Scientists do not exclude that there are probes of "brothers in mind" near the Earth.
Have you ever received Happy New Year greetings in February? And with Victory Day in June? Without any reservations: they say, I'm sorry, the old man, that he realized so late.
But there is a community of people in which such questions can be accepted without idiotic smirks or twisting a finger to the temple.
Among radio amateurs, stories about such "wandering on the air" radio messages are one of the favorite themes of myth-making. Almost everyone has in store a story about "a friend who managed to catch a message from the past on his receiver." Perhaps the most famous is the story of a certain front-line soldier, a participant in the Great Patriotic War.
A former army radio operator in civilian life took up radio amateurism. And once, at the end of the 50s, on the air he received the callsign of his friend, also a radio operator … but who died at the front.
And I heard his message: some of them were surrounded, many were wounded, artillery support is required! After that, the myth says, a front-line radio amateur handed out all his equipment, drank and soon died.
Of course, no scientific evidence for such stories can be found. It is just as impossible to catch a signal from the past from the radio air, sitting in your apartment on Earth, as it is to watch the news program on TV tonight, which was shown yesterday or a week ago. Unless someone will record them and put them on the air again. The nature of radio signals is such that a message sent from a radio and television station has only two paths:
1. either it is quickly damped in the atmosphere, and if there is enough power, it will round the entire Earth once flying speed of light (in this case, the signal at the receiver can be taken again after 1/8 seconds after the first - almost simultaneously)
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2. either at a certain wavelength it will pierce the ionosphere of the planet and go into space, so that it will never return to Earth. There are special cases when the signal will return, reflected from the Moon. But then the delay will be only three seconds, and not 15 years, as in the front-line radio amateur.
However, the problem of radio ghosts, or, as it is also called, "delayed radio echo", still exists. Sometimes it happens that some time after sending or receiving a signal, the receiver receives it again, and possibly several times. As if someone is hooligan on the air, parrots. Scientists admit this, but cannot explain.
Who sends strange signals
One of the first phenomenon of LDE (from English - Long Delay Echo - long delay of radio echo) in 1928 became interested in professor of the University of Oslo (Norway) Karl Stermer - a serious researcher, also known for being the first to determine at what altitude auroras arise … Perhaps a little later, when radio stations and receivers became commonplace, no one would have noticed the LDE phenomenon.
It would have been considered some kind of "glitch" in the atmosphere. But in the 1920s, wireless radio was still a marvelous wonder, and no one understood its full potential. Just like now many miracles and absurdities are associated with genetics.
And then the great inventor Nikola Tesla seriously argued that with the help of radio it would be possible to communicate with the underworld, and in the summer of 1924 the US Secretary of Defense issued an order according to which all military radio stations of the country should catch on air … signals from Mars for the last five minutes of every hour.
That summer, the Earth and the Red Planet came close to a record distance, and the Americans seriously hoped to hear radio messages from "brothers in mind."
On October 11, 1928, scientists conducted a unique experiment. Dr. Stermer in Oslo received signals from an experimental radio station from Holland. The scheme was as follows: a signal (three dots in Morse code) - a pause of half a minute - again a signal, etc. However, in Oslo, each signal came to the receiver twice. In the first series of experiments, the delay was three seconds, in the second - by 4, and then for various times from 5 to 18 seconds.
This is contrary to modern physics! And experts could give this phenomenon only one explanation. A radio wave that has left the Dutch radio station in space at a distance of several hundred thousand kilometers from the Earth, is reflected from an object and returns back. But what was this object? No reasonable versions!
There is a contact
An article about Stermer's experiments was published in the authoritative journal Nature in 1928. Later, similar experiments were carried out by the French, Germans, and Americans. The LDE effect was recognized as a reality. But there was no explanation for him. Until in 1960, at one of the seminars of the American National Space Agency, astronomer Ronald Braswell did not come up with an original hypothesis, which was later supported by the great Soviet astrophysicist Joseph Shklovsky.
“Suppose that some highly developed civilization decided to look for brothers in mind,” said Braswell. - The easiest way to send scout probes to all star systems. This was sent to the solar system as well. The next task is to find a planet with intelligent life here.
The probe begins to scan the ether, looking for electromagnetic waves that are clearly not of natural origin. At the beginning of the 20th century, earthlings invented radio and radio signals from our planet went into space, which were immediately received by a reconnaissance probe. An intelligent civilization has been discovered, and now the miracle of alien technical thought is facing task number 3: how to inform the aborigines about yourself. Again, the simplest way is to receive messages from the Earth and send them back with some delay."
If a trick with a delay is arranged regularly, then the smartest of the aborigines will scratch their heads and realize: since this does not happen in nature, then someone is playing strange games with them. And they will start looking for the mischief.
