… can you determine if intex exist by sitting alone in your room contemplating infinity?

Conundrum One

The first thinkers to ponder the existence of other worlds fell into two opposing camps. On one side stood the world-mongers. They believed there are infinite living worlds in the cosmos. On the other side ranged the one-worlders. They believed in all the universe abides a single world. Our world.

More than two and a half thousand years ago in Greece, Democritus and Leucippus first contemplated the possibility that Earth might not be the only living orb in the heavens. Epicurus developed their world-mongering ideas further, writing:

There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours, for the atoms are infinite in number and are borne out far into infinite space. The atoms cannot be used up in one world or a limited number of worlds, so there exists no obstacle to an infinite number of worlds. We must believe that in other worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world.

Epicurus believed in an infinite universe because he believed in infinite atoms. He did not countenance faith in a Maker, some omnipotent hand willfully guiding the configuration of matter. Rather, Epicurus credited the blind and palsied hand of Chaos. He concluded that infinite atoms propelled by chance will produce infinite configurations, and because one of these configurations—Earth—produced sentient beings, there must be an infinite number of other sentience-harboring worlds, the same way we would expect to find an infinite number of romantic sonnets within an infinitely randomized text.[1]

The math-sotted Pythagorean mystics also endorsed Epicurus’ Doctrine of Infinite Worlds. One Pythagorean asserted that “the moon is terraneous, is inhabited as our earth is, and contains animals of a larger size and plants of a rarer beauty than our globe affords. The animals in their virtue and energy are fifteen degrees superior to ours, emit nothing excrementitious, and the days are fifteen times longer.”

Other sages voiced opposing contentions. The most emphatic assault on the Doctrine of Infinite Worlds was led by Plato and Aristotle, heavyweight champions of Greek cogitation. Neither man believed in the existence of atoms nor the existence of infinity. Plato declared that “there is and ever will be one only-begotten and created heaven.” By heaven, he meant the Earth. Plato’s argument:

(1) There is only one Maker.

(2) The Maker knows perfection, an Eternal Oneness beyond space and time.

(3) The Maker would therefore make a world that is the most perfect imitation possible of the Eternal Oneness, which means he would make a single world because if there was more than one world then such a state of affairs would be a less-than-perfect imitation of the Eternal Oneness.

Leveraging his reputation as the greatest physicist of the ancient world, Aristotle attempted to ground the One World Doctrine in state-of-the-art physics. Aristotle believed that the fundamental elements of the universe were not atoms, but earth, water, air, and fire. Earth and water always move downwards toward the center of the Earth, Aristotle observed, while air and fire move upwards away from the Earth. If there was another world, contended Aristotle, it must be comprised of the same four elements, but then its own earth and water would be pulled towards the Earth ripping the pretender world apart.

Though Aristotle’s understanding of gravity was tenuous, as far as the academic community was concerned he and Plato soundly defeated Epicurus in a first-round knockout. For the next two millennia, Western scholars nearly exclusively embraced the One World Doctrine, especially European advocates of a One God Doctrine centered on a god who redeemed souls through the blood sacrifice of his mortal son. As late as 1699, when the fledgling generation of telescope-wielding astronomers began to murmur about hunting down other bepopulate globes in an unexpectedly voluminous universe, a Christian one-worlder shot them down:

THESE World-Mongers are always objecting to the improbability of GOD's framing so many vast and Glorious Bodies only for the sake of this Earth… they that argue thus seem to measure Things by their Bulk, which is a false way of Reasoning: There is more Beauty and Contrivance in the Structure of a Human Body, than there is in the Glorious Body of the Sun; and more Perfection in one Rational Immaterial Soul, than in the whole Mass of Matter, be it ever so bulky.

Though the Before-the-Common-Era conjectures of Epicurus and other world-mongering Greeks cannot be classified as intex theory, they might represent the earliest rudimentary precursor of intex theory, the Greek philosopher sitting alone in his room pondering infinity and concluding that interstellar xenomorphs must exist[2].

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[1] Epicurus’s leading disciple, Metrodorus of Chios, summed up Epicurus’ Doctrine of Infinite Worlds: “It would be strange if a single ear of corn grew in a vast plain or there was only one world in an infinite universe.”

[2] The key step of intex theory, absent from all Greek philosophizing, is moving from a theoretical proof of their existence to a method for physically summoning them, right here, right now.