Blue dot. The cosmic future of humanity Text. Space and Solar System ExplorationMost Outstanding Early Achievements

02.08.2024

Reviews of the book The True, Mad, Guilty Moriarty l The True, Mad, Guilty

Life at Full Power - Jim Lauer, Tony Schwartz

Famous pirates of the Caribbean, next to whom the movie Jack Sparrow is just a boy

As the sunlight reflects off the probe, the Earth appears to be in the beam of light, as if this small world has some special meaning. But this is just a game of geometry and optics. The sun emits light equally in all directions. If the picture had been taken a little earlier or a little later, the Earth would not have been in the sun's ray.

Why is her color so azure? Partly because of the sea, partly because of the sky. Although the water in a glass is clear, it absorbs red light a little more actively than blue. If the water thickness is tens of meters or more, then red light is absorbed almost completely, and mainly blue light is reflected into outer space. Likewise, at a short distance the air appears completely transparent. Nevertheless - by the way, this effect is perfectly conveyed in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci - the further away the object, the bluer it appears. Why? Because the air scatters the blue rays of the Sun much better than the red ones. So, this speck has a bluish tint because the planet has a thick but transparent atmosphere, as well as deep oceans of liquid water. Where is the white one from? On a normal day, the Earth is about half covered by white water clouds.

We are able to explain the whitish blue of this small world, since we know it well. Whether an alien scientist stranded on the outskirts of our solar system can confidently conclude that one of the planets has oceans, clouds and a thick atmosphere is a moot point. For example, Neptune is blue, but mostly for different reasons. From such a distant vantage point, the Earth may not arouse any interest.

But for us it is special. Look at this spot. Here. This is our house. This is us. Everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you have heard of, every person who has ever existed has spent their life here. The sum of all our joys and sufferings, the thousands of established religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, all the hunters and gatherers, the heroes and the cowards, the creators and destroyers of civilizations, all the kings and peasants, the couples in love, the mothers and fathers, the hopeful children, the inventors and explorers. , moral authorities, unprincipled politicians, all the “superstars” and “great leaders”, all the saints and sinners in the history of our species lived here - on a speck of dust suspended in a ray of light.

The Earth is a very small platform in the vast cosmic arena. Think about what rivers of blood all these generals and emperors shed in order (in triumph and glory) to momentarily become the rulers of some part of this speck. Think about the endless cruelty with which the inhabitants of one corner of this point attacked the inhabitants of another corner, barely distinguishable from them, how often misunderstandings arose between them, with what ecstasy they killed each other, how furious was their hatred.

This blue dot is a challenge to our posturing, our imaginary self-importance, the illusion that we occupy some kind of privileged position in the Universe. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great all-encompassing cosmic darkness. We are lost in this huge emptiness, and there is not even a hint that help will come from somewhere and someone will save us from ourselves.

Until now, the Earth is the only inhabited world known to us. We no longer know of a single place where our species could move, at least in the near future. Visit - yes. To gain a foothold - not yet. Whether we like it or not, at present only the Earth can shelter us.

It is said that studying astronomy builds humility and character. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the frailty of human whims more than this distant image of a tiny world. In my opinion, it emphasizes the responsibility we have to treat each other more humanely, how we must preserve and protect this little blue speck, the only home we know.

Aberration of light

If a person were to be removed from the world, everything that would remain there would certainly go astray without purpose or direction and would not be transformed into anything.

Francis Bacon. On the Wisdom of the Ancients (1619)

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: look again at the pale blue spot described in the previous chapter. Look at it carefully. Look at it again and try to convince yourself that God created the entire Universe for the sake of one of the approximately 10 million species that inhabit this speck of dust. Then take it a step further: imagine that everything was created for only a fraction of the members of that species, grouped together by gender, ethnicity, or religion. If this does not seem extremely unlikely to you, choose another point in the photo. Imagine that it is inhabited by some other form of intelligent life. These creatures also worship a god who created everything around them just for their sake. Can you take something like this seriously?