Greetings from the constellation Bootes
The ideas of Shklovsky and Braswell were developed by the English astronomer Duncan Lunan. Based on the results of Stermer's experiment in 1928, he plotted the "delayed signal number - delay time". It turned out that the graph closely resembles the constellation Bootes.
The scientist concluded: in such a coded form, the probe transmitted to earthlings where it came from.
Moreover, according to some features of the schedule, Duncan determined that the constellation Bootes looked like this 13 thousand years ago. And he suggested that the probe, having arrived in the solar system, immediately took a picture of its native constellation, and, therefore, it has been in our system for 13 thousand years.
However, there were other options for decoding the results of Stermer's experiment. According to one of them, for example, it turned out that the probe transmitted to the Earth an image of the constellation Cetus.
Many have tried to find a secret meaning in the results of experiments with LDE. But the scientific world did not come to a common opinion: it is even unclear whether such signals carry any meaning at all. But the term "Braswell's probe", which supposedly can fly somewhere in the vicinity of our planet, has taken root among astrophysicists - there is no other way to explain the phenomenon. By the way, experts drew attention to one more of its features.
The phenomenon is most clearly manifested at radio frequencies that a person is just beginning to use. This was the case in the 1920s and later. As soon as many stations start working at a certain frequency, the radio echo disappears - this also speaks in favor of its artificial origin.
But if the "Bracewell probe" exists, then you can try to find it. The first mentions of it appeared in the mid-60s of the last century, when the French astronomer Jacques Vallee announced the discovery of an unidentified satellite, which was moving in the opposite direction than all the USSR and the USA launched by that time.
“It would be extremely difficult to launch this strange satellite from the Earth, since the speed and direction of the Earth's rotation would not help, but would prevent the apparatus from reaching the first space velocity,” the scientist wondered.
However, other specialists could not find anything in the orbit indicated by the Valla. And he himself soon admitted that he was no longer watching him.
SPECIALIST COMMENT
Or maybe he doesn't want to be found.
In the USSR, and then in Russia, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics was interested in the LDE effect for a long time. Sci., Head of the Laboratory of the Planetary Physics Department of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Leonid KSANFOMALITI. His most famous work on this topic is "Problem of probes of external civilization, radio echo and Braswell's hypothesis."
- In Soviet times, there was such a controlling body - Glavlit, without whose approval it was impossible to print a single material, - says Leonid Vasilyevich, - and there my article was cut very badly, reducing the thoughts about why the alleged "probe" has not yet been found … By the way, I am not claiming that it exists. Perhaps the effect of the radio echo delay is associated with some natural phenomena, which we do not yet suspect. For example, under certain conditions, during a thunderstorm, the speed of a radio wave can significantly decrease. But there are too many mysteries in this story.
Dr. Ksanfomality submitted the complete manuscript of his article to the editor, from where we decided to publish several excerpts.
* “… If Braswell is correct about the probe's presence, it can be assumed that things are much more complicated. Perhaps the probe has a large number of reconnaissance devices engaged in gathering information, and what we hear is scraps of communication between them. If the delayed radio echo carries a semantic load, it is not addressed to us …
* … We, earthlings, already possess the technique with the help of which it would be possible to detect it and make contact. But this is problematic if the probe avoids such contact …
* … Suppose that we are the creators of the probe directed to the planet X. Should we establish contact with a civilization, which still has a lot to learn, but has already achieved something? Probably yes. But there is a complication: there are several highly developed powers on planet X, and in some of them calls for war are heard. Would contact be a disservice to the Aborigines? After all, contact is impossible without the exchange of information. And if the situation on planet X is really dangerous, then the only correct strategy is not to contact until the time when the possibility of using the scientific and technical information received by the aborigines for military purposes is excluded …
* … But, on the other hand, there should be one feature in the probe's activity, which its creators would definitely address to the civilization of planet X, regardless of their unwillingness to come into contact with it. After all, this higher civilization also once passed such a stage of development. And if now the civilizations of planet X are shown that they are not alone in the Universe, this would be positive. The natives would understand that the problems of military antagonism are solvable, that self-destruction of mankind can be avoided - there are civilizations that have already passed this path.
Very little is needed to convey such information; unnecessary effects would create unhealthy excitement. It is only necessary that the activity of the probe or its information devices should be noticed and understood by the scientists of the aborigines. The rest is a matter of the future.
OWHITER
This phenomenon is not fiction
Sergey YAZEV, Ph. D. Phys.-Math. Sci., Senior Researcher, Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, SB RAS:
- In 1990, the Ministry of Defense handed over to our institute a unique incoherent scatter radar created on the basis of the Dnepr radar system. The radar emits a huge radio signal, which is then received by various stations, and judges the path and medium of the signal by the characteristics of the delay and its shape.
And there are times when there is a signal delay for a few seconds or a radio echo occurs - all the data is recorded. So the LDE effect does exist. Although our specialists take this calmly, considering that we are talking only about multiple signal reflections between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere.
Andrey MOISEENKO