No matter how smart and active the 20th century is, no matter how far out in space we fly, there is still no consensus among scientists on the question of how life originated. The life-giving material - carbon - is the only base on which scientists rely. Without carbon, there would be no life. But the same scientists understand that if there were no carbon at all on the planet Earth, and even in the solar system, this in no way would mean that life could not arise on Earth. The silicon base of wildlife is also quite likely. In theory, life is possible on a nickel base …
But none of the theories has yet firmly and categorically answered the question: how did inanimate matter become living matter? What were these conditions that arose precisely at this point, coinciding in their favorable features, so that the clots of "organic broth" would cease to be a host of molecules, but would be organized into a strictly built structure capable of growing, sharing and producing their own kind, closely tied to the environment and delivering from it your "building" material?
The development of organic chemistry, for which the 20th century is very famous, has drawn the ways in which simple molecules are assembled into chains, chains into new chains, what pressure is needed for this and what temperature is needed. Organic synthesis is no longer a problem at all. Scientists compose substances with new properties, predict and set them on purpose, and then successfully get what they "projected".
But science is as far from a "decisive" step - the transformation of synthetic organic matter into a living cell - as it was a hundred, two hundred, a thousand and tens of thousands of years ago. It is not possible to "breathe" life into inanimate, although organic matter.
Well, in itself, obtaining a living cell from a nonliving one is not particularly important for us (forgive us those who are waiting for the replacement of diseased organs with artificially grown ones) … It is important for us to know (at least approximately!) How this is done !. Alas, there is no answer.
We probably won't find the answer on Earth: isn't that why we gaze so intently into space? Is it not in its depths that the solution to this most mysterious of the mysterious questions lies?
Once a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences I. S. Shklovsky put forward a theory that did not explain the very process of the birth of life, but at least gave encouraging statistics of the presence of this life in outer space. Taking the smallest percentage of the probability of the existence of life on each individual star of the planetary system, then the same percentage of the likelihood of the birth of life on one of the planets of this system (and the same percentage of intelligent life among the "inhabited" planets), Shklovsky received a very impressive number of intelligent civilizations, even for our Galaxy, and in the Universe their number, respectively, turned out to be so huge that mankind clearly ceased to be alone among the stars. The theory, which was picked up by scientists, and then used in their works, "held out" for about 30 years. It had already become almost inaccessible to criticism, when suddenly the author himself turned it abruptly by 180 degrees and, just as hotly as in the first case, began to prove that humanity, unfortunately, is lonely in the Universe, and life on Earth is not a rule, rather, a happy exception in the vast expanses of space.
I. S. Shklovsky left behind this very hopeless look. But he did not cast the enthusiasts into despondency, and the search for reason and life in the Universe continues with the same persistence.
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I must say that even at the dawn of radio engineering, the great American of Slavic origin Nikola Tesla managed to catch someone else's meaningful radio signal, which has not yet been deciphered.
Tesla was born in Shmilyan, now the territory of Yugoslavia. At school, this brilliant mathematician and engineer was often accused of cheating on the basis that he gave answers too quickly, which seemed incredible. However, until the end of his life, Tesla claimed that all his knowledge came to him with flashes of intuition.
After emigrating to New York in 1884, he soon went to work for Edison, for whom he designed twenty-four types of dynamos. Separated from the patron, by 1888 Tesla received thirty patents for his inventions as an electrical engineer. Although he is now rarely seen as a pioneer, it is clear (as the US Supreme Court determined in the year of the inventor's death) that it was he, and not Marconi, who discovered the circulation of sound on which radio is based. It is likely that Tesla was the first to observe cathode and X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. He designed the first fluorescent lamp; Demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in 1898, and built an experimental power plant in Colorado Springs in 1899. In 1912, Tesla turned down the Nobel Prize in Physics: according to rumors, he believedthat he should have received it back in 1909 instead of Marconi.
They also said that Tesla had such precise control over his imagination that he could mentally design a new dynamo or some other device, also mentally put it into operation, forget about it, then return to it a few days later to find out with through mental observation, whether it is still working.
In 1900, Tesla took up his "World System" - ways to use the natural "electrical vibrations" of the Earth in order to obtain cheap powerful energy. The scheme led nowhere. Being in ever-increasing discord with the scientific community, he fell into a prolonged state of decline, obviously wasting his strength. However, in a work dating back to 1934, Tesla described an apparatus by which it can be assumed that he had invented the laser.
Lord Kelvin wrote of him as "the most devoted man of electrical science of all his contemporaries." When Tesla died alone at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan in 1943, FBI agents took all the papers from his safe on the grounds that they might contain a description of an important secret weapon. Today there is a Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. Perhaps he was so far ahead of his time that we still have to catch up with him.
