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 The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge.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.

Comments

It's good to be reminded

[pushing-robot]

'Intellectual' used to be an admired quality in a leader.

Re:It's good to be reminded

[FooAtWFU]

But these days - in America at least - intellectuals trained in the same classical tradition as Winston Churchill are derided as beholden to the white male patriarchy. Hell, even figures previously associated with high minded ideals and liberty like Thomas Jefferson are now considered personas non grata. Meanwhile, the typical modern university does its best to train Alinskyite radicals.

Of course intellectuals are disdained. Thought is dead.

Re:It's good to be reminded

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, apparently, the rest of the world.

Remember, Romanticism was a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment characterized by its emphasis on emotion and glorification of nature. Sounds a lot like the internet these days.

Re:Anthropological principle

[Plus1Entropy]

I think you mean the anthropic principle. It doesn't state that the Universe "tweaked" its laws for intelligent life to exist, as if this is some active on-going process. It just means that we can only exist in a Universe in which the laws of physics allow us to exist.

Would such an universe be left extremely vulnerable to few mad men who could destroy intelligent life at the touch of buttons or some cosmic phenomena destroying intelligent life on the only planet?

Absolutely, why not? The laws of physics allowed us to evolve, and those same laws of physics allow us to be wiped out by an asteroid, a nuclear war, a gamma ray burst, or a plague (man-made or otherwise). They are not mutually exclusive scenarios.

Re:SIR winston churchill !

[drinkypoo]

Tsss, no education!

I, for one, leave off the "sir" nonsense deliberately, as I do not give one whit for who your queen reveres. We got the right to ignore that crap when we kicked British arse.

And yet no link to the actual essay

[DrXym]

That neither link actually leads to the essay. The Verge link is basically regurgitated clickbait summary of the Nature link. Utterly redundant in and of itself.

The Nature article while more informative only provides a handful of selective quotes from the essay but still no link. Instead it frames the essay in the context of Churchill's interest in science. How about an actual link to the actual essay?

Re:H G Wells

[AmiMoJo]

I don't know why we keep falling for the "special relationship" line, we get screwed every time.