Winston Churchill Wrote of Alien Life in a Lost Essay<br />that I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the o<br />In a newly unearthed essay sent to his publisher on Oct. 16, 1939 — just weeks after Britain entered World War II<br />and Churchill became part of the wartime cabinet — and later revised, he was pondering the likelihood of life on other planets.<br />"He’s really thinking about this,’’ Mr. Livio said, "and though he didn’t have all the knowledge at hand, he thinks about this with the logic of a scientist." Churchill’s interest in science<br />stemmed from his early years as an army officer in British-ruled India, where he had crates of books, including Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species," shipped to him by his mother.<br />Two other scientific essays — one on cell division in the body<br />and another on evolution — are stored in the museum’s archives in Fulton, Mr. Riley, the museum director, said in an interview.<br />In the interwar period, Churchill wrote numerous scientific articles, including one called "Death Rays" and another titled "Are there Men on the Moon?" In 1924, he published a text asking readers "Shall We All Commit Suicide?", in which he speculated<br />that technological advances could lead to the creation of a small bomb that was powerful enough to destroy an entire town.<br />Frederick Lindemann, a physicist, became Churchill’s "on tap" expert<br />and once described him as a "scientist who had missed his vocation," said Andrew Nahum, who curated an exhibition on Churchill and science at the Science Museum in London.
