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Winston Churchill’s search for ET revealed in forgotten essay
FEBRUARY 16, 20172:13PM
AS BRITAIN entered World War II to halt the spread of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill had something else important on his mind: the existence of aliens.
The iconic leader who led the English empire as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 dedicated a great deal of energy to theorising about extraterrestrial life, it’s been revealed by a lost essay from 1939.
Such was Churchill’s belief in intelligent life outside our planet, that in the 1950s he ordered a suspected UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent “mass panic”.
Excerpts from his essay Are We Alone in the Universe? were brought to light this week when they were published in the science journal Nature.
The 11-page essay reveals the man known as Winnie was the among the first to theorise about other regions of the Universe in which conditions may be conducive to harbouring life.
“I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets,” Churchill wrote.
There must be many other planets, he concluded, of “the right size to keep ... water and possibly an atmosphere”, and “at the proper distance from their parent sun to maintain a suitable temperature.”This later became known as a star’s “habitable zone” or, more colloquially, the “Goldilocks Zone”.
The hunt for potentially habitable planets elsewhere in the universe began decades after Churchill’s musings on the topic.
And now, thanks to the work of NASA’s Kepler Telescope, astronomers have identified 216 planets believed to sit in habitable orbits around their parent stars.
Stargazing may not be what Winston Churchill is best remembered for but the essay demonstrates his scientific acumen, six decades after he penned it, experts said.
Astrophysicist Mario Livio who first laid hands upon the document last year at the US National Churchill Museum in Missouri, said the writing proved the statesman had powers of reasoning “like a scientist”.
“The most amazing thing is that he started this essay when Europe was on the brink of war and there he is, musing about a question about a scientific topic that is really a question out of curiosity,” he said.
Churchill first drafted the paper in 1939, when Europe was on the brink of war, and revised it in the late 1950s. It’s believed the work has never been published or subjected to scientific or academic scrutiny.
He wrote essays and articles in the 1920s and 1930s on topics including evolution, cell biology and fusion power.
As a politician, he regularly consulted scientists and was the first British PM to employ a science adviser, according to Livio.
“At a time when a number of today’s politicians shun science, I find it moving to recall a leader who engaged with it so profoundly,” Mr Livio wrote in Nature.
— With AFP
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