An outstanding popularizer of science, a wonderful storyteller, a passionate promoter of space, and a visionary, Carl Sagan believes that the desire to wander and expand the boundaries of knowledge is inherent in human nature and is associated with our survival as a species. His candid, engrossing book interweaves philosophical reflections with enthusiastic descriptions of triumphant exploration of planets and satellites, both by man and robotic missions to the Moon. By introducing us to our neighbors in space, Sagan not only enlightens and delights the reader, he also helps to understand how to protect the Earth.

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The given introductory fragment of the book Blue dot. The Cosmic Future of Humanity (K. E. Sagan, 1994) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

After all, the whole Earth is a dot, and what a nook and cranny this village is.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor. Meditations, book 4 (c. 170)

According to the teachings of all astronomers, the volume of the Earth, which seems huge to us, is only one small point in relation to the entire Universe.

Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330–395), last major ancient Roman historian. Quote from the book "Roman History"

The spacecraft was already very far from home, beyond the orbit of the farthest planet and high above the ecliptic plane. The ecliptic is an imaginary plane, like a race track, within which the orbits of the planets generally lie. The probe was racing away from the Sun at a speed of more than 64,000 km/h. But in early February 1990, he received an urgent message from Earth.

The device obediently turned its cameras back to the planets, which were already far away. The scanning platform moved slowly, capturing one fragment of the sky after another. The device took 60 photographs and stored them digitally on its tape drive. Then slowly, in March, April and May, he radioed this information to Earth. Each image consisted of 640,000 individual elements (pixels), reminiscent of the dots in a newspaper phototelegram or on a pointillist canvas. The ship was located 6 billion km from Earth, so each pixel transmitted at the speed of light reached Earth in five and a half hours. Perhaps these images could have been obtained faster, but large radio telescopes in California, Spain and Australia, receiving this “whisper” from the far reaches of the solar system, also served other spacecraft plowing interplanetary space. Among them was Magellan, heading towards Venus, and Galileo, paving a winding path to Jupiter.

Voyager 1 was so high above the ecliptic plane because in 1981 it passed very close to Titan, Saturn's giant moon. The twin Voyager 2 probe was guided along a different trajectory, within the ecliptic plane, so it could carry out the exploration of Uranus and Neptune that made it famous. The two Voyagers explored four planets and nearly sixty moons. These probes were masterpieces of human engineering, the true pride of the American space program. They will remain in the history books even when almost everything else about our time is forgotten.

Voyagers were guaranteed to function only until they met Saturn. I thought it would be good if, just after passing Saturn, they took a “last look” towards home. I knew that from Saturn the Earth would seem very tiny to Voyager and he would not be able to discern any of its details. Our planet will simply look like a luminous point, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from many other such points - nearby planets and distant suns. But precisely because such a picture allows us to appreciate the mediocrity of our world, it was still worth acquiring it.

Mariners painstakingly mapped the coastlines of the continents. Geographers documented these discoveries in the form of atlases and globes. Photographs of tiny patches of Earth were first taken from balloons and airplanes, then from rockets on their brief ballistic flights, and finally from orbiting satellites. The result is approximately the same perspective that you see with the naked eye at a distance of about three centimeters from a large globe. We were all taught that the Earth is a ball and we are glued to it by the force of gravity; our position truly begins to be realized only after you see the famous photograph from Apollo, where the entire Earth fits into the frame. This photo was taken by astronauts from Apollo 17 during the last manned mission to the Moon.

Photography has become a kind of icon of our time. It shows Antarctica, which Americans and Europeans are accustomed to drawing “below,” and all of Africa stretches above it. We see Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya - countries where the first people lived. In the upper right corner you can see Saudi Arabia and the region that Europeans call the Middle East. At the top edge of the photo, the Mediterranean Sea is barely visible, on the shores of which so much was born, from which global civilization was later formed. It is easy to highlight the blue ocean, yellow-red Sahara and Arabian desert, brown-green forests and steppes in the picture.

But still, there are no traces of a person in this photograph. It is not noticeable how we have transformed the surface of the planet; neither our machines nor ourselves are visible. We are too small, and our urban planning is too insignificant, for all this to be visible from a spaceship located between the Earth and the Moon. When viewed from this point, not the slightest trace of the nationalism overwhelming us is visible. The Apollo photographs of the entire Earth conveyed to a wider audience something that astronomers had long known: on a planetary scale—not to mention a stellar or galactic scale—people are just an insignificant, thin living film on the surface of a dim, lonely ball of rock and metal. .

