When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his science fiction story "When the Earth Screamed" almost a hundred years ago, no one imagined that the events described there could really come true.
According to the plot of the story, Professor Challenger, well-known from The Lost World, came to the conclusion that the Earth is a living being. In order to test his version, Challenger gave the planet a sensitive "prick" at the bottom of a deep mine. As a result, the Earth “screamed”: a rumble went off across the planet, a series of strong earthquakes was noted, and volcanic activity intensified …
Will the planet scream?
And now, somewhere in the 80s of the XX century, some scientists (apparently not familiar with the prophetic maxims of Conan Doyle) proposed a way to get rid of radioactive waste. They planned to drill a super-deep well about a meter in diameter and about a kilometer long in order to lower all the radioactive and then chemical debris there. Scientists believed that at the bottom of the well, a container with a radioactive substance would begin to quickly heat up, melt the surrounding rock and sink into it due to its high specific gravity.
The project was open and widely advertised not only in academic. but also in popular science magazines. Thanks to this, everyone learned that a site for drilling such a well is already planned in the area of the Semipalatinsk test site. The implementation of the project was delayed only due to the lack of two billion rubles required to start construction. Fortunately for all of us, this murderous project never came to fruition, and the scientific justifications for the consequences that have appeared in recent years have finally buried the very idea as very dangerous and adventurous. It was theoretically justified that the dumping of radioactive waste into the depths of the earth can cause an increase in internal energy processes in the magma itself, which will no longer be restrained by the shell of the earth's crust and come out, creating not one, but a thousand chernobyls.
Gaia's hypothesis
Promotional video:
In the 70s of the last century, an independent researcher and specialist in various fields of science from the UK James Lovelock put forward the Gaia hypothesis. Having studied the works of V. I. Vernadsky, as well as a number of other scientists, Lovelock came to the conclusion that the Earth is a living being, where all the plants and animals contained on its surface, air, soil, water, rocks are, as it were, its organs. He named this system - Gaia (goddess of the Earth in Ancient Greece). According to Lovelock's ideas, Gaia-Earth is completely independent and cannot be subordinated to man. And therefore, a person must take care of her health, avoiding any environmental disturbances that could upset her balance. Love and harmony should reign in Gaia's system, when all kinds of living things - from bacteria and plants to humans - coexist in a state of mutual assistance.
Unfortunately, today a person lives according to the egoistic principle, put forward by Michurin, that one should not expect favors from nature. Man felt himself to be a god, which led to the merciless exploitation of all earthly riches, where the momentary good was put above everything. However, according to Lovelock, this cannot continue for as long as necessary, man is not the owner, and even less the exploiter of the entire planet. The earth, as a living creature, will definitely throw off the offenders and restore its balance. The survival path of humanity, therefore, is associated with a change in lifestyle and social consciousness.
Something about the mind of the Earth
A further contribution to earth science was made by our Russian scientist I. N. Yanitsky, who came to the conclusion that the Earth is not only a living, but also a rational being. Our planet constantly exchanges information not only with our Sun and surrounding celestial bodies, but also with the center of the Galaxy. This information follows through special channels going from the surface to the center of the planet. Yanitsky believes that the Earth knows about the people existing on its surface, who constantly disturb its body with either nuclear explosions or superdeep drilling, irritate its surface and violate the entire ecology of the biosphere. More frequent earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, sharp fluctuations in ambient temperature - all this is not an accident, but the Earth's response to our ill-considered actions. Yanitskiy set out his conclusions in the book "Living Earth",as well as in numerous articles in periodicals.
The scientist believes that it is time to completely change the outdated definition of life in order to get rid of anthropomorphism and purely human egoism. Our planet - according to Yanitsky's definition - is an extremely energy-rich, highly organized and evolving system, the ability of which to adapt is many orders of magnitude higher than that of humanity.
The fact that the Earth is a living and highly organized creature that responds to all kinds of internal stresses by weather, climatic phenomena and natural disasters has become clear only in recent years, thanks to the analysis and comparison of certain facts.
So, for example, this refers to the behavior of the weather during the August 1991 events in Moscow. At night, when tanks began to storm the White House, it was raining so hard that it was impossible to see anything two steps away. This turned out to be a critical point of the coup, and the downpour largely predetermined its fate. The very next day, joyful crowds gathered in the square, congratulating themselves on the victory of democracy. The sun was shining brightly, there was not a cloud in the sky. It seemed that the weather was happy with the people.
If this case can be attributed to a positive emotional coincidence, then the others cannot be called that. An example is the earthquake that razed two Armenian cities to the ground, followed by bloody inter-ethnic clashes in the same region. Something similar happened in Romania, where human collisions ended in an earthquake. It turns out that serious social upheavals and conflicts, accompanied by mutually irreconcilable heat of passions and human sacrifices, are somehow connected with the state of the earth's crust and the processes taking place under it.
So, for example, it is known that during the First and Second World Wars there were practically no major earthquakes, but they immediately resumed with the same force as soon as the war ended (for example, the Ashgabat earthquake of 1948).
In the same way, it should be noted that earthquakes, wars and various kinds of interethnic conflicts with the accumulation of negative emotions never occur at the same time, but follow each other as if in succession. The most indicative place where this constantly happens is the Caucasus, where, moreover, there is the place of the largest fault in the planet's crust.
It turns out that at certain moments the Earth needs to realize its inner activity, "let off steam", and in what way it will happen - with the help of human reserves or natural disasters - is a matter of chance. Yanitsky himself, for example, is sure that the Chernobyl disaster ruled out the possibility of a Third World War, relieving tension not only from the depths of the planet, but also from the noosphere.
Or here's another conclusion made in Yanitsky's laboratory: natural phenomena affect the behavior and mental stress of people - and vice versa. Thus, a kind of "swinging" of the processes can be carried out in one direction or another, but this process is not endless. If it is not stopped, a kind of resonance may occur, and we will all perish in a global catastrophe.
Arkady Vyatkin. Secrets of the XX century magazine