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Winston Churchill on Aliens: 1939 Essay Discovered — Winston Churchill (shown here at his daughter's wedding in September 1935) wrote an essay on alien life in 1939 when Europe was on the brink of war, shortly before he became prime minister of the United Kingdom.
**Credit: Fox Photos / Stringer**

Winston Churchill was known for his leadership during World War II, but a newfound essay on alien life reveals another side of him, one that was deeply curious about the universe.

"I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures," he wrote in the newly uncovered essay, "or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time."

Besides being prime minister of the United Kingdom during the tumultuous years of World War II, the British statesman was also a prolific writer and proponent of science. In fact, he was the first prime minister to have a science advisor. Those traits converged in the newfound 11-page essay about the search for alien life, discovered at the Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. It was first written in 1939 and was slightly revised in the late 1950s. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

The museum's director, Timothy Riley, showed the document to astrophysicist Mario Livio, who described the work and Churchill's approach to science in an article published today (Feb. 15) in the journal Nature. Churchill's essay was titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?".

"I was amazed to see the title of this article, first of all," Livio, head of the Institute Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told Space.com. "And then I read it and was even more astonished, because I saw that this great politician is musing about a real scientific topic, an intriguing scientific topic, [and] he is reasoning about this in the same way that a scientist today would go about it."

Churchill was not a scientist, and when the politician composed the essay, Europe was on the brink of war, Livio said.

"And yet, at that time, he finds the time to contemplate such issues and think about things so clearly," Livio added.

Evaluating the likelihood of life

In the essay, Churchill first set out to define life, characterizing the most important quality as the ability to reproduce. He chose to consider "comparatively highly organized life," which Livio said is probably multicellular life. Churchill likely did this to avoid ambiguity for things like viruses, which are able to replicate but exhibit other characteristics that aren't terribly lifelike, Livio said.

Then, Churchill discussed where to look for life: in places with liquid water (or where liquid water can persist, which is what scientists now call the "habitable zone" around stars).

"Then, he says, OK, once we've defined life, what are the necessary ingredients for life to exist? And he identifies liquid water as one such ingredient," Livio said. "And that's exactly what we do today. Our searches for life in the universe today are primarily guided by liquid water."

In his essay, Churchill considered the solar system, deciding that only Mars and Venus could have fulfilled those conditions. The outer planets are too cold, Mercury is too hot on one side and too cold on the other, and the moon and asteroids have gravity too weak to trap the atmosphere, Livio wrote, summarizing Churchill's argument.

Then, Churchill discussed the possibility of planets outside the solar system — exoplanets — which had not yet been discovered. The model he considered, described by astrophysicist James Jean in 1917, predicted that planetary formation is very unlikely to occur. (The theory, which proved incorrect, described planets forming by the gas torn from a star when another star passes by it.)

"But the beautiful thing is, then he says, But wait! Maybe this theory is wrong! Why should we think that this theory is correct?" Livio said. Churchill added that the abundance of double stars suggests that planetary systems could form commonly.

In the article, Livio quoted Churchill's essay: "I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets." Churchill went on to posit that a large fraction of those planets would be the right size to keep water on their surface and maybe an atmosphere, and that some would be at the right distance from their stars to maintain a life-friendly temperature.

"This chain of logic is astounding, in my opinion, for a politician," Livio said. [SETI: All About the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Infographic)]

Churchill and science

Livio said Churchill saw value in science, but the statesman took a nuanced approach. He understood that science was necessary to win the war effort, but also established an atmosphere in which science was important in its own right, and he wanted it to be used to improve the world.

"As a result of that, in the 1950s, came all these great discoveries," Livio said, citing milestones like finding the structure of DNA and developing radio astronomy, which stemmed from work on radar. "Once you generate the framework and the infrastructure for science to thrive, then a variety of discoveries come."

But Churchill also emphasized that science should work to advance humanity, Livio said.

"Later in life, he also understood that one cannot do the science in what he would call a moral vacuum," Livio said. "You need to embed all the scientific research and discoveries also in the context of human values, and an understanding of the human condition."

Livio emphasized that today, science has serious problems to address, particularly regarding food resources, climate change and disease. Churchill's approach to science is necessary, Livio said.

"All of those [concerns] require serious scientific input, so there must be the mechanisms in place to get that scientific input, and the correct scientific input — which means science advisors at high levels, and involvement of scientists in a variety of decisions concerning some of those challenges," Livio said. "It certainly doesn't help to shun sciences; some of these problems can turn into disasters if nothing is done."

As for the likelihood of life on other planets, over the past 20 years, scientists have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars and have made large strides in determining these worlds' characteristics remotely. But researchers have yet to discover definitive signs of life elsewhere in the universe, or to visit other planets in person to hunt for life. However, Churchill didn't want to put bounds on what advancing science or technology might bring, Livio said.