It seemed to me that another photograph of the Earth, taken from a distance hundreds of thousands of times greater than the Apollo photographs, could contribute to a further understanding of our true situation and our nature. Scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity fully understood that the Earth was just a point in the vast cosmos, but no one could see this with their own eyes. Here is our first chance to verify this (and, perhaps, the last, if we talk about the next decades).

Many Voyager project staff at NASA supported me. But in the image taken from the outskirts of the solar system, the Earth is too close to the Sun, like a moth caught in a flame. Did we want to point the camera directly at the Sun and risk burning out the probe's Vidicon system? Wouldn't it have been better to postpone this shot until the apparatus had taken all the scientific photographs of Uranus and Neptune, if it could operate that long at all?

Therefore, we paused - quite a long one - until in 1981 the vehicles passed Saturn, in 1986 - Uranus, and in 1989 both Voyagers went beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. Finally the time has come. But first we needed to calibrate a few instruments, so we waited a little longer. Although the probes were well located, the equipment still worked perfectly and no routine photographs were required to be taken, some employees spoke out against it. They said it had nothing to do with science. Then it turned out that the technicians developing and transmitting radio commands for the Voyagers were subject to immediate dismissal or transfer to another job immediately after the completion of the project - NASA was strapped for funds. Immediately after we took this photo, we would have to part with them. By the way, at the last moment, right as Voyager 2 flew past Neptune, the NASA administrator, Rear Admiral Richard Truly, intervened and ensured that these pictures would be taken. Control specialists Candy Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Carolyn Porco of the University of Arizona developed a sequence of commands and calculated the length of the photographic exposure.

This resulted in a mosaic pattern of squares, with planets in the foreground and a scattering of distant stars in the background. We were able to photograph not only the Earth, but also five of the nine known planets in the solar system. Mercury, located in the innermost orbit, was lost in the glare of the Sun; Mars and Pluto turned out to be too small, dim and/or distant. Uranus and Neptune were so dim that they could only be captured with very long exposures; Accordingly, their images were blurred due to the movement of the probe. This is exactly what our planets would look like from an alien ship approaching the solar system after a long interstellar journey.

From this distance, the planets appear as just luminous spots, clear or blurry, even through the high-resolution telescope on Voyager. This is approximately how we see planets with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth - luminous points, brighter than most stars. If you observe the Earth for several months, it will seem that it, like other planets, moves among the stars. Just by looking at such a speck, you cannot judge what this planet is like, what is on it, what its past was like and whether anyone lives there now.

Translator Oleg Sivchenko

Scientific editor Vladimir Surdin, Ph.D. physical – mat. sciences

Editor Anton Nikolsky

Project Manager I. Seregina

Proofreaders M. Milovidova, E. Aksenova

Computer layout A. Fominov

Cover design Yu. Buga

Cover illustration Shutterstock

The publication was prepared in partnership with the Trajectory Foundation for Non-profit Initiatives (with the financial support of N.V. Katorzhnov).

The Trajectory Foundation for Support of Scientific, Educational and Cultural Initiatives (www.traektoriafdn.ru) was created in 2015. The foundation's programs are aimed at stimulating interest in science and scientific research, implementing educational programs, increasing the intellectual level and creative potential of young people, increasing the competitiveness of domestic science and education, popularizing science and culture, and promoting the ideas of preserving cultural heritage. The Foundation organizes educational and popular science events throughout Russia and promotes the creation of successful practices of interaction within the educational and scientific community.

As part of the publishing project, the Trajectory Foundation supports the publication of the best examples of Russian and foreign popular science literature.

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O wanderer!

