Again, totally unrelated to anything we usually blog about (and I am not quite ready to create an “alien life” category for the blog), but in 1939 Winston Churchill wrote a never published essay on intelligent life in the universe. Winston-Churchills-aliens-essay
At the time, the accepted theory in science was that planets formed when two stars passed closely to each other, creating a stream of gas that then formed the Solar System. The interesting argument Churchill presents is: “But this speculation depends upon the hypothesis that planets were formed in this way. Perhaps they were not,” wrote Churchill. “We know there are millions of double stars, and if they could be formed, why not planetary systems?”
and
“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,” he wrote.