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posted by on Thursday February 16 2017, @06:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-minded dept.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38985425

A newly unearthed essay by Winston Churchill reveals he was open to the possibility of life on other planets.

In 1939, the year World War Two broke out, Churchill penned a popular science article in which he mused about the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life.

The 11-page typed draft, probably intended for a newspaper, was updated in the 1950s but never published.

[...] More than 50 years before the discovery of exoplanets, he considered the likelihood that other stars would host planets, concluding that a large fraction of these distant worlds "will be the right size to keep on their surface water and possibly an atmosphere of some sort". He also surmised that some would be "at the proper distance from their parent sun to maintain a suitable temperature".

Churchill also outlined what scientists now describe as the "habitable" or "Goldilocks" zone - the narrow region around a star where it is neither too hot nor too cold for life.

[...] In an apparent reference to the troubling events unfolding in Europe, Churchill wrote: "I for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time."

Also at Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/winston-churchill-s-essay-on-alien-life-found-1.21467


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