Churchill believed in aliens – what a wise guy
WE shall f igh t on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We will explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Obviously that isn’t what Winston Churchill said – not all of it. The last wee bit is the unforgettable Star Trek opening speech of Captain James T Kirk, slayer of Klingons, lover of green alien women and of the split infinitive. But now I know that Britain’s iconic wartime leader believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, I have a somewhat changed attitude to the most quotable politician in the history of the world.
I know. Churchill believed in aliens. Some 50 years before the discovery of a planet outwith our solar system, the pol- itician and Nobel Prize-winning writer scribed an essay espousing the notion that: “The sun is merely one star in our galaxy. I am not conceited enough to think that my sun is the only one surrounded by a family of planets.” This was astonishingly forward-thinking for 1939 – the year Churchill penned this article. He continued: “With hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible.” The essay had been lost before being discovered in the US National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, by astrophysicist and author Dr Mario Livio. It has since been published in the science journal Nature.
I’ve always loved the words of Churchill. No doubt, given his various peccadilloes and predilections, he wouldn’t have lasted a moment under the scrutiny of today’s invasive press but his insight, his pithy ability to sum up a situation, was both erudite and hilarious.
Yet these newly uncovered ideas reveal another side of the great man. He was by no means a scientist but he was undoubtedly a thinker.
At the present time we are witnessing the battle of ideas between those who believe and accept science and those who challenge it. The current Tory government decided to abolish the Department of Energy and Climate Change last year, a decision campaigners described as “terrible”, “deeply worrying” and “plain stupid”. Newly-appointed Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsom’s first question to her officials was: “Is climate change real?” Meanwhile, President Trump has nominated Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environment Protection Agency. This is a man who has sued the agency on several occasions (with a court case still active). Then there’s the alt-right offering “alternative facts”, trying to reperceive long-accepted wisdoms and denying the change of our climate.
Yet there was Winston Churchill in the year war broke out, prepared to accept in a somewhat prescient fashion, the possibilities of the future, proving that politicians can embrace science.
Our world is a mess. The food indus- try drives farming rather than farmers supplying food. The planet seems unable to agree to any sort of meaningful policy when it comes to dealing with carbon emission and air pollution. The lobbying power of the oil industry is so potent it has choked the development of more sustainable, greener forms of travel.
It’s embarrassing to think that almost 80 years ago a man like Churchill, a leader, visionary and politician, was prepared to take a leap into the scientific unknown and fly the kite of a thought that no doubt would have been very much the exception rather than the norm.
It’s easy to look to the past and celebrate a simpler, more elegant time. And while such sentimental head-burying is unhelpful I think it’s worth remembering that we have had leaders and politicians who offered a wider, more nuanced vision of our world and others. In these fundamentally febrile times, one thing we cannot give up on is hope. Never more than now do we require leadership, politicians who have vision and belief. Churchill saw the future, a future many around him couldn’t even conceive of.
I leave you with the great man’s words in the hope that hope itself might inspire. “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”