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 The Verge reports: Livio was "stunned" when he first saw the unpublished, 11-page essay on the existence of alien life, he tells The Verge.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