May your generation see miracles in reality

Cosmonautics and solar system exploration
Most Outstanding Early Achievements

USSR (Russia)

1957 The first artificial satellite of the Earth (Sputnik-1)

1957 The first animal in space (Sputnik 2)

1959 The first spacecraft to reach escape velocity (“Luna-1”)

1959 The first artificial satellite launched into heliocentric orbit (“Luna-1”)

1959 The first spacecraft to reach another celestial body (“Luna 2” – lunar landing)

1959 Managed to see the far side of the Moon for the first time (Luna 3)

1961 The first manned space flight (Vostok-1)

1961 The first man in orbit around the Earth (Vostok-1)

1961 The first space probes sent to other planets (Venera 1 to Venus) and the 1962 Mars 1 to Mars

1963 The first female cosmonaut (Vostok 6)

1964 First group space flight (Voskhod-1)

1965 The first manned spacewalk (Voskhod 2)

1966 The first space probe entered the atmosphere of another planet (“Venera-3” - into the atmosphere of Venus)

1966 First successful soft landing on another celestial body (“Luna 9” - on the Moon)

1966 The first spacecraft to enter the orbit of another celestial body (“Luna-10” around the Moon)

1970 The first robotic expedition to deliver samples from a celestial body (“Luna-16” - from the Moon)

1970 The first self-propelled vehicle on another celestial body (“Luna-17” - on the Moon)

1971 First soft landing on another planet (“Mars-3” – on Mars)

1972 The first landing on another planet that had scientific value (Venera 8 - on Venus)

1979–1980 The first manned space flight, which lasted about a year, which is comparable to the duration of the flight to Mars

1983 First complete radar mapping of another planet (“Venera-15” – Venus)

1985 The first balloon probe deployed in the atmosphere of another planet (“Vega-1” on Venus)

1986 First close contact with a comet (“Vega-1” – Halley’s Comet)

1986 The first space station to employ interchangeable crews (“Mir”)

USA

1958 The first scientific discovery in space - the Van Allen radiation belt (Explorer 1)

1959 The first television images of the Earth received from orbit (Explorer 6)

1962 The first scientific discovery in interplanetary space - direct observation of the solar wind (Mariner 2)

1962 The first expedition to another planet, successful from a scientific point of view (“Mariner 2” - to Venus)

1962 First astronomical observatory in space (OSO-1)

1968 The first manned flight of another celestial body (Apollo 8 - around the Moon)

1969 The first human exit on the surface of another celestial body (“Apollo 11” - on the Moon)

1971 The first self-propelled vehicle controlled by a person on another celestial body (“Apollo 15” - on the Moon)

1971 The first spacecraft launched into orbit around another planet (“Mariner 9” - to Mars)

1973 First flyby of Jupiter (Pioneer 10)

1974 The first space flight to two planets at once (“Mariner 10” - to Venus and Mercury)

1974 First flyby of Mercury (Mariner 10)

1976 First successful landing on Mars; the first spacecraft searching for life on another planet (“Viking 1”)

1977 First flybys of Saturn (Pioneer 11)

1977 The first spacecraft to reach escape velocity (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, launched in 1973 and 1974; Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977)

1981 First manned reusable spacecraft (STS-1)

1980−1984 The first satellite that was found in orbit, repaired and put back into operation (Solar Maximum Mission)

1985 First distant contact with a comet (International Comet Explorer with Comet Giacobini–Zinner)

1986 First flyby of Uranus (Voyager 2)

1989 First flyby of Neptune (Voyager 2)

1991 First contact with an asteroid from the Main Asteroid Belt (“Galileo” - with Gaspra)

1992 Heliopause discovered for the first time (Voyager)

1994 Asteroid satellite discovered for the first time (Galileo - Ida)

Wanderers: Introduction

But who are they, passing by?

Rainer Maria Rilke. Fifth Elegy (1923)

We were pilgrims from the very beginning. We knew all the trees for a hundred kilometers around. As soon as the fruits ripened, we came to collect them. We followed herds of animals on their annual migrations. We rejoiced over fresh meat - to get it we had to sneak, cheat, set up ambushes and hunt together. Indeed, when we united, we succeeded in what a lone hunter could not do. The idea of feeding oneself seemed as absurd as the transition to a settled life.

Together we protected our children from lions and hyenas. Taught them everything they might need. We also had guns. Then, as now, technology was the key to survival.

