The popular politician of Great Britain also devoted his free time to such unusual things as reasoning about life outside our planet. Many of the politician’s thoughts seem too modern for the times of his life.
The manuscript authored by Winston Churchill was found by a group of researchers by chance. In his writings, the politician presents his thoughts on extraterrestrial life. The Nature magazine even managed to publish a review of the prime minister’s work.
“Are we alone in the universe?”
An eleven-page essay entitled “Are we alone in the universe?” has been in the storage of the Premier’s Museum for a long time. The museum collection was replenished with this copy in the 1980s, when one of the private owners handed it over. Until May of last year, the manuscript was not even mentioned.
The fate of the essay is very long. The first version of the works was written in 1939, after which Churchill did not touch on this topic for a long time. But in the 1950s he returned to this work again, rewriting it in a new version with additions. In this form, the essay was given to Emery Reeves, a friend of the British prime minister.
It seems surprising to many that in his judgments Churchill often agrees with modern xenobiologists. The work is based on such ideas as the vastness of the universe, the fundamental role of water in the origin of life, the relationship of gravity, temperature and resources to form a possible habitat. Based on these requirements, Churchill concluded that Mars and Venus may well be planets inhabited by life forms.
At the same time, the Prime minister notes that the vastness of the Universe makes the number of planets on which life could have originated infinite. At the same time, our planet is not unique in the universal plan and its role for the whole Universe is not particularly important.
