Churchill would have appreciated this week’s exoplanet discovery
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8207
In February news reports a week apart, each paralleling coverage mediawide, the New York Times first reported on scientific prescience from a statesman three-quarters of a century ago, then reported what may be the most intriguing astrophysics news yet for affirming the politician’s vision.
In both cases, the Times‘s opening paragraphs nicely summarized the news. On 16 February, the article “A lost essay from Churchill, on alien life” began:
Even as he was preparing for the biggest struggle of his life, leading Britain in its fight against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill had something else on his mind: extraterrestrials.
In a newly unearthed essay sent to his publisher on Oct. 16, 1939—just weeks after Britain entered World War II and Churchill became part of the wartime cabinet—and later revised, he was pondering the likelihood of life on other planets.
Churchill, who went on to become prime minister during much of World War II and again from 1951 to 1955, was so enthralled by the subject that he even ordered a suspected sighting of an unidentified flying object by the Royal Air Force to be kept a secret for 50 years to avoid “mass panic.”
In an 11-page essay titled “Are we alone in the universe?” the statesman showed powers of reason “like a scientist,” said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist who read the rarely seen draft and wrote about it in an article published…in Nature magazine.
Livio read the draft on a visit to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the home state of US president Harry Truman. In 1946, shortly after World War II, Churchill, accompanied by President Truman, visited Westminster. There he delivered what became known as the Iron Curtain speech , seen as marking the start of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s 1939 essay apparently isn’t available online, but the Churchill Project at Hillsdale College in Michigan has republished what it calls a variant, Churchill’s 1942 piece “Are there men on the moon?”
In the upcoming March issue of Physics Today, Livio and coauthor Joseph Silk present an article on exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life. In Nature, Livio analyzes the long-forgotten Churchill essay in some detail. Churchill’s 1939 reasoning, he observes, mirrors much from modern astrobiology: the presupposition that the universe’s vastness implies an unlikelihood of humans’ uniqueness, the assumption of water’s fundamental importance for any life anywhere, the focus on exoplanets in temperate and therefore possibly habitable zones, and such a “Goldilocks” planet’s probable need for an atmosphere if it’s to support life.
He believes that Churchill “shines” as a scientific thinker who exhibits “healthy scepticism” concerning a theory of planet formation that scientists later discarded. He quotes from Churchill’s essay: “But this speculation depends upon the hypothesis that planets were formed in this way. Perhaps they were not. We know there are millions of double stars, and if they could be formed, why not planetary systems?” Livio affirms that indeed, “the present-day theory of planet formation—the build up of a rocky planet’s core by the accretion of many small bodies—is very different.” Here he quotes a Churchill line that has drawn considerable media attention: “I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets.”
The reviewing scientist marvels that the science-minded statesman wrote decades before the discoveries of thousands of exoplanets and “years before astronomer Frank Drake presented his probabilistic argument for the rarity of communicating civilizations in the cosmos in 1961.” As an astrophysicist today calling to mind the logic of the politician and professional writer of long ago, Livio observes as well that “extrapolating data from the Kepler Space Observatory suggests that the Milky Way probably contains more than a billion Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of stars that are the size of the Sun or smaller.”
Livio is awed by Churchill’s prescience concerning travel and exploration in the solar system. He affirms Churchill’s doubts about overcoming interstellar distances. He notes Churchill’s awareness of astronomer Edwin Hubble’s findings. He also quotes something that has been requoted widely. Churchill wrote, “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, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”
The essay’s astrobiology prescience has occasioned observations about politicians’ science-mindedness generally—or its absence. The essay has also occasioned specific recollecting of Churchill’s general science-mindedness, ranging beyond astrobiology. For that, there’s plenty of evidence.
At London’s Science Museum, the recent exhibit Churchill’s Scientists sought to uncover “the way British science was recruited to the war effort and flourished in the general ‘culture of encouragement’ that Churchill fostered.” Churchill College at Cambridge University, with a focus on math, science, and technology—and with 32 Nobel laureates—traces its origin to a vision established in Churchill’s mind in a 1949 visit to MIT. The New York Times reported that, along with the astrobiology piece, two more essays turned up at Westminster College, one on cell division and another on evolution. A Westminster press release gives their titles: “Mysteries of the body” and “River of life.” The Guardian‘s report on the astrobiology essay describes Churchill as creator of “government funding for labs, telescopes and technology which led to post-war discoveries and inventions from molecular genetics to x-ray crystallography” and as the UK’s “first prime minister to hire a science adviser.”
