People began to think about the fact that we are not alone in the Universe in ancient times. It is not known for certain who first thought about this, but scientific research on this issue can be attributed to the end of the 19th century, when the active development of radio waves began.
When did you start looking for extraterrestrial civilizations?
The first to say that he was able to receive a signal of extraterrestrial origin was the legendary Nikola Tesla.
In 1899, he allegedly received signals on the radio transmitters installed by him, which, as Tesla began to assure, were received not from anywhere, but from Mars itself.
In his diary, the scientist wrote: “Only later did I have a glimpse that these signals were directed. Although I could not understand their meaning, I am increasingly convinced that I was the first to hear the greeting from one planet to another."
When they learned about Tesla's wholesalers in Europe, Marconi spoke to reporters, saying that Tesla had received his "record transatlantic radio communications" on July 28, 1899 at his experimental station in Colorado Springs. After all, it was on this day that Marconi conducted his series of advertising and commercial stunts on the Channel for representatives of the British Admiralty and the French Navy.
Tesla did not give up. In his article "The Main Achievements of the Past Century", published in 1900 in the magazine "Epoch", he wrote: "Of course, anyone can scoff at the very possibility of contact with our neighbors in the Universe, for example, with Mars, or consider it a joke, but I talked about it quite seriously … One fine day all the inhabitants of the Earth, as one, will raise their eyes to the sky with love and reverence, amazed by the joyful news. Brothers! We have a message from another world, unknown and distant. It says: "One … two … three …".
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Why might we not be alone?
To date, scientists have discovered 561 exoplanets in 470 planetary systems. All in all, there are about 50 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy, 2 million of which are "Earthlike".
In 1960, Frank Drake, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, even developed an equation for finding extraterrestrial civilizations.
He came to the conclusion that on 100 billion similar planets of ours there must be from several thousand to hundreds of millions of civilizations capable of contacting ours.
It must be said that most of the variables in the Drake equation are hypothetical or even speculative. Back in 1950, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi formulated an important statement that if the Universe were filled with creatures like us, then we would have met them long ago.
In short, the Fermi paradox looks like this: "Where is everyone?"
SETI project
In the 1960s, a series of projects under the general name SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was launched in the United States. The goal of the project was formulated briefly: the search for extraterrestrial civilizations.
Project enthusiasts (and it still exists today) are confident that it is possible to find civilizations similar to the Earth if they are at approximately the same level of technological development and live in systems similar to the Solar.
The already mentioned Frank Drake launched the Ozma project in 1960, in which the Green Bank telescope collected signals from two solar-type systems - Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. The SETI project was funded by the US National Space Agency (NASA) for some time, but today the SETI project fundamentally refuses state funding, accepting only deposits from individuals.
The first UFO tracking station was established in Texas a year after the launch of SETI, in 1972, under the direction of Colonel Stanford. Since that time, the Pentagon has been developing a strategy to repel an extraterrestrial invasion, and has created a truly mysterious aura around its projects, seasoned with a good share of "rumors in the form of versions."
For example, former Pentagon and Congress consultant Timothy Goode in an interview with BBC-2 said that former US President Eisenhower met with aliens at military bases and even entered into mental conversations with them. How much this information corresponds to reality is difficult to say, but the fact that the Pentagon is seriously considering the "extraterrestrial threat" is obvious.
Wow signal
On August 15, 1977, a strong narrow-band space radio signal was recorded by Dr. Jerry Eiman while working on the Big Ear radio telescope in the SETI project. Its characteristics, such as transmission bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, were consistent with an extraterrestrial signal. Eiman then circled the corresponding characters on the printout and wrote "Wow!" In the margin.
The radio signal came from an area of the sky in the constellation Sagittarius, about 2.5 degrees south of the star group Chi. Eiman expected a second signal, but it never came. The first problem with the WOW signal is that to send it (if we nevertheless assume its extraterrestrial origin as a hypothesis), a very powerful transmitter is required - at least 2.2 gigawatts.
Until now, the most powerful transmitter on Earth has a power of 3600 kW.
There are many hypotheses about the origin of this cryptic message, but none of them are accepted. In 2012, for the 35th anniversary of the WOW signal, Arecibo observatory sent a response of 10,000 coded messages in the direction of the alleged source. The earthlings did not receive an answer.
Paleocontacts
If we cannot find extraterrestrial civilizations today, this does not mean that the inhabitants of the Earth have never before been able to meet representatives of other planets. Approximately this logic can be traced in the writings of those who believe that earthlings in ancient times had a connection with aliens.
The main ideologist of the theory of paleocontacts is the Swiss writer and director Erich von Daniken. In his books and in his lectures, he assures that in the past, the Earth was often visited by alien aliens.
The development of Daniken's views was influenced by the discoveries in the Sahara of a series of rock carvings of creatures resembling extraterrestrials, which their researcher Henri Lot called "the period of round-headed people" in the art of North Africa and described in his work "In Search of Tassili Frescoes".
Another ideologist of paleocontacts was the American writer of Azerbaijani origin Zakharia Sitchin. He claimed that humanoids
the powerful Anunnaki race from Sumerian mythology were the inhabitants of the planet Tiamat. They, as Sitchin wrote, visited Earth and with the help of genetic engineering, created our species by crossing their genes with those of Homo erectus. They needed people as cheap labor for their gold mines.
What have you come to?
Despite all the activities deployed today, it must be admitted that in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, humanity has not gone too far. We have not landed anywhere, except for our own satellite, the object of human origin (satellite Voyager 1) farthest from the Earth is located outside the Solar System, but by cosmic standards, the distance of 0.002 light years is considered microscopic.
Even the planet Kepler 452b, discovered by NASA on July 24, is 1400 light years away, which means that any signal received from a possible life form on it will be dated at least one and a half millennia.
Why is all this necessary?
In connection with the topic of the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, it is interesting to recall Werner von Braun, the German designer, the father of astronautics.
Dr. Carol Rosin, who worked with von Braun at Fairchild Industries from 1974-1977, repeatedly recalled in interviews that von Braun talked about creating an "enemy image" necessary to maintain the financial system.
Von Braun said that at first the "fight against communism" was used for this purpose, then the "fight against terrorism" would be used, then "the fight against rogue countries." In the future, the "father" of the American space program saw the "meteorite threat" and the "threat of alien invasion" as the main bogeymen.