortals, Kant suggested that the inhabitants of the outer planets were free from decay and death, and speculated on whether those who were fortunate to live on the larger planets were ‘too noble and wise’ to sin. It might be interesting to consider what Kant would have said about the inhabitants of the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, discovered some time later. It is comforting to note that for Kant the Martians, at least, suffered from the same sinful afflictions as Earth beings.

Later in life Kant was to achieve fame for his critique of speculative systems and consequently prohibited republication of the chapters of his book that dealt explicitly with ETI. He never proposed any means of verifying his beliefs in ETI, although his faith in pluralism persisted in his mature works. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, when comparing opinion, knowledge and belief, Kant assesses the strength of various beliefs, some of which can be measured by the amount one is prepared to support with a bet. There are, he says, analogons in purely theoretical circumstances, which he calls doctrinal beliefs. Thus:

I should not hesitate to stake my all on the truth of the proposition – if there were any possibility of bringing it to the test of experience – that, at least, some one of the planets which we see is inhabited. Hence I say that I have not merely the opinion, but the strong belief, on the correctness of which I would stake many of the advantages of life, that there are inhabitants of other worlds.

(Kant, 1956: 468)

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The Lunarians make a brief appearance in the Transcendent Dialectic, as evidence that:

the objects of experience … are not things in themselves, but given only in experience, having no existence apart from and independently of experience. That there may be inhabitants in the Moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time.

(ibid.: 297)

Kant did not offer any guidelines on how experience could progress towards contact with the Lunarians but others were to follow him with more practical suggestions. In the 1820s the German mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss, devised a method of communicating the level of Earth intelligence to the Lunarians. One scheme involves mirrors which would reflect the Sun’s light back to the Lunarians. He also proposed that groves of pine trees should be planted in Siberia, laid out in the shape of squares on the sides of a right triangle. Inside the triangle wheat was to be grown to contrast with the dark green of the trees. Gauss anticipated that the Lunarians, peering through their telescopes, would be able to recognize that the patterns of the pine trees were intelligently designed and, by calculating that the sum of the square of the number of pine trees forming the legs of the right triangle was equal to the number of trees in the square of the hypotenuse, would be able to infer that human intelligence had mastered Pythagoras’s Theorem. A similar scheme was proposed by Joseph von Littrov, Director of the Vienna Observatory in 1840, who envisaged a 20-mile ditch in the Sahara Desert filled with kerosene and then set alight to function as a beacon. Neither scheme was implemented.

In 1941 Sir James Jeans suggested that searchlights be used to signal prime numbers to the Martians during the planet’s close approach to Earth. Other proposals to communicate with Martians have included the building of large mirrors to reflect flashing semaphore messages and similar arrangements of large identifiable black sheets that would flap rhythmically.

On 16 November 1974 Frank Drake sent a 3-minute message from the 305-metre radio telescope in Arecibo, which gave details of our position in the universe, our mathematics and several physical details of human terrestrials. The message was sent to M-13, the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules. This message did not elicit a reply, but it provoked a strong rebuke from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, in England, who argued that humanity had been exposed to threats from ETs with evil intention. This was a rather pointless protest as ordinary radio broadcasts are capable of giving away our location provided that they are 1 per cent stronger than the radio noise from the Sun. Each year the spreading waves of radio signals reach a further twenty stars.

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