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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on February 15th,

2017. I'm Steve Murski. In 1939, with the war in Europe looming,

Winston Churchill published a newspaper essay on, of all things, the possibility of extraterrestrial

life. Astrophysicist Mario Livio saw the essay last year while visiting the U.S. National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri.

That's the site of the Churchill Museum because he made his famous Iron Curtain speech

at Westminster College there in 1946.

From Stettine in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Livio was so taken by Churchill's analysis that he wrote a piece about it for the February 16th edition of the journal Nature.

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author. His upcoming book is called Why? What Makes Us Curious? That'll come out in July.

I spoke to Livio earlier today by phone.

You know, what's fascinating to me is Churchill is thought of as a politician. A lot of people forget that he was a journalist, a wonderful writer.

I mean, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and that he had a great and deep interest

in science.

Right.

And what was amazing to me, in addition, after reading this particular essay, was how his logic,

his train of thought is just like that of a scientist.

I mean, you know, he picks this subject, are we alone in the universe?

...