In 1892, a Berliner called Carl Goeke published a little book titled Die Sonne ist bewohnt. This translates as The Sun is Inhabited. In it, Goeke rejected suggestions our sun is a gaseous, superheated body. Accepting that it formed from the gravitational collapse of a vast dust cloud, he contrarily maintained that, as this nebula compacted, its core ignited, causing it to burn and rotate with unimaginable energy. The outward, centrifugal pressure of this flung matter outwards again, which, as it cooled, consolidated into a gigantic hollow sphere. The superhot gases trapped inside thereafter congealed into petroleum and gasoline, which, secreting and belching from the equator, pooled into gigantic, white-hot, burning oceans spilling across the sun’s outward surface. Hence, the incandescence emitted from our sun.

Nevertheless, Goeke assures us that the star’s poles are cool enough to be hospitable cradles of life. Not a fan of Darwin’s theory of evolution by common descent, Goeke believed that complex organisms spontaneously popped out of the primeval slime oozing and sluicing over the spinning star’s polar regions. Goeke depicted the solarian natal scene:

…in the region of the poles, life and vegetation now emerge; a tropical region is formed [at the poles], plants, animals, and humans find their place; in the still shallow waters, small crabs and star-shaped little living beings arise; in the muddy depths, saurian stir; on the landmasses, everything on the land and in the mud takes on the largest forms, the great mammoth beasts arise, whose descendants we still see today in the elephants.

Goeke also singles out “whales” and “seals” as solar polar denizens. It appears that he wasn’t just imagining the sun as habitable, but superhabitable.

Given the maturation of spectroscopy and thermodynamics, scientists had, by the late 1800s, begun confirming that our sun’s surface is roughly 5,500°C. That is, a bit hot for organic life. Accordingly, Goeke’s contemporaries dismissed his ideas.

Nevertheless, peculiarly, he was not alone. Even mainstream scientists of his own time, such as Anglo-German biochemist William Preyer, argued that suns themselves are alive: representing “glowing organisms whose breath may perhaps be shining vapor, whose blood may be flowing metal, and whose food may perhaps be meteorites”.

Indeed, Goeke was only the last of a long line of thinkers and writers who maintained that the surfaces of suns are bursting with life, whether exotic or familiar. For generations prior, it wasn’t just oddballs and outsiders that held that stars are inhabited. In fact, the view was mainstream. In the 1850s, François Arago, Director of the Paris Observatory, announced that our sun is populated with “beings organized in a manner analogous to those which populate our globe”. Around the same time, the Belgian astronomer Jean-Baptiste Liagre claimed the sun is a “majestic abode”, filled with “organized beings” of admirable “perfection”. Several years earlier, in 1854, the celebrated Scottish physicist David Brewster agreed that stars are the abode of “the highest orders of intelligence”. Carl Friedrich Gauss, celebrated as one of history’s most insightful mathematicians, reportedly also affirmed there must be “conscious life” on solar surfaces. (He admitted they could be “only very tiny creatures”, on account of the overwhelming gravity.)

Indeed, the idea has a venerable pedigree. Around 1440, the German theologian Nicolaus Cusa, in one of the first recognizably modern explorations of the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, insisted upon the existence of “solar beings”. Who, of course, are “bright and enlightened”. Later, in 1714, English priest Tobias Swinden published a book insisting that “the FIRE OF HELL is not metaphorical, but real”. Swinden reasoned that all the myriad demons and souls of the damned couldn’t fit within the volume of “the Little Ball of the Earth”. So, where are they? In the Sun, of course. Swinden announced sunspots are chasms filled with chained demons.

By the 1720s, scientists dismissed the fancies of those assuming suns “to be Hells”, but continued pronouncing there are “beings” who “act” and “think” in “the very centre, as well as on the surface of the sun”. “Who would doubt their existence?”, pronounced respected German astronomer Johann Bode in 1776. Not longer after, William Herschel, one of the most influential astronomers in the field’s history, concurred that, though the sun may not be “fit place for the punishment of the wicked”, he deemed it almost certainly is infested with rational dwellers. His son, another reputed astronomer, later speculated that features like sunspots might themselves be “organisms”.

In the 1790s, Herschel senior had supposed that the incandescence we see is just an opaque, burning cloud-layer surrounding a cool globe. Sunspots represent intermittent holes in this thick atmosphere, allowing us to spy inward and the solarians to spy outward.

