This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

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 Curiosity's.

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. Wells' 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.

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