On December 1, 2009, the Department for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon at the UK Department of Defense ceased its work. According to a widespread statement by officials, the reason for the closure of the UFO desk was the absolute uselessness of the department in the framework of ensuring the country's security. For 50 years of intense research, not a single reliable confirmation of the existence of "flying saucers" and "aliens" has been received.
Of course, the closure of the British military department for the study of UFOs is nothing more than a curiosity … and the "department" itself was a tiny office in which only two people worked - an officer and a non-commissioned officer, whose duties included the collection and systematization of all information, coming from UFO eyewitnesses. Alas, these two researchers could not find anything worthwhile, and all the evidence obtained turned out to be banal photo forgeries or a consequence of any rare natural phenomena (halos, mirages, etc.).
In every joke there is a grain of a joke - behind all the seeming frivolity of the event that happened on the shores of Foggy Albion, there is a real Problem - an impenetrable blank wall that stood in the way of the development of modern science.
Lack of cosmic wonders
The fact that the world is far from easy, people guessed for a long time - even Aurelius Augustine, who lived in the IV century A. D., reasonably noted that all the most important discoveries and achievements of human civilization took place in the recent past - the memory of generations has preserved the names of most of the authors of ancient treatises and discoveries.
Eratosthenes was the first to calculate the diameter of the Earth - a cunning Greek calculated the characteristics of the planet using the simplest trigonometry (the difference in the angles of inclination of the sun's rays in Siena and Alexandria, with a known distance between the two cities).
Ptolemy created his inimitable "Almageist" - a collection of astronomical knowledge, including a catalog of the positions of 1022 stars.
The story of Herodotus, the Pythagorean theorem, the Hippocratic oath …
There is nothing to be surprised at: according to modern concepts, the duration of the active phase of human Civilization hardly exceeds 6,000 years - from the moment the first cities, the writing system and the rudiments of ancient cultures appeared.
Much more important is another circumstance: the existence of Civilization obeys an exponential law - the longer it exists, the more intensively it develops.
1861: "I saw a red day, there is no slave in Russia" … and, just 100 years after the abolition of serfdom, the king's "seven" carried Yuri Gagarin into space.
None of the science fiction writers of the mid-20th century could predict the further direction of evolution. Remember, as in Efremov's "The Adromeda Nebula": "Erg Noor sat down at the levers of the calculating machine."
Absurd?
Instead of flying to Mars, microelectronics and information management have become the main global trend. August 2006: Japanese company Hitachi announced a 1 terabyte hard drive - a massive academic library in the palm of your hand! Writing similar textual information on paper would require 50,000 tree trunks.
Civilization is evolving at an explosive speed - this whole huge, incredibly complex world was known in just a few decades of the last century … sounds too boastful, but the fact remains: it took modern science a few years to deduce the basic laws of the universe. Sensitive antennas of giant radio telescopes allowed to look into the depths of the Universe, and magnetic colliders made it possible to split matter into individual quarks and gluons. Humanity began to understand how this world functions - the result was the emergence of nuclear technologies and unique electronic devices. For the first time in history, we got a real opportunity to destroy our "cradle" - a nuclear flame is capable of moving mountains and radically changing the conditions of life on Earth.
As for the success of genetic engineering and space flights - who are you going to surprise with such events? Unless the launch was unsuccessful, and the exploded launch vehicle blossomed in the sky with colorful fireworks.
It is scary to imagine what heights Civilization will achieve in another thousand years! And after 10 thousand? (of course, subject to a successful development of events - no world nuclear wars and epidemics of incurable fever)
Arecibo Observatory. A 300-meter radio telescope mirror is installed in the crater of an extinct volcano
On November 16, 1974, a radio message was sent from Arecibo towards the constellation Hercules, containing basic data about man, the solar system and our civilization. Decoding a 1679-digit message requires a lot of mathematical tricks and extraordinary logic
According to the modern cosmological model of the Universe, the age of our world is 13.8 billion years. How many times does the duration of the active phase of human civilization fit into this figure? More than 2 million times!
Two million times a civilization like ours could arise somewhere in the depths of space, reach the heights of knowledge and disappear again in the millstones of merciless time. Or vice versa - having emerged once, continue its incomprehensible path through billions of years, reaching to this day some completely unreal power on a galactic scale.
In 1988, earthly astronomers discovered the first exoplanet - a massive celestial body orbiting the star Gamma Cepheus A.
By May 2013, the number of detected exoplanets near the nearest stars reached 889 units - almost each of the nearest stars, which the researchers look at, has its own planetary system. The Milky Way Galaxy is made up of 200 billion stars. The number of galaxies in the visible part of the Universe is estimated at about the same figure.
Upsilon Andromeda D is the fourth planet in the system of the sun-like star υ Andromedae
The spectrum shows the presence of water vapor
A huge number of possible options for the origin of life, billions of years, the rapid pace of development of civilizations …
Substituting these values (adjusted for various unfavorable factors) into the Dyson formula and other cosmological calculations, scientists have obtained a unique result - all probability theories show that the number of highly developed civilizations in the Universe by now should be calculated as a number with many zeros!
