On eve of war with Germany, Winston Churchill penned essay about alien life

It was 1939, and Hitler was on the march in Europe. But Winston Churchill, the man who would lead Britain to victory over the Nazis, had another subject on his mind: aliens.

In a recently unearthed essay written shortly before German bombs began pummeling London, the great British statesman argued that extraterrestrial life is not just possible — but plausible. Over the course of 10 typewritten pages, Churchill defines life itself, notes the importance of water and concludes that there must be planets around stars besides the sun. Such “exoplanets” are one of the hottest topics in contemporary science.

“I was really amazed just seeing the title,” says Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and book author who wrote a commentary in this week’s Nature about Churchill’s essay. “His chain of reasoning is very much along the same lines (as that of) modern astronomers and astrophysicists.”

Churchill may have thought like a scientist, but he also churned out words like a printing press. An extravagant spender, Churchill tried to keep ahead of his debts by producing a torrent of lucrative books and newspaper articles. He probably planned to sell the extraterrestrial essay to a newspaper, says Timothy Riley, chief curator of the National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.

But the essay was never published, perhaps because more urgent duties prevented Churchill from finding a home for it in the 1930s, Riley says. An early draft of the essay in Britain’s Churchill Archives Centre is dated October 1939, the month after Britain declared war on Germany and Churchill was named First Lord of the Admiralty. He became prime minister seven months later.

In the late 1950s, Churchill, no longer prime minister, tinkered with the essay, but it never saw publication. His publisher’s widow gave the later draft to Riley’s museum in the 1980s, where it languished without notice until Riley stumbled on it in 2014.

Churchill is known mostly as an orator and the leader who guided Britain through the grim years of World War II. But he also aimed his immense curiosity at science, says Andrew Nahum, curator of a 2015 exhibit about Churchill and science at London’s Science Museum.

Churchill, though entirely self-taught, wrote articles about subjects from biology to quantum physics. Nahum suspects that Churchill read The Mysterious Universe, a 1930 book by British astrophysicist James Jeans, who writes that conditions for life could exist outside our solar system.

In the 1950s version of his essay on extraterrestrial life — which he titled “Are We Alone in the Universe?” — Churchill notes that water-based life will survive “between a few degrees of frost and the boiling point of water.” That’s reminiscent of today’s definition of the “habitable zone,” the region around a star where a planet would be neither too hot nor too cold to support living organisms.

Churchill also shows “the healthy skepticism of a scientist,” Livio writes. The armchair astronomer casts doubt on Jean’s theory of planetary formation — later rejected — and says he himself is not “sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets.”

Given the number of stars in the universe, Churchill concludes, “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 …”

Says Livio: “Here is a world leader, a person who is arguably the greatest statesperson of the 20th century, and look at his level of acquaintance with science ... and his general support of science. It does generate a nostalgia for this type of a person.”