The first officially recorded case of receiving mysterious signals from space dates back to 1889. This happened in Nikola Tesla's Colorado laboratory. The scientist kept a laboratory for the study of electrical and electrical phenomena, including being very close to solving the mystery of ball lightning. In this laboratory, he received a mysterious signal - either from space, or from the future: after all, the radio broadcast then, just a few years after the invention of A. S. Popov, was still practically "empty", and against the background of this "emptiness" the radio signal could in no way be taken for belonging to any terrestrial device.
In 1928, while working with the ionosphere, scientists again received strange signals. This time it was their own code, as if reproduced by someone and sent back at different intervals. It was as if an unknown "addressee" at the "other" end of the radio bridge was mimicking scientists. The experiment was set by Karl Stermer, who learned about the existence of such a "radio echo" from the Norwegian engineer and radio amateur Jorgen Hals, who faced a problem in 1927. However, about this story in more detail and from the very beginning we will tell below: the question seems to go beyond the practical and takes on a conditionally philosophical character.
Several more times, signals of varying degrees of complexity and reasonable belonging were accepted, which have not yet been explained.
1921 year. Guillelmo Marconi received strange signals.
The year is 1928. The scientific press reported a mysterious "radio echo" from some object located outside the Earth's ionosphere.
1959 year. NASA specialists recorded signals from an unknown satellite of our planet.
1961 year. In the course of the OZMA project (the American project for the search in space for artificial signals) to search for artificial radio signals in space, Dr. Frank Drake's group listened to the sector of the Tau Ceti star. Clear coded pulses were caught. Here, however, the Pentagon intervened, saying that scientists had caught the transmission of a classified military radio station …
Despite the military's explanations, the scientists did not calm down. Astronomers conducted two more search programs - OZMA-2 and OZMA-3. And every time "there was something." But the endless debates, "artificial" or "natural", have not led to anything.
In the archives of researchers of the so-called anomalous phenomena, you can also find a lot of interesting evidence on this topic. In 1929, for example, the signals of "aliens" were caught not by radio telescopes, but by ordinary radio at a wavelength of 75 meters. Someone who called himself Nikomo, for a long time, alternately in different languages read the text of the appeal (see attachments) of the Coalition Observer Detachment (KOH) to the inhabitants of the Earth. Nikomo reported that a gravitational cyclone is drifting in the vicinity of our cluster of galaxies, capable of destroying life on all planets, and urged humanity to join the Coalition so that it could help the Earth prepare for a dangerous phenomenon.
If it was someone's joke, then a very talented and educated person was having fun. This message provided information that is known even today only to a limited circle of specialists.
On November 27, 1977, something similar happened in England, southwest of London. On an area of about 120 square kilometers, a television broadcast was suddenly disrupted. The image from the TV screens disappeared, and an unknown voice said that he was a representative of an extraterrestrial civilization, that humanity was on the wrong path, that earthlings needed to destroy the instruments of evil, and there was not much time left for this …
The police, actively engaged in the search for the "alien", loudly promised to present it to the public in court soon. And later, without finding anyone, she just shyly threw up her hands. London television specialists who participated in the investigation said that they did not even know how the joker managed to carry out his broadcast - too bulky and expensive equipment was required for this.
Nevertheless, it still seems that the existence of other civilizations is more proof of the correctness of IS Shklovsky in the first theory, and not in the second. Let not "a huge number of civilizations", but only a few in a century, but all the same it is closer to the fact that the Universe is densely populated.
Now there are people whose interest began to be directed not at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but at preparing their own mind for a possible Contact. Probably, there is a rational grain in this.
The remarkable Russian writer Daniil Danin, the author of many scientific and artistic books ("The Inevitability of a Strange World", "Rutherford", "Niels Bohr", "Probabilistic World", etc.) is well known in scientific circles. Daniil Danin came up with nothing more than a new science - centauristics. Of course, he himself sometimes laughs it off and does not consider his brainchild to be completely scientific, but let's figure it out. Centauristics is the science of the compatibility of the incompatible, which is very important when communicating with other forms of intelligence. The combination of incompatible concepts and images … Sometimes it is difficult for us to come to an agreement with close people, and what can we say about telepathic creatures with huge eyes!.. Of course, since the days of students, many know the laws of dialectical materialism:
a) the unity and struggle of opposites, b) the transition of quantitative changes into qualitative ones, and c) the law of denial of negation.
True, from this recollection it follows that the diamat considers only a few features of the material world as a cornerstone. Just as the Ptolemaic system of the universe was morally outdated in its time, so diamat is no longer meeting the requirements of modern life. However, maybe he never answered?..
Already at the beginning of the 20th century, a serious antithesis to materialism arose. In 1913-1917. a two-volume edition of the famous Russian physician, economist, philosopher and revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov (Malinovsky) was published, which was called: "Textology: General Organizational Science." He writes: “Any human activity is objectively organizing or disorganizing … The whole process of man's struggle with nature … is nothing more than the process of organizing the world for man in the interests of his life and development … Humanity has no other activity except organizational … All the interests of mankind - organizational. And from this it follows: there cannot and should not be any other point of view on life and on the world, except for the organizational one”. From the quotation, which is very characteristic of Bogdanov's worldview, it appears that his theory, in contrast to dialecticalism, is concerned only with the connection between objects and phenomena. But here again we have only two poles: organization and disorganization - is that really all?
