John Adams and Extraterrestrial life

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second
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HERSCHEL AMONG THE STARS
President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel's new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extrater-restrial life, and the moral implications of there being a 'plurality of worlds. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his brother Jacob, touching on the speculations of European authors like Fontenelle and Huygens, but which he tended to avoid with his English contemporaries. Neither Herschel nor Caroline recorded exactly what was said, but it is clear from his own diaries that Adams would have put lively and unorthodox views: 'Astronomers tell us that not only all the Planets and Satellites in our Solar system, but all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Stars are inhabited ... If this is the case all Mankind are no more in comparison [with] the whole rational Creation of God, than a point in the orbit of Saturn.' Like the poet Shelley a generation later, Adams liked to press this argument one stage further. If astronomy discovered extraterrestrial civilisations, then surely the earth-based doctrines of Christian redemption became absurd, or at least mighty inconvenient for the Lord. 'I ask a Calvinist, whether he will subscribe to this alternative: EITHER God Almighty must assume the respective shapes of all these different Species, and suffer the penalties of their Crimes, in their stead; OR ELSE all these Beings must be consigned to everlasting Perdition?
Adams never forgot this spirited meeting with Herschel. Years later, in 1825, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, complaining of the orthodox Christian beliefs of most British scientists, and advising Jefferson not to hire them to teach at the University of Virginia, where he was Chancellor. Adams contrasted these scientists' attitudes with Herschel's untrammelled vision: 'They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschel's universe, came down to this little ball [planet earth], to be spit upon by the Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.' This argument would presumably have been satisfactorily concluded the following year, when both Adams and Jefferson died and went to meet the Great Principle. 
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Over the next decade Herschel's work began to be widely known by the younger generation of Romantic writers. Byron visited him at Slough in 1811, and viewed the stars through his telescope, which gave him an alarmingly religious experience: 'The Night is also a religious concern; and even more so, when I viewed the Moon and Stars through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds: Later Byron defended him-self against accusations of atheism. 'I did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of Man, I could be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated.
Coleridge seized on this idea in a late essay: 'Kepler and Newton, by substituting the idea of the Infinite — for the idea of a finite and determined world assumed in the Ptolemaic Astronomy — superseded and drove out the notion of one central point or body of the Universe. Finding a centre in every point of matter and an absolute circumference no-where, they explained at once the unity and the distinction that co-exist throughout the Creation by focal instead of central bodies. The attractive and restraining power of the sun or focal orb, in each particular system, supposing and resulting from an actual power, present in all and over all, throughout an indeterminable multitude of systems. And this, demonstrated as it has been by science, and verified by observation, we rightly name the true system of the heavens' — Church and State (1830). Hubble put this simply and beautifully: 'Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drifts through the summer air' — Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1936).
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With such images in his head, Keats left Clerkenwell at 6 a.m., shortly before autumn sunrise. The stars were still out as he crossed London Bridge making for his student lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, near Guy's. He noticed the planet Jupiter, very bright, setting over the Thames. The moment he got to his lodgings, he sat down and began to write, starting with the inspired line, 'Much have I travelled in the Realms of Gold ... This perfectly introduced two linked ideas, of thrilling exploration and gleaming brightness, which orchestrate the whole poem. Keats wrote so quickly that he was able to send a clean copy of the poem straight round to Cowden Clarke that same morning. Clarke remembered opening it at his breakfast table in Clerkenwell by 10 a.m. (a credit also to the postal system). He noticed the historical error — it was Balboa, not Cortez, who reached the Pacific but was thrilled by the beauty and originality of the sonnet. Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way. 127 Keats likens his own discovery of Homer's poetry to the experience of the great astronomer and the great explorer finding new worlds.
... Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with wond'ring eyes He stared at the Pacific — and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise —Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Both comparisons turn on moments of physical vision — watching, staring, looking with 'wondering eyes. (This was the original manuscript reading, although Keats later changed it to the more conventional 'eagle eyes'.) Physical vision — one might say scientific vision — brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geog-raphy of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. In the case of Herschel's sighting of Uranus, Keats's word 'swims' is brilliantly evocative, because of its sense of new life and movement.