A newly unearthed essay by Winston Churchill shows Britain’s wartime leader was uncannily prescient about the possibility of alien life on planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

The 11-page article was drafted on the eve of World War Two in 1939 and updated in the 1950s, decades before astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planets in the 1990s.

Yet Churchill pinpointed issues dominating today’s debate about extraterrestrial life, proving that the former prime minister “reasoned like a scientist”, according to an analysis of his work published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The hunt for life on other worlds has taken off in the last 20 years as observations have suggested the Milky Way alone may contain more than a billion Earth-size planets that could be habitable.

Churchill was already thinking along similar lines nearly 80 years ago, writing that “with hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible”.

read more:

http://nypost.com/2017/02/15/winston-churchill-tried-to-prove-possibilit...

meanwhile in Trump's world:

Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s controversial choice to run the Department of Labor, has withdrawn his nomination as questions about his byzantine business interests, details about his acrimonious divorce and revelations that he employed an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper have mounted.

Puzder’s nomination was ultimately felled by Republicans, who grew increasingly concerned about the restaurant executive’s background and business record.

After a series of delays, Puzder, the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the billion-dollar parent company of the fast food chains Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s, was due to appear before the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee on Thursday.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/15/andrew-puzder-withdraws-...