When the drought dragged on or the summer air was pierced by cold winds, our group set off on a journey - sometimes to unknown lands. We were looking for better places. When we couldn't get along with anyone in our little nomadic community, we left to join friendlier company. You could always start over again.

For 99.9% of our species' existence, we were hunters and gatherers, wanderers crossing savannas and steppes. There were no borders or customs then. The frontier stretched everywhere. We dealt only with land, ocean and sky - plus the occasional surly neighbor.

But when the climate became favorable and there was plenty of food around, we decided to lead a settled life. No adventures. Got fat. Relaxed. In the last 10,000 years - just a moment in our long history - we have abandoned the nomadic life. Animals and plants were domesticated. Why chase food when you can breed it?

Despite all the material advantages, settled life did not satisfy us, leaving us with a feeling of unfulfillment. Even after 400 generations of people spent their lives in villages and cities, we have not forgotten nomadic life. The road opening before us still beckons, like an almost forgotten song from childhood. We associate distant lands with a certain romance. I suspect that this drive has been carefully honed by natural selection as an essential factor for our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, abundant game - none of these last forever. We cannot predict the future. Catastrophic disasters seem to creep up on us, taking us by surprise. We may owe our lives, the lives of our communities, and indeed of our entire species, to those few - the restless, thirsting for something they cannot even describe or understand, striving for new countries and new worlds.

Herman Melville in his Moby Dick spoke on behalf of wanderers who lived at all times and on all meridians: “I am forever tormented by the thirst to know the distant. I love swimming in protected waters.”

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world was limited to Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. The earth was surrounded by an insurmountable ocean. People could meet lower creatures - barbarians or higher ones - gods. Each tree had its own dryad, each region had its own legendary hero. But there were not too many gods - at least at first; no more than a couple of dozen. They lived on mountain tops, underground, in the sea or high in the sky. They communicated with people through messages, interfered in human affairs, and even interbred with us.

As time passed, research thought developed, and amazing things began to emerge. It turned out that barbarians can be no less intelligent than the Greeks or Romans. Africa and Asia were larger than anyone could have imagined. The oceans were completely surmountable. There were antipodes in the world. It turned out that there are three new continents, which in time immemorial were inhabited by people from Asia, and news of this never reached Europe. It also turns out that detecting gods is frustratingly difficult.

The first large-scale human migration from the Old World to the New occurred during the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago, when expanding polar ice caps shallowed the oceans and exposed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. A thousand years later we reached Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. Long before Columbus, Indonesian Argonauts explored the western Pacific Ocean in outrigger sailing boats; people from Kalimantan settled Madagascar; The Egyptians and Libyans circumnavigated Africa, and a huge fleet of sea junks equipped by the Chinese Ming dynasty crossed the Indian Ocean. The Chinese established a base in Zanzibar, then the fleet passed the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Atlantic. From the XV to the XVII centuries. European sailing ships discovered new continents (new, at least for Europeans) and circumnavigated the world. In the 18th and 19th centuries. American and Russian pioneers, traders and colonists streamed across two vast continents, the former heading west and the latter heading east. This desire for exploration and exploration, although unconscious, contributed to survival. It cannot be said that it is characteristic of a particular nation or ethnic group. This is a gift inherent in all representatives of the human race.

Since our origins in East Africa several million years ago, we have carved winding paths across the planet. Today there are people on all continents, on the most remote islands, from pole to pole, from Everest to the Dead Sea, we have visited the bottom of the oceans, and some have even lived at an altitude of more than 300 km, like the ancient gods.

Today it seems that there is nothing left to explore on Earth, at least on land. We, victims of our own geographic success, are now increasingly staying at home.

Large-scale migrations of people—some voluntary, most not—have shaped human nature. Today, more people are fleeing war, oppression and hunger than ever before. It is likely that when the Earth's climate changes in the next decade, environmental refugees will appear in huge numbers. The best places will always attract us. Human waves will wash over the planet like ebbs and flows. But the countries we are striving for today are already populated. Other people had already settled there before us, often not ready to face our plight.