A few years after the release of Bogdanov's two-volume book, in 1929, the alien “Third Appeal to Humanity” was broadcast on the radio, where it was said that the foundation of our mind has two pronounced extremes of the acceptability of a reaction to informational influence, depending on the perceptibility thereof. Simply put, we have only two peaks - the concept of "yes" and the concept of "no". And this means that we expect only a positive or negative answer to any of our questions - isn't this a profanation of knowledge ?! And imagine our logic in comparison with the mind of enlonauts: Daniil Danin believes that our thinking devices, pardon the comparison, are fundamentally different from each other, that is, for them the logical foundation with a single extremum (maximum) is most adequate for the real world,located between our "yes" and "no". According to Danin, such logic is called continuous by the enlonauts, and the beginnings of such logic can be found in centauristics.
It is good, of course, to think that we are not alone in the Universe, and to cherish the thought of a possible meeting, but not so long ago, scientists suddenly discovered that the Christian belief in the uniqueness and uniqueness of Man may well be justified from a scientific point of view. It turns out that in our solar system the ratio of interstellar oxygen to interstellar hydrogen is greater than in all galaxies that we can see! Or, more precisely, in those galaxies that we are able to explore - and this distance extends as much as 2000 light years! - oxygen (its relative content) is 40-70 percent less than in the solar system. The stars studied have an average of 175 to 275 carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms, while the Sun has 355 carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms, that is, one and a half to two times more! Solar system,according to American astronomers Snow and Witt, it is dedicated.
Maybe Joseph Shklovsky knew what he was saying before his death?..
Carbon is the base of life. And it turns out that our solar system is the "carbon capital of the Galaxy"? Snow and Witt comment on their statement in the following way: “Perhaps our solar system was formed from some kind of gas clot ejected during the explosion of such a star, which was especially rich in these elements. Then everything that happened after the event (that is, after the emergence of life on our planet) was very specific and local, not having a universal character. " Unlike his compatriots, planetary scientist John Lewis believes that half of all Earth's carbon could have been brought in as a result of a collision with a huge comet, especially rich in these elements. But all this, in his opinion, also does not happen accidentally and chaotically: “Even in stellar systems that are less rich in carbon than ours, comets can form,sufficiently saturated with this element, and the collisions of such comets with the planets of this system can give the planets all the carbon necessary for the emergence of organic life. " Of course, it is not worth repeating here what has already been said about the possibility of other foundations on which life could arise …
But if collisions with comets-“carriers of life” are not accidental, then by whom and when were they programmed? After all, F. Krik refers them to someone. You might think that they are being transported to us by some giant alien trailer, although it is much easier to pour several living microorganisms from a test tube into an aqueous broth and wait until the first "shoots" appear. On the other hand, what about the destroyer comets, thanks to which several times life on our long-suffering planet hung literally by a thread? Deliberately multiplied and deliberately removed the results of unsuccessful experiments?
It is worth mentioning here that a huge crater was found in the Canadian province of Ontario, formed 1.85 billion years ago. The meteorite was only slightly larger than Mount Everest! From it remained a mass of fragments, the chemical composition of which scientists analyzed at the Canadian Institute of Oceanography. To their surprise, they found there bukibols - molecules very similar to a soccer ball - made up of dozens of carbon atoms. It was then that the hypothesis arose that life on Earth (carbon molecules) was carried by asteroids or comets. Naturally, there were opponents who immediately objected to the Canadians: even if there were embryos of life, then in the most terrible hellish hell - and the process of collision with the Earth, you cannot name it otherwise - all organic molecules would instantly collapse to the simplest atoms … However,we spoke about the possibilities of organic synthesis precisely in the process of impact at the very beginning.
But human thought did not stop, but moved forward with even greater stubbornness: a group of Canadian scientists was created under the leadership of daring experimenters Jeffrey Bald and Robert Porez from the University of Rochester, and as a result of numerous experiments and calculations, they showed that not all organic is destroyed during a collision. " baggage". They said they were ready to continue the experiments if they had not convinced the opponents enough.
There is a possibility, and rather high, that Sojourner is still circling around its lander. There is one clearly defined line in his program:
The "fellow traveler" should not leave the "uterus" further than 50 meters. Apparently, this is due to the disappearance of the past, and scientists do not want to throw away equipment and money. So, it is likely that the smart device continues to exist in an autonomous mode, and in fact, some of the equipment failed simply because of the cold. At Sojourner, power is supplied by solar panels. Perhaps he continues to accumulate information. Perhaps he will also give it to us.
Only now the hills that fell into the field of "view" of the rover were given a very ominous name: "Twin Peaks".