An excerpt from a recently uncovered 11-page essay by Sir Winston Churchill about the search for alien life.
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.
[…] It is rash to set limits to the progress of science, things that are not possible today, you shouldn’t think that they would not be possible in the future.”
Entitled “Are We Alone in the Universe?” the essay was written before the outbreak of WWII and has been kept at the Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri, USA.
Born to an aristocratic family, Sir Winston (1874 – 1965) served in the British military and worked as a writer before going into politics. After becoming prime minister in 1940, he helped lead a successful Allied strategy with the U.S. and Soviet Union during WWII to defeat the Axis powers and craft post-war peace. Elected prime minister again in 1951, he introduced key domestic reforms.