One later commentator sarcastically quipped:

Poor Sonnenmenschen! They would be denied the opportunity to gaze into the open cosmos; a hot, luminous cloud-layer constantly hovering above their heads, and only from time to time, during maximum sunspot activity, can they let their longing gaze wander through [these] openings to marvel at the fact there are, also, other stars out there.

Such views, sincerely held by serious scientists, strike us now as absurd, even stupid. But what can the history of stupidity teach us about its future? Prominent philosophers, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, have argued that stupidity is not just an intellectual failing, but also a moral one. In other words, that it is a vice. In the Holocaust’s wake, Hannah Arendt also famously argued for the deadly dangerousness of “thoughtlessness”.

As a wider tendency, many seem to assume that stupidity is flatly the opposite of intelligence or, at least, intelligence’s absence. But stupidity comes in many forms. There is the stupidity that is evil; there is the stupidity that is banal; but there is also the stupidity that we can grow from. You cannot become right without first being wrong after all. In fact, error is a condition of correction. This way, folly is the path to insight, unavoidably so.

The history of ideas is a history of errors. Particularly so, when it comes to ideas about the future and the wider cosmos, as it exists, beyond human experience. In the dawning years of the 1800s, Thomas Jefferson famously thought that Westward expansion of Europeans through the Americas would take many generations, proceeding only fittingly and gradually. In reality, the entire continent was settled in just a few decades. When he sent Lewis and Clark westward, in 1804, to explore this vast territory, Jefferson ordered them to “observe the animals” – “especially those not known in the United States”, even more so any “deemed rare or extinct”.

This was because Jefferson rejected rapidly building fossil evidence that certain organisms had been lost from the Earth, never to return. He found the prospect morally repugnant, so concluded it was naturally impossible. Why would divinity paint a canvas of creatures, bright and beautiful, only to thereafter poke permanent holes in it? So, as the scientific community came around to the notion of extinction, Jefferson, late into life, maintained that Mastodon and Megalonyx will eventually be found stomping around in the Wild West.

Aside from hollow suns, the 1800s saw serious scientists continue staking their claim that Earth itself has a similar structure. In 1829, Sir John Leslie, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, argued that, unless the planet’s interior was largely void, the density of matter at the core would be physically infeasible. Thus, it must be hollow, yet, since “absolute void” is inadmissible, he argued this “vast subterranean cavity must be filled with some diffusive medium [of] astonishing […] repulsion”. Leslie duly elected luminescence for the job, speculating upon an ongoing explosion of “LIGHT” propping up our brittle crust.

Not long after that, in 1833, English science writer John Narrien proudly pronounced that, in astronomy, “human ingenuity” will, “in future”, only be “able to accomplish little more than an improvement in the means of making observations, or in the analysis by which the rules of computation are investigated”. Within a quarter of a century, spectroscopy made bodies lightyears distant amenable to chemical analysis.

Seven decades later, physicists and astronomers again began feeling smug, proclaiming their field was “wonderfully complete”: that all key laws had been uncovered, unveiling the matrix within which “all physical phenomena must forever fit”. They, again, believed all “future progress” must involve finer-grained improvements of preestablished theories.

But then Curie and Einstein happened: unleashing radioactivity and relativity, respectively. It became obvious the Victorian physicists “had taken themselves a little too seriously”, boasting off their “all-inclusive set of laws”. The above judgement came, in 1927, from Nobel-winner Robert Milikan, who the afterward himself proudly professed of subatomic energy that, should it be tapped, it might:

…be sufficient to keep the corner peanut and pop-corn man going, on a few street corners of our larger towns, for a long time yet to come, but that is all.

Indeed, other luminaries of his generation, such as J.B.S. Haldane, had, two years earlier, similarly doubted “the commercial possibility” of nuclear power. The list of smart people who dismissed aeronautics is well-known. A generation prior, leading scientists, such as John Tyndall, were confidently auguring that – in the powering of advanced economies – they foresaw “no prospect of any substitute being found for coal”.

