Winston Churchill’s essay on alien life found

Seems Churchill could be classed as a modern thinker in a sense, influenced by science & quite possibly by his friend physicist Frederick Lindemann.

Churchill wrote an essay in 1939 'Are We Alone in space?' later revising it lightly & title-wise to 'Are We Alone in the Universe?' in the 1950's.

Mario Livio has written an article for nature.com about the essay.


Link is here www.nature.com...
additinal link to a BBC article is here www.bbc.co.uk...

“Churchill sees great opportunity for exploration in the Solar System.” Mario Livio nature.com

Sorry that I haven't much context to add I'm not really a thread writer, If someone wants to do a proper thread I have no problem with this thread been deleted.
Just wanted someone to to see this info so they could maybe do a better thread!

a reply to: Obsidian303

He penned the first draft, perhaps for London's News of the World Sunday newspaper, in 1939 — when Europe was on the brink of war. He revised it lightly in the late 1950s while staying in the south of France at the villa of his publisher, Emery Reves...

...

Churchill began his essay not long after the 1938 US broadcast of the radio drama The War of The Worlds (an adaptation of H. G. Wells's 1898 story) had generated 'Mars fever' in the media. Speculation over the existence of life on the red planet had been going on since the late nineteenth century. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described seeing linear marks on Mars (canali; mistranslated as canals) that were thought to be constructed by some civilization. These turned out to be optical illusions but the idea of Martians stuck.

Source: Nature article cited

That is the background of it's origins.

The rest of the Nature article is Mario Livio's opinion on what he has read.

The document was uncovered in the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, by the institution's new director Timothy Riley. Mr Riley then passed it to the Israeli astrophysicist and author Mario Livio who describes the contents in the latest issue of Nature journal.

Source: BBC article cited

Wish they had the actual article to read! 11 pages with a fairly well reasoned argument that still causes ink to be spilled today!

Here is an example of some electronic ink spilled here on ATS: Did Churchill and Eisenhower cover up UFO encounter?.

Because it is fun to read the older threads!

I really like what Churchill said to MIT (again, from Nature)...

If, with all the resources of modern science, we find ourselves unable to avert world famine, we shall all be to blame.

Cool find!