According to all calculations, the indescribable should be happening in the heavens: driven by an unknown force, stars should collide and the "arms" of spiral galaxies should unravel; Dyson spheres or other bizarre artificial objects should be built all over the sky.
Without any illusions about the kindness and peacefulness of technological earth-like civilizations, we must watch the fierce battles of starships and "flying saucers". Highly developed aliens must burn each other with thermonuclear fire and explode the nuclei of galaxies, the "death star" must emit its incinerating rays, and many cosmic bodies must undergo changes and terraforming right before our eyes in order to expand the living space of extraterrestrial civilizations.
The entire electromagnetic spectrum must be permeated with signals - by rotating the frequency tuning verniers, radio amateurs could catch the broadcast of the DOM-200 reality show from the constellation Eridanus (a million-year-long television broadcast - why not?).
Scientifically speaking, a lot of inexplicable and mysterious phenomena of clearly artificial origin must occur in the starry sky, which would certainly attract the attention of earthly researchers. Those same "cosmic miracles", the appearance of which was predicted by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky!
BUT NOTHING HAPPENS
Endless space is quiet and calm - only velvet blackness and cold twinkling of stars.
With the help of modern astronomical instruments, the human mind has penetrated into such depths of the Universe, where even the most daring imagination cannot penetrate: the cellular structure of the cosmos was discovered, relic radiation and black holes were discovered. The sensitivity of astronomical instruments is amazing: the energy received by all radio telescopes of the Earth for the entire period of the existence of radio astronomy is not enough to heat a drop of water by 1 ° C. A modern radio telescope is capable of examining even the most distant quasars, 13 billion light years distant from Earth.
In vain! There are no signs of "cosmic miracles" - all movements, vibrations and characteristics of the investigated celestial objects are subject to the influence of gravity and other natural causes.
June 1967. Has it really happened? Postgraduate student Jocelyn Bell once again verifies the data from the Cambridge University Observatory - there can be no mistake, a source of periodic radio pulses has been found in the sky. This is an extraterrestrial radio station broadcasting!
The object was assigned the index LGM-1 (Little Green Men - "little green men"), but, alas, everything turned out to be much simpler - scientists discovered the first pulsar: a madly rotating neutron star with an offset magnetic pole. To date, more than 1800 such objects have been discovered in the Universe, whose natural origin is no longer in doubt.
Pulsar in the Crab Nebula.
The picture was taken by the Chandra space X-ray observatory
To date, almost the only case of a "cosmic miracle" can be considered only a strange radio signal received at the Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 *. The signal, designated Wow ("Wow!"), Was just a minute burst of radio emission at a frequency of 1420 MHz - so as not to tire the reader with long excursions into physics, I just note that this frequency is directly related to the fundamental laws of nature and is considered the highest priority channel for search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The laws of physics are the same for everyone - the "aliens" will probably guess to use this particular frequency.
As for the Wow signal itself, its nature remained unclear. Failure of the receiving equipment, accidental reflection from a piece of space debris, or maybe really … Unknown. The signal was no longer repeated.
Tower of babel
The phenomenon known as the Great Silence of the Universe is increasingly becoming a crisis in modern natural science. The absence of "cosmic miracles" has only two reasonable explanations:
1. We are alone in the universe
2. Something terrible is happening before our eyes
Also, there is a third version - "the contact took place, but the authorities are hiding," but we will not dwell on this issue in detail, since here begins pure conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
You can somehow come to terms with the thought of our loneliness in the vastness of the vast Space (scientists admit that this is an absolutely incredible situation - life can have countless forms, and a huge selection of habitats gives an amazing picture of a densely populated Universe).
The second response causes goosebumps running down the spine. The crisis of modern natural science is directly linked to the upcoming crisis of our civilization - we, like thousands of other highly developed cultures, will face inevitable death. The myth of the Tower of Babel turned out to be a formidable prophecy: having reached a certain limit, civilization disappears (disintegrates / degrades / collapses).
Causes?
Genetic engineering games. Meteor falling. An epidemic of incurable fever.
Perhaps old Einstein was right:
“I don’t know what kind of weapon the Third World War will be fought, but the Fourth - with stones and sticks”
Warm southern night, cicadas singing. A bright flash of a match splits the darkness for a moment, a trickle of smoke flows upward. Damn … and there is something to think about here. "Summer Tregolnik" - Lyra, Altair, Deneb … The swan, spreading its wings, flies along the Milky Way … Pegasus … a little higher in the zenith the letter "M" is inscribed … Cassiopeia … somewhere here, in a dark gap, the Andromeda Nebula is hidden, but its the dim shine is illuminated by the glow of the big city. Some lights are floating among the stars. Wonders? Unlikely. Just a belated flight from Sheremetyevo.
Black haze, stars twinkle
And they hide something from people …
