Anti-gravity, heat rays and aetheric cities - the past century has not lacked ideas for space exploration. Much of what scientists and science fiction writers dreamed of came true, albeit on different technical principles. Flying into space is now an ordinary event. Nevertheless, the human leg has not yet set foot on the moon. About what space projects were implemented and where we should look for brothers in mind - in the material of RIA Novosti.
Flights to the moon
The French writer Jules Verne dedicated two novels to space travel: From a Cannon to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1869). In the United States, after the Civil War, members of the gun club decide to send a hollow metal shell-car with three travelers inside to a natural satellite of the Earth. The second cosmic speed is given to it with the help of a charge of gunpowder exploded in an underground mine. Oxygen reserves in flight are replenished through chemical reactions using berthollet's salt and caustic soda.
In The First Men on the Moon, published in 1901, English science fiction writer H. G. Wells sent people into space in a capsule made of mysterious Cavorite material that defies the laws of gravity. Keyword, synthesized from metals with an admixture of some gaseous substances, did not allow any kind of "radiant energy" to pass through, as well as gravity.
In fact, the first space station landed on the Moon in 1959 - it was the Soviet Luna-2 spacecraft. Ten years later, people were there. The technology turned out to be different - jet-powered engines. But if anti-gravity remains a fantasy, then Jules Verne's projectile car can be implemented in a device called a railgun.
Another way to overcome the gravitational field is the space elevator, first proposed by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the late 19th century. Nowadays, the idea has been theoretically well substantiated: if you fix one end of the cable above the geostationary orbit, for example, with the help of an asteroid, and the other at the surface of the Earth, then you can start up a lift and deliver cargo to orbit or further, beyond its limits.
“The space elevator - like a stationary cable transport system - will never be built on Earth. There are a lot of technical obstacles to this, but most importantly, there are no problems that such an elevator would solve. For the delivery of cargo to orbit by an elevator cost the same as with conventional rockets, two million kilograms must be sent into space per year, that is, about six tons per day. Moreover, to maintain the stability of the elevator, the same number of tons must be lowered to the Earth. The solution to what task or problem may require lifting into space and returning six tons of cargo every day?
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The same should be said about the railgun: in fact, it is a cannon, and not every cargo can be launched with it due to high shock overloads, and those that can be delivered cheaper by conventional missiles. But I am sure that the concept of a tether system and an electromagnetic gun will come in handy outside the Earth, if someday the mass exploration of the Moon, Mars and asteroids really begins,”comments Anton Pervushin, science fiction writer, specialist in the history of astronautics to RIA Novosti.
Is there life on Mars
In the late 19th century, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, discovered a network of straight canals on Mars. It was suggested that they were created by intelligent beings, whose civilization has reached a high level.
Developing this idea, HG Wells wrote the novel "War of the Worlds" about the invasion of Earth by the inhabitants of the Red Planet. The Martians arrived in metal cylinders and immediately acted aggressively. They destroyed the people who came to meet with the help of a heat beam, the modern analogue of which, the laser, was invented almost half a century later.
Now the nature of the Martian channels has been revealed. They turned out to be an optical illusion, which is confirmed by high-precision photography of the planet's surface from spacecraft.
Signs of intelligent life and anything living in general on the Red Planet have not yet been found. Nevertheless, Mars is considered promising for the search for extraterrestrial life. Soviet biochemist Norayr Sissakian, the founder of Soviet space medicine, spoke about this back in the mid-1960s. According to modern data, it is most likely to reveal signs of life in the northern hemisphere of the planet, which in ancient times was covered by a giant ocean of liquid water.
Rocket rockets and the colonization of Mars
The idea of jet engines delivering a spacecraft with people to the Earth's orbit or beyond was substantiated by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky at the beginning of the 20th century. The book Out of the Earth, published in 1918, details the journey of humans to the moon in 2017 in a homemade 100-meter device consisting of 20 rocket rockets. There was a wardroom, quartz windows, outer skin of a very refractory material.
Tsiolkovsky provided for a life support system, and space suits for spacewalk, as well as chambers with liquid, where passengers were saved from overloads during takeoff. He described in detail the on-board greenhouse, which provided space travelers with oxygen and plant food. They communicated with the Earth through telegrams. By the way, the first message from the rocket was read on April 10. Tsiolkovsky almost guessed the date that the whole world now celebrates as Cosmonautics Day.
Almost everything from the book, with the exception of the settling of other planets by colonists, has already been implemented.
The concept of a space biosphere was tested in a series of Soviet experiments "Bios" in Krasnoyarsk. In 1964, they began to create a closed ecological system capable of providing people with water and oxygen for a long time due to the cultivation of microalgae. Soon the experiment was supplemented with a phytotron, where vegetables and cereals were grown. The Bios-3 installation, built at the Institute of Biophysics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 1972-1973 set a record for the duration of the isolation of people. Three experimenters spent six months in the facility.