Some follies are comical and quixotic. Look to the French socialist Charles Fournier who, in the early 1800s, argued that humanity’s onslaught of Promethean progress might bring “the North Pole under full cultivation”, by melting icecaps with artificial “light and heat”. He also claimed that this process would some how turn the planet’s briny seawater into delectable lemonade. Fournier also foresaw a bioengineered future wherein predators, like “lions” and “crocodiles”, have transmogrified into pacificist “anti-lions” and “anti-crocodiles”. These, he thought, might be employed as steeds that will replace railways.

In reaction, his protégé Auguste Comte, celebrated as the founder of modern sociology, envisioned a future wherein humans teach cows how to be carnivorous. Disagreeing with his forerunner, Comte saw active carnivorism – not herbivorous passivity – as the true apotheosis of dignity and progress.

Other errors are serendipitous. Based on Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, which held that luminosity consists of miniscule, discrete particles, the English rector John Michell, in 1783, predicted the existence of black holes. He reasoned that there might be stars with enough mass that their gravitational pull would prevent all particles of light from escaping – such that, in Michell’s words, “we could have no information from sight”. Several years after, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace predicted something similar on similar grounds. The corpuscular theory of light is wrong, but it fortuitously coaxed these thinkers towards predicting some of contemporary astronomy’s most exotic objects.

Other follies are downright pernicious and evil. Take, for example, the genocidal ideas of the Russian rocket scientist and cosmist visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He subscribed to an idea of materialist metempsychosis. That is, if our consciousness can be reduced to our constituent parts – down to the atoms – then, when they decomposed and are eventually reconstituted into a new organism, part of us is resurrected and continues within that organism. So, for “egoistic” reasons, Tsiolkovsky recommended the elimination, from Earth, of every “weak, unhappy, stupid, sick, or crippled person”. Then, he could feel secure:

Then I will not be afraid of being reborn in the image [of] a man of a pitiful race, in the image of a sick, crippled, idiot.

There are some ignorances that, in their malignance, are simply unforgivable. They will remain insuperably evil; but they still need to be remembered. Many moments of malignancy and smallness of mind prove indigestible to any easy narrative of learning and improvement, just as in our own lives we can make mistakes that – rightfully – we never, ever forgive ourselves for. But there are also many errors of the past that are forgivable in the sense that we now see farther because of them.

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in 1802, wrote that the “Child is father of the Man”. Better put, the child is parent of the adult. I take this to mean that competence is only arrived at through the path of the neophyte, alongside all the incompetence that entails.

We can say that we aren’t merely passive product of happenstance, because, through our trials and tribulations, we actively make ourselves who we are. Only by over coming error, and demonstrating that we are liable to jettison inconsistent beliefs when they are unveiled to us, do we earn the ability to say our opinions and values, at least in part, our own. Otherwise, their origin might as well be arbitrary. But this takes time, for no one is born wise, which is why the adult requires the tutelage of the child. Insight doesn’t hit its mark immediately, a wise philosopher once said, as if shot out of a pistol.

Part of this, unavoidably, requires tarrying with errancy. That is, it involves integrating our past follies, acknowledging they were – and thus remain – also our own. No one chooses the conditions of their birth, nor the contingencies of their upbringing, nor the attitudes thrust upon them, rightly or wrongly, but through affirming some aspects and wilfully expunging others, we become self- fashioning: transmuting the unwilled into the willed, giving contingency the shape of necessity.

Perhaps the same can be said to apply to the transforming worldviews of human communities: as they compile experience, chronicle errors, and converse with each other, in and across the generations, whilst time meanders on. Looked at in intergenerational terms, it is not so much about what our predecessors, from their perspective, failed to grasp, but what, by their lights, they enabled us to arrive at.

This way, when it comes to the future of the vice that is folly, we must acknowledge we are also undeniably being cretinous (in ways we cannot yet see), and will have failed in the eyes of the future (in ways we cannot yet anticipate), but we are, we must hope, thereby making it possible for them to see wider and to act better. When we forgive the past for their fatuities and mistakes we are simultaneously supplicating the future to show us magnanimity in turn.

So, the history should not teach us to be circumspect: precisely the opposite. Bolder ruins sometimes provide better foundations. We must avoid the banality of evil, it is absolutely true. But the history and future of stupidity might, this way, coax us towards a cautious praise of folly. Desiderius Erasmus was being no fool, perhaps, when – half a millennium ago – he said folly is the “seedplot and source of our existence”. At the very least, we must confess that it is unavoidable.

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