Description
The path of man to the stars has never been simple and straightforward. There are no straightforward paths in the Universe at all. Obeying the laws of the universe, all cosmic bodies move along curved trajectories — orbits. People are also space inhabitants — whether they understand it or not. And the laws of our World, in a philosophical sense, affect them in a similar way. In our destinies, we make turn after turn around certain centers of our interests, move towards the goal, but suddenly begin to retreat back, describe loops like the intricate movements of the planets. In general, the evolutionary line of the entire human race has the same character — the entire civilization sometimes reaches a dead end, with difficulty gets out of it, rushes in different directions before finding a more or less suitable path — sometimes by trial and error, sometimes by mystical clues from the heavens. But most often it seems that we are in the dark, and do not see the way. How can we move forward in such difficult conditions, when no one has yet trodden our path?
Something similar can be said about sailors — the pioneers of sea spaces, discoverers of new continents and oceans. Their path is full of unexpected and surprising events, but very poor in landmarks. And therefore, luck sometimes depends entirely on those sailors who stand watch day and night in the observation barrel at the top end of the ship's mast. They peer intently into the distance, and when their solemn cry "Land!" is heard above the deck, the entire ship's crew understands that they were sailing in the right direction, that they were not sailing in vain.
Our planet can be compared to such a ship. And it also has lookouts. These are astronomers — priests of the goddess Urania. Every night they look straight ahead along the course of our universal voyage. They are the ones who discovered all the new cosmic lands, all the laws of life of this huge world. Now astronomers, armed with modern "spyglasses", are ready to warn us about unwanted encounters with dangerous space vagabonds — comets and asteroids, can point out alternative energy sources — we still have a very long way to go and there is definitely not enough oil and coal for it, new territories are being sought for the establishment of earthly colonies — human settlements on other planets in the very near future.
It is sometimes breathtaking to realize how far we have come on this cosmic path. And yet the frigate of our knowledge has been sailing full speed across the expanses of the Universe for not so long. For one and a half thousand years it stood on the shallows of delusions, dogmas and the fear of seeing what exists in reality. About four centuries ago, a sudden wave pushed this barnacle-covered vessel off the reef and, slowly gaining speed, it moved forward — towards the alluring, frantically calling to itself starry distances and a fantastic future.
In this album, I tried to paint a picture with musical strokes — mixing notes and noises — illustrating the changes in our consciousness — a picture explaining how the views of the World changed among those representatives of humanity who chose the role of lookouts for our ship named "Earth".
After all, even astronomers are sometimes mistaken, reluctant to replace old theories with new ones — more accurate, discard old ideas about the harmony of the world in order to find modern ones.
Already in the Renaissance, it took about a century to recognize that our place in the World is not central, and another two hundred years were spent to understand that the World has no center at all — at least in the geometric sense in which we find the center on the earthly scale and in earthly objects.
Only in the last hundred years has astronomy used electronics in its research and the transition to software technologies occurred overcoming significant resistance from supporters of human uniqueness and indispensability. But now robotic space telescopes have almost completely displaced the living observer from the process of discovering new objects, from the process of measuring the exact positions of cosmic bodies. Man can only reap the fruits of such measurements and try to draw conclusions based on data already processed by other robots.
The science of astronomy has changed dramatically. Instead of hundreds or thousands of objects to study, astronomers have to deal with hundreds of billions. And all of these objects are very important. Some may harbor life, some pose a threat. But they all give us a chance to learn something new about our World. And this knowledge — its abundance — leads to the fact that we can no longer remain the same. This space journey has taken us so far, where we can hardly recognize ourselves, and comparing with the images that we corresponded to in the recent past, we begin to realize that we cannot go back, and we cannot live in the old way.
The clocks of our computer assistants measure time in billionths of a second, streams of information in gigabytes and terabytes rush into our heads, even when we go for a walk we determine our location with the help of space satellites, our letters to another continent are delivered by a computer network in less than a second, and we can see the interlocutor on the screen of the communicator in the palm of our hand, when we are separated by tens of thousands of kilometers — wasn't this the reality that science fiction writers described some half a century ago? — we are already in it.
Believe me, the next step of such a scale of achievements will be overcome by us in a much shorter time. In 5-10 years we will see this frontier of knowledge as distant as we now estimate the level of our technical development, which dates back to the middle of the 20th century. The speed of our flight in space-time has increased many times!
And in this fast-paced era, it is more important than ever to look ahead — into the future flying towards us. In order to recognize it in time, to be able to bypass obstacles and false goals, to find the right landmarks. Who knows what awaits us in that unknown World of the future, which we will enter tomorrow? Perhaps we will find brothers in mind, whom we have been looking for a long time? Perhaps tomorrow will give us the technology of controlling Gravity or even Time. And all these milestones on our path will be the first to be noticed by the forward-looking of the Earth — astronomers, astrophysicists.
Now they have such an important role. Once upon a time, their work seemed to many as impractical passive contemplation of stars that are out of reach. They were called Astrologers — those who count the stars. But in English there is another term — Stargazer — a person who clings to the stars with his gaze. He does not count them, he peers into them — he is inseparable from them, he is a part of them. And through it, we are all connected to the stars by an inseparable thread. Once upon a time, this was not felt, did not seem relevant, important. But everything changes. And now the fate of humanity depends on the people "clung to the stars" — on the "Stargazers".
