Voltaire's Aliens Discovered Microscopic Whale

In his 1752 science-fiction novella Micromegas, French philosopher and satirist Voltaire imagined a giant alien from a planet orbiting Sirius who left home after a court banished him for 800 years. Micromegas traveled to Saturn, befriended the much smaller but still gigantic secretary of its academy, and brought him on a journey to Earth. When the Saturnian declared the apparently empty lifeless planet, Micromegas rejected his hasty conclusion and fashioned a magnifying glass from a diamond in his necklace. Through it, he discovered a "microscopic" whale in the Baltic Sea and later a ship filled with human philosophers.

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