Pedro Lilienfeld

A personal synthesis The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me Blaise Pascal Where are They? Enrico Fermi Introduction The subject of “aliens”, i.e., beings elsewhere in our universe[1], has captivated my imagination ever since I read Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon, at the…

Background This essay is the sequel to the one entitled “From Aristarchus to Hubble, Humanity’s Quest to Comprehend the Cosmos” and will attempt to cover the century from the 1920s to today in the fields of astronomy, space exploration, astrobiology, astrophysics and cosmology. We will start by reviewing the state of affairs at the waning…

Humanity’s Quest to Comprehend the Cosmos Introduction This is a written complement to a set of slides presented at a class with the above title given in October of 2025 within the framework of the Lexington Community Education. These slides follow this writing (or click here to view them immediately). The contents of this class…

Pedro Lilienfeld Let the higher philosophy reflect, I repeat, and glance backwardto some extent. How far has the knowledge of nature progressed,how much is left, and what may the men of the future expect? Johannes Kepler, 1610 Introduction (written 2026) In the early 2000s I was asked to write a chapter on the history of…