Quoting Winston Churchill has always been something of a national pastime.
• If you’re going through hell, keep going.
• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
• Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
What hasn’t often been quoted is the essay he penned in 1939 titled “Are We Alone in the Universe?” That isn’t surprising, as the 11 typed pages were never published before being lost to the world for more than three decades.
Churchill, who served as British prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and then again from 1951 to 1955, updated his manuscript in the late 1950s. Nothing came of it, and eventually Wendy Reves, wife of Churchill’s publisher Emery Reves, passed the manuscript to the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Mo. There it gathered dust until last year, when the museum’s new director Timothy Riley discovered and handed it over to Israeli-American astrophysicist and author Mario Livio.
In an article published in this week’s science journal Nature, Livio examined the essay. The most striking takeaway is how prescient Churchill’s conclusions were. “One day, possibly even in the not very distant future, it may be possible to travel to the moon, or even to Venus or Mars,” he wrote 30 years before Neil Armstrong’s historic voyage.
His nuanced view of the potential for extraterrestrial life “mirrors many modern arguments in astrobiology,” most notably that in the ever-expanding vastness of the universe, such life is likely. As Livio wrote: In essence, he builds on the framework of the Copernican Principle — the idea that, given the vastness of the universe, it is hard to believe that humans on Earth represent something unique.
Perhaps Churchill’s most intuitive prediction, as Livio noted, was that of the habitable zone. After noting that “all living things of the type we know require water,” Churchill observed that the presence of water — thus the potential for life — likely requires a rocky planet at the right distance from a star to be “between a few degrees of frost and the boiling point of water.”
“He had a tremendous intellect,” Westminster College President Benjamin Ola Akande said. “Even though Great Britain was on the brink of war at the time, Churchill continually educated himself and wrote thought-provoking essays that demonstrated his leadership beyond government and military affairs.”
“Renaissance man that he was, Churchill was keenly interested in science,” Livio said. “For example, he was the first British prime minister to hire a science adviser and made the UK a friendly environment for science and scientists.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
