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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 The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge.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.
He also wrote:
"Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings -- nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?"
in 1924.
Anti-intellectualism in America is nothing new. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One thing which gets left out is ... I hate to say this but ... consciousness. We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works. I don't mean information processing, because eventually any robot will be able to do everything a human does, as it is just about having a machine that's processing inputs and converting those to behaviours.
No, the real mystery is why such a robot would even need to be sentient. There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines. We could go about performing human functions and communications all running our complex brains just as we are, just not sentient, not experiencing any of it. One human could say to another, "I love you" as simply a code for certain information which gets processed into various probabilities of scenarios for future survival, and so on. Even poetry can come down to that, given we're now starting to develop machines which can work with intuitive patterns.
So that leaves consciousness as a) totally irrelevant and b) the most core part of our existence as sentient experiencing humans, humans watching the movie of their lives.
A lot of people tend to dismiss consciousness as just a byproduct, but that's maybe just because it is so hard to study that any self respecting person stays well clear of it. But it is also known as the "hard problem" and it is so "hard" that some say we'll need to start thinking about consciousness as another law of the universe, along with the other fundamental laws. And that would eventually start to modify these "anthropic" principles in some way.
As for "gods" well, humans have always had very powerful imaginations, and we make stories, but that's a separate thing altogether, and those stories about identity and belonging are perhaps seen as survival strategies between groups, where rather than physically fight another group, you just reprogram them to act as if they are part of your group already, "owning" as it were, without destroying.
And even if one puts aside survival questions, and one assumes there may be an afterlife, it really is up for grabs what form that could take, as the possibilities are endless and in my mind, either you die and disappear in which case you don't know you're dead, or something else, which could be anything. Nobody knows. But I digress.
Back to the point, ideas like the anthropic principle tend to go a bit too far with their conclusions given that they take no account of consciousness and what part that plays in existence and the cosmos.
And inventing trillions of trillions of other universes as a way to explain why this one happened to be tuned just right for us, is hand-waving and as made up as any myth which was made up as an ad-hoc explanation. An explanation isn't more rigorous just because it avoids mentioning gods or turtles.
We don't know why matter was tuned just right, and we don't know what consciousness is, and we don't know if there is life out there. Although there's no reason to think that Earth is special. I mean, it is more like the naughty corner if anything, you get sent here and ignored until you learn to calm down and behave. (See, stories.)
If you were writing that hundreds of years ago, that's be a perfectly normal statement. Queen comes from Old English cwen (queen, woman, wife) - having originally been in the context of "wife (of a king)", and only later to refer only specifically to royals. It stems from the proto-germanic kwoeniz (wife), from PIE gwen (woman, wife), cognate of Greek gyne (woman, wife), Gaelic bean (woman), Sanskrit janis (woman), etc.
Lots of words related to women have changed over time, it's sort of weird. In Middle and Old English, woman was wif, which later became wife; the word "woman" comes from "wifman", or "woman-man", in the context of the gender-neutral usage of man that's been steadily dropped from English over the past half century (aka, more like "woman-person"). Wif still exists in English in a context closer to its original meaning in the word "midwife" - "woman who is with" (mid being a cognate of the Old Norse miðr (with), seen today in languages like Icelandic "með", Danish "med", etc)
Even "girl" has changed. "Gyrle" used to refer to babies only (more commonly female, but of either sex). Boys were "knave gyrles" and girls were "gay gyrles" (yeah, the latter term has changed a bit ;) ). The word "boy" existed at the time, but more often referred to a servant or commoner rather than being a generic term for "young male".
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
Ask Africa: has kicking out the Europeans helped? Who, among the Africans, has benefited from their departure? There seems to be no lack of savages in the continent. Cf. Congo. Or Rwanda. Or Nigeria. Or SA. All of which are various levels of fucked-up disaster. Best you can get is, maybe, Kenya, where there are still beggars everywhere (in the midst of an incredibly fertile land) and gates blocking the entry to the driveways of hotels in Nairobi - and that was before the mall catastrophe.