"When he discussed the possibility of traveling to other planets and things like that, he says, well maybe this isn't possible today but, he says, 'It is rash to set limits to the progress of science,'" Livio said. "Things that are not possible today, you shouldn't think that they would not be possible in the future."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Black Holes are Even Stranger Than You Can Imagine

An artist’s impression of a Sun-like star close to a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole, with a mass of about 100 million times the mass of our sun. Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesser

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Our love of black holes continues to grow as our knowledge of these celestial bodies expands. The latest news is the discovery of a rare "middleweight" black hole, a relative newcomer to the black hole family.

We already knew that some black holes are just a few times the mass of our Sun, while others are more than a billion times as massive. But others with intermediate masses, such as the one 2,200 times the mass of our Sun recently discovered in the star cluster 47 Tucanae, are surprisingly elusive.

So what is it about black holes, these gravitational prisons that trap anything that gets too close to them, that captures the imagination of people of all ages and professions?

'Dark stars'

As far back as 1783, within the framework of Newtonian dynamics, the concept of "dark stars" with sufficiently high density that not even light can escape their gravitational pull had been advanced by the English philosopher and mathematician John Michell.

Almost immediately after Albert Einstein presented his theory of general relativity in 1915, which supplanted Newton's description of our Universe and revealed how space and time are intimately linked, fellow German Karl Schwarzschild and Dutchman Johannes Droste independently derived the new equations for a spherical or point mass.

Although at the time the issue was still something of a mathematical curiosity, over the ensuing quarter of a century nuclear physicists realised that sufficiently massive stars would collapse under their own weight to become these previously theorised black holes.

Their existence was eventually confirmed by astronomers using powerful telescopes, and more recently colliding black holes were the source of the gravitational waves detected with the LIGO instrumentation in the United States.

A dense object

The densities of such objects is mind-boggling. If our Sun were to become a black hole, it would need to collapse from its current size of 1.4 million km across to a diameter of less than 6km. Its average density within this "Schwarzschild radius" would be nearly 20 billion tonnes per cubic centimetre.

The increasing strength and pull of gravity as you get closer to a black hole can be dramatic.

On Earth, the strength of the gravitational pull holding you to its surface is roughly the same at your feet as it is at your head, which is a little bit farther away from the planet.

But near some black holes, the difference in gravitational pull from head to toe is so great that you would be pulled apart and stretched out on an atomic level, in a process referred to as spaghettification.

In 1958, the American physicist David Finkelstein was the first to realise the true nature of what has come to be called the "event horizon" of a black hole. He described this boundary around a black hole as the perfect unidirectional membrane.

It's an intangible surface encapsulating a sphere of no return. Once inside this sphere, the gravitational pull of the black hole is too great to escape – even for light.

In 1963, the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr solved the equations for the more realistic rotating black holes. These yielded closed time-like curves that permitted movement backwards through time.

While such strange solutions to the equations of general relativity first appeared in the 1949 work of Austrian-American logician Kurt Gödel, it is commonly thought that they must be a mathematical artefact yet to be explained away.

A video simulation of two black holes merging.

Black and white holes

In 1964, two Americans, the writer Ann Ewing and the theoretical physicist John Wheeler, introduced the term "black hole." Subsequently, in 1965, the Russian theoretical astrophysicist Igor Novikov introduced the term "white hole" to describe the hypothetical opposite of a black hole.

The argument was that if matter falls into a black hole, then perhaps it is spewed out into our universe from a white hole.

This idea is partly rooted in the mathematical concept known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Discovered (mathematically) in 1916 by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm, and re-introduced in 1935 by Einstein and the American-Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen, it was later termed a "wormhole" by Wheeler.

In 1962, Wheeler and the American physicist Robert Fuller explained why such wormholes would be unstable for transporting even a single photon across the same universe.

Fact and fiction

Not surprisingly, the idea of entering a (black hole) portal and re-emerging somewhere else in the universe – in space and/or time – has spawned countless science fiction stories, including Doctor Who, Stargate, Fringe, Farscape and Disney's Black Hole.

Ongoing productions can simply claim that their characters are travelling to a different or a parallel universe to our own. While it appears to be mathematically feasible, there is of course no physical evidence to support the existences of such universes.

But this is not to say that time travel, at least in a limited sense, is not real. When travelling at great speed, or perhaps falling into a black hole, the passage of time does slow down relative to that experienced by stationary observers.

Clocks flown quickly around the world have demonstrated this, displaying time lags in accordance with Einstein's theory of special relativity.

The 2014 movie Interstellar played on this effect around a black hole, thereby creating a sense of travelling forward in time for astronaut Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey).

Despite the strangely endearing name, the phrase "black hole" is perhaps somewhat misleading. It implies a hole in space-time through which matter will fall, as opposed to matter falling onto an incredibly dense object.

What actually exists within a black hole's event horizon is hotly debated. Attempts to understand this include the "fuzzball" picture from string theory, or descriptions of black holes in quantum gravity theories known as"spin foam networks" or "loop quantum gravity."

One thing that does seem certain is that black holes will continue to intrigue and fascinate us for some time yet."

Alister Graham, Professor of Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was published on Space.com.