In 2011, a similar experiment was organized at the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences in preparation for an interplanetary flight. The crew spent 520 days on the Mars-500 installation.
Plans for the exploration of Mars were recently announced by Elon Musk, founder of the private space company SpaceX. He is going to send a ship to the Red Planet in 2022 and then build a glass dome for the colonialists, a greenhouse, and a power plant there. His goal is to create a million-strong city on Mars that could support itself.
“This is a pure utopia so far. SpaceX has no experience of launching even the simplest spacecraft with a crew, no experience of docking. The project of a huge ship is just a beautiful picture, nobody is seriously engaged in its construction. The problem of soft landing on Mars of such a bulky structure has not been solved. No one has ever taken off from Mars itself. All of this will take decades, not years. And here the main question arises: who will pay for the "banquet" all this time, without a chance to extract any profit? Elon Musk is an excellent engineer and entrepreneur, he will surprise the world more than once, but Mars is too tough for him in the foreseeable future,”says Pervushin.
Microbes in outer space
The hypothesis that living matter exists in outer space and travels from planet to planet entered scientific circulation in the middle of the 19th century. This is called panspermia - a mixture of different seeds in Greek. Theoretically, the possibility of space transfer of microbes in the form of sperm, or spores, by the force of light pressure was substantiated by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist.
According to this hypothesis, sperm came to Earth and gave rise to life. Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky believed that life in the Universe was carried by meteorites. Chemist Alexander Oparin, on the contrary, believed that living matter could be formed in chemical reactions at an early stage of the formation of the Earth. His experiments on the synthesis of organic molecules that make up a living cell and proteins served as the scientific basis for the theory of abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of life on the planet. However, until now, both panspermia and abiogenesis remain in the category of scientific concepts awaiting clear, direct evidence.
“Confirmation of the panspermia hypothesis will fundamentally change nothing in the question of the origin of life. Even if life originated in some other place, you still have to figure out the mechanism of how it originated. Suppose we find out tomorrow that the first microorganisms flew to Earth from Mars - this will only make the problem even more confusing. On the other hand, if we find traces of a fundamentally different life, a lot will change: biological geocentrism will have to be abandoned once and for all, and the most incredible theories about life in the Universe will not be fantastic,”continues Pervushin.
The search for traces of intelligent beings, living matter, including fossils, continues in several directions at once: the study of meteorites, lunar and Martian soil, the identification of liquid water on planets, observation of the planets of the solar system using spacecraft, the detection of exoplanets - worlds similar to the Earth outside the solar system.
Experiments on the synthesis of living matter in laboratory conditions, on the study of the viability of microbes on the ISS are also being improved. The SETI project - the search for radio signals of intelligent beings in space - has not been forgotten either. And in 2016, Russian businessman Yuri Milner, together with physicist Stephen Hawking, presented Breakthrough Starshot - a project to launch a series of nanosatellites to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, where an exoplanet was discovered.
“To accelerate the Milner-Hawking probe, a laser installation will be required, which consumes 100 gigawatts of energy. One gigawatt of energy is the capacity of an entire block of a nuclear power plant. The whole Crimea consumes so much. How to generate so much energy and accumulate it? For some reason, the authors of the project do not even think about it, but without energy there will be no flight,”the expert says.
Artificial planets
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was one of the first to build habitable dwellings in space. He imagined them in the form of cones with their base turned towards the Sun in order to intercept thermal energy. The cones connected to each other form "chains of ethereal cities", where greenhouses are green all year round. The scientist hoped that people would colonize the solar system with the help of ethereal cities.
In 1960, American physicist Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of an artificial sphere that surrounds a star to make the most of its energy. The diameter of the sphere is about 150 million kilometers; the substance of the whole planet will be spent on construction. Man is quite capable of making its inner surface habitable, thus solving the problem of overpopulation of the Earth.
To an outside observer, Dyson spheres will look like powerful sources of infrared radiation, which means that they can be detected by ground and orbiting telescopes. The very first results of such observations revealed several promising objects in deep space. They were listed in the book “Universe. A life. Reason Soviet astronomer Iosif Shklovsky.
According to the classification of radio astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, developed back in 1964, a type II civilization is capable of building a Dyson sphere, that is, having reached a fundamentally new level of technological development, consuming huge amounts of energy. A Type III civilization will be able to harness the resources and energy of the entire galaxy.
Reports of candidate objects for the role of Dyson Spheres occasionally stir up the public. So, for three years now, US astronomers have been observing the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, which flickers mysteriously, which may indicate the existence of a man-made sphere around it.
Tatiana Pichugina