That adviser was Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, once described in the Guardian as “arrogant, boastful, childishly competitive” but also as Churchill’s “one-man think-tank.” In a recent Guardian piece , Graham Farmelo identified Lindemann as the ultimate source of what impressed Livio. That article’s subhead proclaimed, “From alien life to foreseeing the nuclear age, Churchill’s essays reveal a dazzling scope of inquiry that would be unimaginable on the part of western leaders today.” The byline identified Farmelo as a biographer and science writer, a Churchill College by-fellow, a physics adjunct professor at Northeastern University, and as author of Churchill’s Bomb. Farmelo called Churchill a longtime science writer who, as a statesman, “appreciated the importance of new breakthroughs to the development of civilisation better than any other leading western political leader of the past century.” Churchill received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, but the lengthy presentation speech delivered in awarding it to him never mentioned the word science.
Farmelo noted that as early as 1925, Churchill picked up and used the term atomic bombs from a 1914 book by H. G. Wells. A passage from Farmelo’s article bears on that category of prescience in describing Churchill’s general science-mindedness:
[In the early 1930s] Churchill published his famous essay “Fifty years hence,” a 4,000-word meditation on the effects that science might have in the future. It looked ahead to a wide variety of new developments, including wireless telephones, the potential of robots, the artificial cultivation of animals in laboratories and, above all, the release of nuclear energy to power societies and build weapons of unprecedented destructiveness. Churchill wrote that scientists were looking for “the match to set the bonfire alight”. Eight weeks after the essay’s publication, a Cambridge experimenter [James Chadwick] discovered the match, the sub-atomic particle he called the neutron.
Even more widely read than “Fifty years hence” was Churchill’s foray into science journalism for the News of the World. In the 1930s, when he was in the political wilderness, he wrote several articles about possible future applications of new science. One of his themes, briefed by Lindemann, of course, was the possible impact of nuclear technology at a time when another war was looming. Most leading physicists at the time were extremely sceptical that this type of energy was likely to be important in the foreseeable future. But Churchill had other ideas. In late 1937, he explained to millions of readers that nuclear energy may soon be captured, with potentially frightening consequences. Less than 12 months later, nuclear fission was discovered by two scientists working in Berlin, capital of Hitler’s Germany. From a scientific point of view, he was supremely well-equipped to deal with the impending nuclear age.
Farmelo also related this anecdote: “One Sunday in April 1926, when Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer and preparing his budget, he set aside his papers for the morning and dictated a summary of quantum theory.” Farmelo asked, “Can anyone seriously imagine any political leader today using their downtime to brush up on their understanding of string theory?”
Churchill’s “Fifty years hence” is available online . Anyone who has appreciated recordings of Churchillian speeches will detect the Churchillian voice in it. With a certain cadence and rhythm, the statesman proclaims, “By observing all that science has achieved in modern times, and the knowledge and power now in her possession, we can predict with some assurance the inventions and discoveries which will govern our future. We can but guess, peering through a glass darkly, what reactions these discoveries and their applications will produce upon the habits, the outlook and the spirit of man.”
Churchill continues by asserting that the “most wonderful of all modern prophecies is found in Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall.’” Churchill quotes at length from the poem, beginning with these lines:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the World, and all the wonder that could be.
All the wonder that could be? That’s what Livio saw in Churchill’s old astrobiology essay. Livio enthused to National Public Radio: “He moves point by point. It’s first identifying life, then saying what’s necessary for life, then going on to say, OK, so liquid water—under what conditions do you get liquid water? He looks at the solar system. He looks at extrasolar planets.”
In Nature, Livio wrote, “Almost 80 years later, the question that obsessed Churchill is one of the hottest topics of scientific research.” A week after the Churchill news broke, the New York Times again reported on the hot astrobiology topic, this time in parallel with a tsunami of coverage worldwide. Above the fold on the front page, illustrated by a NASA artist’s rendering , the article began just as Churchill long ago might have expected:
Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien life outside the solar system.
The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light-years, or 235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close in cosmic terms, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail.
One or more of the exoplanets in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.