Transcript
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This show is sponsored by American Public University. Success starts with your drive, and American Public University is here to fuel it. With affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs, APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward. Whether you're changing careers, starting fresh, or pursuing a lifelong passion, APU's programs are designed for people who never stop. You bring the fire. APU will fuel the journey. Learn more at apu. Apus. Edu.
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Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.
Erin Menke (0:47)
Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Narrator (1:11)
Human beings have looked to the stars for as long as well, we've had stars to look at. The night sky inspires wonder in all of us. In the ancient world, it was a chart that could hold the images of gods and show a person's future. And today it shows us how small our world is in the vast universe. And sometime between these two points in history, as far back as ancient Greece, someone had that sneaking thought, what if there's another being looking back at us from the stars? In 1939, a well known politician wrote an 11 page essay reflecting on this age old question. Inspired by the recent radio adaptation of H.G. well, Bell's War of the Worlds, he titled his essay Are We Alone in Space? His country, and by extension our planet, was in a tenuous place in the late 1930s. In September of that year, the Second World War would officially begin in Europe, plunging the world into a period of distrust and death at an unprecedented scale. The following year, London itself would face several years of devastating bombardment from German planes in a period called the Blitz. Perhaps this politician wrote their essay as a form of escapism to let his mind wander away from the impending stress and terror of the war. Reflecting instead on what sort of being might live beyond the stars and what conditions might it need to survive. He posited that liquid water would be required for any sort of life, as all living species here appear to require it. Although he did acknowledge that they have discovered creatures so small that they cannot be seen by the human eye. He also astutely noted that for a planet to be suitable for life like on Earth, it would need to be a specific distance away from its star, close enough for heat to encourage growth, far enough away that it has a stable atmosphere and smooth conditions. He considered each planet in turn, including the relatively recently discovered Pluto, and addressed what science knew about each environment, some he accepted as more plausible locations than others. His unshakeable conclusion about the Moon, for instance, was that it was one of the places that can never support life because it's just an arid desert. In his words, the essay concluded by leaving the overall possibility open, and it reads as 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 writer sold his essay to the Sunday Dispatch, which printed it in 1942 under the title Are There Men on the Moon? Although the beginning of the war somewhat obscured our record of this publication, the essay itself, though published, would not appear in any collections of the Dispatch's articles and thus would be forgotten in the noise of the 1940s. After the war, this Politician returned to the essay, revising it twice over the following decades. He considered alternate titles such as Are We Alone in the Universe? And Does Life Exist Elsewhere in the Universe? It seems that he was contemplating reprinting the essay, but it would never come to pass. After the Politician passed away in the 1960s, the these additional drafts would sit in the desks of literary agents for many years to come, until, in 2017, someone unearthed the history of drafts of this essay. Though the public was already aware of the existence of the original one, the discovery of subsequent drafts cast the Politician's career in a new light as someone who had an untapped scientific interest, regularly returning time and time again to this same question that has puzzled philosophers, astrophysicists, and casual observers since the dawn of humanity. What is perhaps most astonishing about the essay itself, though, is the author. It was written during the start of World War II by one of the principal men involved in the fighting of that war. It was written by Winston Churchill.