An extraterrestrial or alien is any extraterrestrial lifeform; a lifeform that did not originate on Earth. The word extraterrestrial means "outside Earth". The first published use of extraterrestrial as a noun occurred in 1956, during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Extraterrestrials are a common theme in modern science-fiction, and also appeared in much earlier works such as the second-century parody True History by Lucian of Samosata. Gary Westfahl writes: History Pre-modern Cosmic pluralism, the assumption that there are many inhabited worlds beyond the human sphere predates modernity and the development of the heliocentric model and is common in mythologies worldwide. The 2nd century writer of satires, Lucian, in his True History claims to have visited the moon when his ship was sent up by a fountain, which was peopled and at war with the people of the Sun over colonisation of the Morning Star. Other worlds are depicted in such early works as the 10th-century Japanese narrative, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and the medieval Arabic The Adventures of Bulukiya (from the One Thousand and One Nights). Dante in his Divine Comedy sets the third part, Paradise amongst the planets where he meets the saints. Early modern The assumption of extraterrestrial life in the narrow sense (as opposed to generic cosmic pluralism) becomes possible with the development of the heliocentric understanding of the Solar System, and later the understanding of interstellar space, during the Early Modern period, and the topic was popular in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. In Johannes Kepler's Somnium, published in 1634, the character Duracotus is transported to the moon by demons. Even if much of the story is fantasy, the scientific facts about the moon and how the lunar environment has shaped its non-human inhabitants are science fiction. The didactic poet Henry More took up the classical theme of Cosmic pluralism of the Greek Democritus in "Democritus Platonissans, or an Essay Upon the Infinity of Worlds" (1647). With the new relative viewpoint that understood "our world's sunne / Becomes a starre elsewhere", More made the speculative leap to extrasolar planets, the frigid spheres that 'bout them fare; Which of themselves quite dead and barren are, But by the wakening warmth of kindly dayes, And the sweet dewie nights, in due course raise Long hidden shapes and life, to their great Maker's praise. The possibility of extraterrestrial life was a commonplace of