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Lost Winston Churchill Essay Reveals His Thoughts On Alien Life (theverge.com)
"A newly discovered essay by Winston Churchill shows that the British statesman gave a lot of thought to the existential question that has inspired years of scientific research and blockbuster movies: are we alone in the University?" reports The Verge. "The essay was drafted in the 1930s, but unearthed in a museum in Missouri last year." Astrophysicist Mario Livio was the first scientist to analyze the article and has published his comments in the journal Nature. The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge. The astrophysicist was visiting Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, for a talk last year, when he was approached by Timothy Riley, the director of Fulton's US National Churchill Museum. Riley showed him the essay, titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?" In the essay, Churchill reasons that we can't possibly be alone in the Universe -- and that many other Suns will likely have many other planets that could harbor life. Because of how enormously distant these extrasolar planets are, we may never know if they "house living creatures, or even plants," Churchill concludes. He wrote this decades before exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s; hundreds have since been detected. What's impressive about the essay is the way Churchill approaches the existential and scientific question of whether life exists on other planets, Livio says. Churchill's reasoning mirrors extremely well the way scientists think about this problem today. The British leader also talks about several theories that still guide the search for alien life, Livio says. For example, he notes that water is the key ingredient for life on Earth, and so finding water on other planets could mean finding life there. Churchill also notes that life can only survive in regions "between a few degrees of frost and the boiling point of water" -- what today we call the habitable zone, the region around a star that is neither too hot or too cold, so that liquid water may exist on the planet's surface.
The Winston Churchill connection to H G Wells was well known.
The why of Frederick Lindermann who was liked over a lot of other staff and the design of the British nuclear project.
Lindermann sent Churchill a book on nuclear physics in 1926 and gave a talk that ensured Churchill was ready for nuclear issues.
H G Wells was just one of the people Churchill kept in contact given the interest in The World Set Free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
So Churchill had been reading and meeting a lot of interesting people over many decades. Given the early contact with Wells and the topics in his books,
Churchill was much more ready for nuclear e.g. the work of Frederick Soddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and space topics.
That later interest in science, nuclear weapons was what saved the UK's nuclear weapons design work from the USA.
The "other planets" question would have been talked about a lot given the interest in H G Wells.
What can political leaders learn from this? Read a lot, be interesting and talk a lot to the best minds of your generation.
Find the scientist who can speak about emerging topics and who can hold a conversation. The best scientists to work on any project are easy to find later on.
Never trust another nation with your own science, they will not share or give back.
That allowed the UK to be ready for a nuclear future.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The western, romanticized image of Churchill is of the stoic rock that beat the Nazis in WWII, bravely leading the British people to oppose fascism while America dithered.
The rest of his bio is rounded out by his fond nostalgia for shooting "savages" in Africa - i.e. blacks not yet subjugated by European colonialism. And the post WWII crushing of Kenya's rebellion against British rule, where you'd have a hard time looking at the treatment of prisoners and thinking you weren't hearing descriptions of a Nazi concentration camp. Shit like shoving sand in anuses with metal rods, crushing men's testicles and shoving glass into women's vaginas. "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" was a real knee-slapper, too.
Churchill wasn't opposed to barbarous tranny, as long as it was coming from his own country.
Well, it might a be a slightly garbled statement of the Strong Anthropic Principle, which posits that in some kind of deterministic way, the laws of nature are fashioned to ensure that intelligent life (specifically, us) will result. Personally, I find that slightly presumptuous.
The Weak Anthropic Principle, however, posits that the laws of nature are what they are, and intelligent life (specifically, us) is simply the serendipitous by-product of the way that things happen to be. In a universe of this size, the probability that such an event might happen at least once, somewhere, must be close to 1, one might think.
I think the difference is how deterministic you think the mechanics of the universe are, and how important we are within that situation.
Personally, I'm an agnostic atheist, which brings me to the Weak side, but even that doesn't deny the existence of a non-interventionist God. Take your pick.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
I don't have an opinion on this yet, because the only way it's come to my attention is through a highly biased source (you).
However I see one red flag straight away. Headline "Yale Students Demand English Department Stop Teaching White Male Poets".
Actual quote: "It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors."
You just conflated "ban teaching of white poets" with "we don't want ONLY white poets".
Did you conflate the two on purpose because your arguments are so weak as to only be applicable to straw men, or did you conflate the two because you're stupid and incapable of nuanced thought? Inquiring minds want to know.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That neither link actually leads to the essay.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38985425
Dr Livio told BBC News that there were no firm plans to publish the article because of issues surrounding the copyright. However, he said the Churchill Museum was working to resolve these so that the historically important essay can eventually see the light of day.
They're DEMANDING that "Major English Poets" not be taught at all - by the university English Literature department - because they're white Europeans.
Are you unaware that "Major English Poets" is the name of a series of classes? And that those classes are a requirement for all students? (Citation)
So they're not demanding the removal of all major English poets as crybaby snowflakes like you seem to think, they just seem to want that series of classes replaced with something more diverse. Something which could include Shakespeare but _also_ non-Europeans. (Or maybe they'd be okay with just eliminating "Major English Poets" as a singular requirement and allowing students to pick from a diverse set of literature classes to fulfill their requirement instead.)
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