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AT THE END OF THE 19th century. Leib Gruber grew up in a provincial town in Central Europe. The town was located in the huge, multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire with a rich history. His father sold fish. Life was hard at times. In his youth, Leib was able to find only one worthy occupation for himself - he carried people across the Bug River, which flowed nearby. The client, man or woman, climbed onto Leib’s back, and Leib, wearing precious boots that literally served as his working tool, walked along the river ford and delivered the passenger to the opposite bank. Sometimes the water reached Leib's waist. There was neither a bridge nor a ferry on the river at that time. Perhaps it would have been possible to cross the river on a horse, but there was other work for horses. All that remained was for Leib and some other young people, just like him, to work. There was no other use for them; there was no way to find work either. Porters wandered along the shore, shouting their prices, extolling their services to potential clients. The guys worked like four-legged animals. Among these “pack” people was my grandfather - his name was Leib.

I don’t think that in all of his youth, Leib had the opportunity to go anywhere further than a hundred kilometers from his native town of Sasov. But then, in 1904, as family legend goes, he suddenly fled to the New World to escape prosecution on murder charges, leaving his young wife behind. How different from his tiny, ordinary town the great German ports must have seemed, how vast the ocean had opened up to him, how strange the luxurious skyscrapers and the endless roar of the new country had appeared. We know nothing about his voyage, but we found a ship's manifest mentioning his wife Chaya; she was able to move in with Leib as soon as he saved enough money to move her. Chaya set off in the cheapest class on the Batavia, registered at the port of Hamburg. The document is so brief that it smacks of desperation: can she read or write? No. She speaks English? No. How much money does she have with her? I can imagine how vulnerable and ashamed she felt when she answered, “One dollar.”

She got off the ship in New York, was reunited with Leib, lived long enough to give birth to my mother and her sister, and then died due to “complications related to childbirth.” In the few years that she lived in America, she was sometimes called in the English manner - Clara. A quarter of a century later, my mother named her first-born son after the mother she did not know.

OUR DISTANT ANCESTORS, looking at the sky, noticed that among the so-called “fixed” stars there are five unusual ones, which, unlike all the others, do not simply rise and set in strict sequence. They moved across the sky in a surprisingly intricate manner. For months they slowly travel among the stars. Sometimes they loop. Today we call them “planets,” which means “wandering” in Greek. I think it was precisely this strangeness that our ancestors liked.

Today we know that planets are not stars, but celestial bodies, as if fastened to the Sun by the force of gravity. As we explored the Earth, we began to recognize it as just one world among countless others orbiting the Sun and the other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy. Our planet and solar system are surrounded by a global ocean of deep space. And it is no more insurmountable than the World Ocean we already know.

Maybe it's still a little early. Maybe the time hasn't come yet. But those new worlds, in which unheard-of possibilities lurk, beckon.

In the past few decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union have made historic and fascinating strides in closely exploring all those points of light, from Mercury to Saturn, that sparked curiosity in our ancestors and gave birth to science. Since the first successful interplanetary flight took place in 1962, our vehicles have visited, entered orbit and even landed on more than seventy new worlds. We traveled among these wanderers. We discovered huge volcanic cones, in comparison with which the highest mountains on earth seem like hummocks; ancient river valleys on two planets, one of which is mysteriously cold, and the other is too hot for the existence of water flows; we have discovered a giant planet with a core of metallic hydrogen capable of containing a thousand Earth-sized planets; entire molten moons; a world of clouds with an acidic atmosphere, where even the highest plateaus are so hot that lead melts; ancient landscapes engraved with a true chronicle of the turbulent formation of the solar system; icy fugitive planets from the plutonian depths; exquisite patterns of planetary rings reflecting the subtle harmonies of gravity; and also a world surrounded by clouds of complex organic molecules, approximately the same as those that allowed life to arise on our planet at the dawn of its existence. They all quietly circle around the Sun and wait.

We have discovered such miracles that our ancestors, who pondered the nature of the luminaries that wander in the night sky, never dreamed of. We have touched the origins of our planet and ourselves. By discovering everything that can still be discovered, contemplating other destinies of other worlds, more or less similar to ours, we begin to understand the Earth better and better. Each of these worlds is beautiful and instructive. As far as we know, every single one of them is uninhabited and deserted. There is no “better place” around. For now at least.

