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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 The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge.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.
I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
'Intellectual' used to be an admired quality in a leader.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Plus, all those conversations with The Doctor probably stimulated his thinking on the issue.
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"
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.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's a question I usually ask myself when the holidays kick in. The answer has still to be found.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
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.
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.
According to what studies specifically? The Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox are not fast friends. The former insists there should be life. The latter says we should already have seen it. Many attempts have been made to explain the latter in a way that doesn't contradict the former. We really don't know what the right answer is.
Honestly, I'm very much in opposition to the "follow the water" people. The argument goes, "everywhere that we find liquid water on Earth, we find life - so we just need to find liquid water elsewhere, and we should find life". Which I find to be patently absurd. It's a truism that anything life is made of, it has to be able to get, in some sort of reactive form. On Earth, water pretty much has to be the source for hydrogen, and hydrogen is one of the elements that make up all LAWKI (that is, CHONPS). That says absolutely nothing about whether water must be the source of hydrogen, or whether forms of life that don't use hydrogen are possible. It just says that life on Earth is well adapted to build itself out of the elements found on Earth. Well, duh, that's going to happen by definition.
The other related argument is that life appeared on Earth shortly after the planet cooled, so not only should life form wherever there is water, but it should do so quickly. You know, as if the seas as a whole simultaneously and spontaneously evolved life proto-cells across their breadth, rather than there existing some particular isolated location that happened to have the right conditions for life, which seems vastly more likely, and which the vast majority of abiogenesis theories call for. We do not know what that situation was, and can only speculate on it. But assuming that wherever you have liquid water you're going to have paired with it such a situation is such a huge unsupported leap of logic. And one thing we can say for certain about Earth's early seas is that they were nothing like today's; they were bright green, full of unreduced iron. Earth was a dramatically different place then.
Water is bloody everywhere in the universe. Liquid water not that much rarer. If you accept the "follow the water" peoples' ideas, than life should exist in almost every solar system, and on the surface in a good number. That's just turning the dial on the Drake Equation up to 11, and consequently, doing the same with the Fermi Paradox. Fermi Paradox solutions like "life evolving toward intelligence is rare" flies flat in the face of evolution, and "intelligence reaching sentience is rare" is way too much human hubris, insisting on some sort of magical Rubicon-crossing intelligence jump that sets us apart from other animals. In reality our problem-solving ability isn't so vastly greater than our nearest relatives; the main Rubicon that we've leaped across, the one thing that we do vastly better than our relatives, is communication - the ability to convey ideas to our fellow humans. And "communication" hardly seems like some sort of unevolvable barrier.
It seems much more likely to me that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is just that life is not a common occurrence, not something that just spontaneously and quickly generates wherever you have water; that life is rare, rare enough that cosmological distances keep us from encountering each other.
I'd also like to add that I think the chance of planetwide extinctions (especially before life is really tuned) is perhaps underrated. The more we learn of our neighbors - even here in our middle-of-nowhere location around our relatively tame star - the more we learn that they haven't always been as they are now. Venus, for example, appears to have once had seas of comparable scale to Earth. If the "follow the water" people are right, then life should have evolved there. But of course Venus hardly resembles Earth at all day. It's not even just the issue that Venus has lost the vast majority of its water; Venus's entire crust (with the possibility of some small exceptions) was resu
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
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?
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.
I can't take him seriously after he recruited Darleks to fight the Germans. There is a dark side to him if he teams up with a race that want to destroy the universe.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Churchill wasn't opposed to barbarous tranny, as long as it was coming from his own country.
Unfortunately, his position on shemales and ladyboys remains unknown.