«Life on another planet will be discovered in the next 10-20 years»
«How many of you are smart enough to understand what you're looking at?» Such a question, according to Stanford University professor, immunologist Harry Nolan, is asked by aliens living among us on Earth when they meet people. Nolan believes the aliens are already around. We talked about the validity of such a statement with Professor Vladimir Lipunov. He is more cautious in his judgments, his story about the possibility of the existence of other civilizations sets one up for serious reflections on our existence.
Let's spend some time with Nolan, because it was his statement that was the reason to talk again about the possibility of the existence of aliens.
To be honest, I was surprised that he is a biologist, one of the top twenty scientists at Stanford University (few scientists of this level can simply say that they know where aliens live).
Harry Nolan studies the autoimmune system, cancer and leukemia. His lab is working on several major projects on Ebola, influenza, Zika and COVID-19.
According to Wikipedia, Nolan was first approached by U.S. intelligence and aerospace corporation officials to conduct research on biomaterials taken from «defense, government, and aerospace workers,» some of whom claimed to have seen unexplained phenomena in the air.
“Initially, with the help of an innovative blood test, he helped examine the brains of about 100 patients,” we read on the page introducing the scientist. And then comes the result: «Nolan stated that some parts of the subjects' brains were horribly damaged.»
How he then connected it all with aliens, where he was and what he saw, could not be found on the Internet. But at a conference in New York called «The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and Crashed UFOs,» Nolan stated that aliens have visited Earth and are still here. This was reported by the Daily Mail
According to Nolan, he attended hearings on extraterrestrial life in the US Congress, suggested that the inhabitants of the planet had met aliens before, but, just as the wild South American tribes were not surprised by the Spanish ships, not realizing their significance, so we simply do not see anything unusual in the aliens we meet.
“They show up and say, 'Which one of you is smart enough to know what you're looking at? Can you see what is in front of you in its true form? Do you see anomalous data spikes?» — Nolan is quoted by the publication.
He also touched on the topic of reverse engineering of unidentified flying objects shot down by American air defense — he said that if scientists manage to figure them out, this will lead to a technical revolution.
But let's not continue, as they say, to produce entities. We only note that for such a thing even the most outstanding of our scientific colleagues would have been subjected to scientific anathema long ago. However, this does not mean that our researchers do not reflect on eternal questions.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Lipunov is a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist, professor at the State Astronomical Institute. Sternberg Moscow State University, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, creator of the global robotic network of robotic telescopes «Master» of Moscow State University, science fiction writer.
Our system has been in existence since 2002. She works around the clock, for all the time she made a record number of images of the starry sky (hundreds of millions of images) and processed them. We found about three thousand new natural objects on them, including one of the largest, potentially dangerous asteroids with a diameter of 900 meters.
But as for the «little green men», the Universe, alas, is silent.
— The very question of whether there is life in the Universe arose much earlier than projects to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, sending signals to distant star clusters using radio telescopes. Our famous thinkers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Alexander Chizhevsky were thinking about this back in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the twentieth century, with the development of science, this issue became even more relevant. Once Enrico Fermi, a physicist, Nobel laureate, who participated in the Manhattan (atomic) project, went into a cafe and heard his colleagues argue at one of the tables about why we do not see aliens from outer space. Approaching the debaters, he said: “If aliens existed anywhere, then their spaceships would have long been in our solar system.”
What were his words based on? At that time, especially in the late 1940s and early 50s, the Japanese economic miracle happened — the country was developing at the same pace as China is now. Based on this speed of development, Fermi estimated: if this continues, the country will reach incredible power, increasing up to 10% of the increase in GDP per year. That is, after the Newton era and the beginning of the technological revolution, scientists saw an exponential growth of the economy. It was like an explosion.
On the one hand, this made it possible to feed a large population, on the other hand, it led to disturbing thoughts about what would happen next? And, as Fermi rightly noted, other civilizations should have developed exponentially in exactly the same way. And if there is at least one such person in the Universe, even if only 2-3 thousand years older than us (if we count from the beginning of the technological “explosion”), then she would certainly find an opportunity to get to know us. If this does not happen, then this is a real paradox!
— Already in five thousand years, a technological civilization like ours, if it continues to develop, will be able not only to establish contact, but and, theoretically, reach the level to create a new universe.
Now we are sure that only in our Galaxy there are billions of planets, and hundreds of millions of them are similar to the Earth. This became clear at the beginning of the 21st century, when exoplanets began to be discovered.
Scientists have seen that every third star similar to our Sun has a system of several planets, as in our solar system, and every planet probably has satellites like Saturn's moon Enceladus, under the ice of which it can also be life.
— This paradox is often called the Great Silence. The first thing that comes to mind is that civilizations do not contact us because they do not live long, they simply do not have time to develop to such a scale that their activities are visible to us.
Despite the statement some American scientists, there are no flying saucers or aliens themselves. Blaise Pascal once said: «The silent black sky terrifies me.» What exactly he was talking about, I don't know. But it seems to me that he hinted at our loneliness in the universe.
“If the speed of light is multiplied by the potential remaining lifetime of the planet, we get the distance that the signal sent would have had time to reach the next civilization. The most optimistic estimate is a thousand years. It is likely that many earlier civilizations that are at the stage of their technological heyday send us such signals, but while they are going on, they are greatly attenuated with time.
— Remembering Occam's razor, we rely so far only on knowledge about one world known to us — about our, earthly world.
Based on those not too positive events that take place in it, we can hypothesize that the technological stage of civilization is the last for civilizations, wherever they are. This means that there may not be any more perfect than we, if they existed before.
— There can be many options: it is possible that at some point outside law, progressive thinkers, scientists turn out to be, and society stops in development, again turning into animals.
There is also a legend about the northern people of the Hyperboreans, who lived happily, having comprehended the secret of being, nothing special happened to them, and they died quietly, peacefully …
— I would say this time is golden. We have recently joined it, we are still very young, we have many people who are not tired of seeking the truth, revealing the secrets of nature, but how long can this last?
“If the world were too complex, the whole mind could not emerge. But we see that knowledge is revealed to us in parts, and this means that our world is quite simple: the old theory, as a rule, is always a part of the new one and sheds light on the next one. Yes, we do not see the end yet, but we have a mind. And this means that someday we will all know.
— This is just a beautiful legend. But in reality, we have a very encouraging thing — a few hundred years of the life of civilization, at least. We still have to unravel the riddle of dark matter, dark energy, even dark light..
— This is still only a hypothesis, but it is already being discussed.
– Of course, it can be assumed that some talented student was given a course topic: “Creating a New Universe”, he worked a little, and we started moving (smiles). Theoretically, anything can be imagined. But once again I bring you back to reality — scientists must proceed from what is known and verifiable. So far, this is the only way.
Solving the problem of the “Great Silence” will make a real revolution in our worldview, and not only in its physical understanding, but also in the mental one. The contradiction of this Silence and many rays of light breaking through the black velvet of the night will someday be removed. Awareness of the new will produce a real explosion inside our world, and perhaps we will begin to create the laws of new physics.
— I think that with the acceleration of scientific and technological development that is now observed in all over the world, primitive life on another planet will be discovered by us in the next 10-20 years. But this will not yet prove that we are not alone in the Universe, because it will not work with the simplest.