The Dominican monk was born in Nola in 1548, in what was then the Kingdom of Naples in Magna Graecia. He was imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition for seven years, before they burned him at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.2 His crime? Among a long list of other heresies, proclaiming the “gospel of infinity” that proposed the existence of multiple earths orbiting multiple suns across the endless expanse of the cosmos.3 Earths that might contain other forms of human life, dethroning our species as God’s favorite. Four hundred years ahead of his time, the martyr for free thinking somehow
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