Discovered an essay by Winston Churchill on extraterrestrial life

Churchill banned the pilots of the Royal air force to tell about encounters with unidentified flying objects.

An article by Winston Churchill about the existence of extraterrestrial life found by scientists in the United States. Review essay the British Prime Minister during the Second world war published on Wednesday, February 15, in the journal the Nature.

The first version of an essay called “are we Alone in the Universe?” Churchill probably was written in 1939 for the newspaper News of The World. In the late 1950-ies during your stay at the Villa publisher emery Reeves politician has revised his work. In the 1980s Reeves wife gave the 11-page manuscript in the archive of the National Churchill Museum in the American city of Fulton, where it was kept all these years.

The essay of Churchill, as writes the edition, largely reflects the views of modern astrobiology. In their work, the former British Prime Minister relied on “the Copernican principle”, one of the tenets of which is that the universe is too vast to life on Earth was something unique.

Churchill was determined that a necessary condition for life is reproduction, and an important factor is the presence of water. He also described the term now known as the habitable zone close to other stars. The latter means temperature factor, and the need for the existence of gravity to form an atmosphere. Based on these prerequisites, according to Churchill, in the Solar system, besides Earth, life could arise only on Mars and Venus.

Speaking about life in other systems, the politician said that the Sun is “only one star in our galaxy, which contains several thousand million other” stars. He also came to the conclusion that the majority of exoplanets should have a suitable size for availability of water and the semblance of the atmosphere.

“Given the hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each of which contains billions of suns, chances are that there are a lot of planets whose conditions allow for life,” the article says Churchill.

In 2010, the UK national archives has declassified documents from which it became known that Winston Churchill banned the pilots of the Royal air force to tell about encounters with unidentified flying objects. This step was linked to the fear that the reports of UFOs can provoke panic in society.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (1874-1965) British politician and public figure, Prime Minister in 1940-45 and 1951-55.

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