You could say that during the Viking robotic mission, launched in July 1976, I spent some time on Mars. I explored boulders and sand dunes, skies that remained red even at midday, ancient river valleys, dizzyingly high volcanic peaks, ferocious wind erosion, stratified polar regions, two dark satellites shaped like potatoes. But there was no life there - not a cricket, not a blade of grass, not even, as far as we can be sure, a single microbe. These worlds, unlike ours, are not decorated with living nature. Life is a comparative rarity. You can explore many worlds and discover that only in one of them life could originate, develop and survive.

Leib and Khaya, who had never crossed anything wider than a river in their entire lives, grew to the point of transoceanic travel. They had one big advantage: on the other side of the ocean they were expected - yes, accustomed to living according to their foreign way of life, but still - other people who spoke their own language, shared at least some of their values, and some of them were even their relatives .

Today we reached the boundaries of the solar system and sent four of our ships to the stars. Neptune is a million times farther from Earth than New York is from the shores of the Western Bug. But there are no distant relatives there, not a single person, and, apparently, there is no life that awaits us in these other worlds. We will receive no letters from recent emigrants to help us understand the new country - only digital data transmitted at the speed of light by soulless, meticulous robot messengers. They tell us that these new worlds are nothing like our home. But we continue to search for the inhabitants of these worlds. That’s how we are made – life stretches towards life.

No one on Earth, not even the richest among us, can afford such a trip. We can't pack up and just go to Mars or Titan - if we're bored, we've lost our jobs, we've been drafted into the army, we feel oppressed, or we're (fairly or unfairly) accused of a crime. Such travel does not promise quick profits that could attract private entrepreneurs. If we humans ever go to these worlds, it will be when some nation or association sees it as an advantage for itself - or for the entire human race. There are a lot of things right now that we have to spend money on to send people to other worlds.

That's what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us there, what they can tell us about themselves, and - given the pressing problems our species now faces - whether it makes sense to go there. Should we solve these problems first? Or are they just the reason to hit the road?

In many ways, this book is optimistic about the prospects for humanity. It may seem that in the first chapters I am focusing too much on our imperfections. But they lay essential spiritual and logical foundations on which I subsequently build my argument.

I tried to look at the problems from different angles. There will be passages where I seem to be arguing with myself. Yes. Considering certain arguments from different sides, I often argue with Sagan. I hope that by the last chapter it will become clear where exactly I am expressing my point of view.

The plan of the book is roughly as follows: first, we will consider widely held opinions that have been expressed throughout human history and boil down to the fact that our species and our world are unique, moreover, we have a major role in the structure of the universe and in its purpose. We'll follow the latest exploration missions around the solar system, consider the latest discoveries, and then evaluate the arguments commonly made in favor of human space exploration. In the last, most hypothetical part of the book, I will tell you how, in my opinion, our space future will develop in the long term.

The book “Blue Dot” talks about the new knowledge that is slowly taking possession of us, about our coordinates, our place in the Universe and why (even if the call of distant roads has become much quieter in our time) the main component of the human future is found far beyond the Earth.

. “To the same thing that they say that there are antipodes,” wrote St. Augustine in the 5th century, “that is, that on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises at the same time as ours sets, people walk in the opposite direction to our feet.” direction, there is no reason to believe.” Even if there is any land there, and not just an ocean, "since the first people were only two, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should also be inhabited by the descendants of Adam." – Approx. auto

Carl Sagan

Blue dot. Space future of humanity

Translator Oleg Sivchenko

Scientific editor Vladimir Surdin, Ph.D. physical – mat. sciences

Editor Anton Nikolsky

Project Manager I. Seregina

Proofreaders M. Milovidova, E. Aksenova

Computer layout A. Fominov

Cover design Yu. Buga

Cover illustration Shutterstock

The publication was prepared in partnership with the Trajectory Foundation for Non-profit Initiatives (with the financial support of N.V. Katorzhnov).

As part of the publishing project, the Trajectory Foundation supports the publication of the best examples of Russian and foreign popular science literature.

O wanderer!

May your generation see miracles in reality

Cosmonautics and solar system exploration

Most Outstanding Early Achievements

USSR (Russia)