Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (2 page)

What I am saying is that at some time or other the technical feasibility of every new idea vitally affecting the life of mankind was 'not proven'. Proof of its practicability was always preceded by the speculation of the so-called visionaries who were violently attacked, or what is often harder to stomach, laughed at condescendingly by their contemporaries.

I admit quite frankly that in this sense I am a visionary, too, but I do not live in splendid isolation with my speculations. My conviction that intelligences from other planets have visited the earth in the remote past is already under serious consideration by many scientists in both East and West.

For example, Professor Charles Hapgood told me during my stay in the USA that Albert Einstein, whom he had known personally, was in complete sympathy with the idea of a prehistoric visit by extraterrestrial intelligences.

In Moscow Professor Josef Samuilovich Shklovsky, one of the leading astrophysicists and radio-astronomers of our day, assured me that he was convinced that the earth had received a visit from the cosmos at least once.

The well-known space biologist Carl Sagan (USA) also does not exclude the possibility that 'the earth has been visited by representatives of an extraterrestrial civilisation at least once in the course of its history'.

And Professor Hermann Oberth, the father of the rocket, told me in these words: 'I consider a visit to our planet by an extraterrestrial race to be extremely probable.'

It is gratifying to know that under the pressure of successful space flights science is beginning to concern itself intensively with ideas that were absolutely taboo only decades ago. And I am convinced that with every rocket that shoots into the universe the traditional opposition to my theory about the 'gods' will get weaker and weaker.

Only ten years ago it was absurd to talk about the existence of another form of intelligent life in the universe. Today no one seriously doubts that extraterrestrial life exists in the cosmos. When eleven scientific experts separated after a secret conference at Green Bank (West Virginia) in 1961, they had agreed on a formula which calculated up to fifty million civilisations in our galaxy alone. Roger A. MacGowan, who holds an important NASA appointment in Redstone (Alabama), even arrives at a figure of 130 milliard possible cultures in the cosmos, basing? his theory on the most recent developments in astronomy.

These estimates seem comparatively modest and cautious if it proves to be true that the 'key of life'—i.e. the generation of all life from the four bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine—controls the whole cosmos. If this is the case, the universe must be literally teeming with life.

Crushed by the facts, people reluctantly admit today that space travel within our solar system is conceivable, but in the same breath they say that they consider interstellar space travel impossible because of the vast distances. Like a conjurer, they whip out of the hat the statement that because interstellar space travel will never be possible in the future, our earth cannot have been visited in the past by unknown intelligences, because they would have had to have been able to traverse interstellar space. And that's that!

But why should not interstellar space travel be possible? Working on the speeds that seem possible to us today, it is calculated that the journey to our nearest fixed star, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away, would take eighty years—in other words no man could survive the flight there and back. Is this calculation correct? Admittedly, the average expectation of life today is about seventy years. The training of space pilots is complicated; even the most intelligent young man would not be able to pass his examinations as an astronaut before he was twenty. And if he was over sixty, he would hardly be sent on a space mission. That leaves only forty years as an active astronaut. It sounds quite logical to say that forty years are not long enough for an interstellar expedition.

But that is a fallacy. Even a simple example shows why and simultaneously demonstrates how hard it is for us to escape from traditional patterns of thought whenever we tackle projects for the future. Let us suppose that I am given an accurate calculation showing that it is impossible for a water bacteria to move from point A to point B during its lifespan, because the microbe can only move at speed x and neither the current nor the slope of the watercourse can increase the speed x by more than y per cent at most. That sounds convincing, but there is a mental error in the calculation. The water bacteria can move from A to B in many different ways. For example, we can freeze it. Then the ice cube containing the bacteria travels from A to B in an aircraft. The ice is melted and the microbe has reached its goal. Yes, someone will retort, if you switch off its vital functions. But it seems to me a perfectly feasible, indeed highly practical, method of transporting the microbe—just as I think (which is why I gave this example) that we have reached the stage when we must replace the obsolete methods by new ones.

In spite of all the objections to it, there is nothing farfetched about my forecast that in the not too distant future it will be possible to freeze astronauts, thaw them out again on a set date and restore the use of their functions. Professor Alan Sterling Parkes, member of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, supports the view that by the early 1970's medical science will already have perfected a method of preserving organs for transplants indefinitely at low temperatures.

Anyway, the whole has always been equal to the sum of its parts, which is why I am convinced that my forecast is right.

In all experiments on animals, one problem that constantly recurs is how to keep the brain cells alive, since they die rapidly without oxygen. The fact that research teams of the US Navy, the US Air Force, as well as firms such as General Electric and the Rand Corporation, are working full time on it shows how seriously the solution of this problem is taken. The first reports of success come from the Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, where the brains of five rhesus monkeys were separated from their bodies and kept functioning for as much as eighteen hours. The separated brains reacted unhesitatingly to noises.

These experiments are basically connected with the idea of constructing a 'cyborg' (the abbreviation of 'cybernetic organism'). In a speech the German physicist and cyberneticist Herbert W. Franke put forward the sensational idea that in the decades to come space-ships would journey to unknown planets without astronauts aboard and search the universe for extraterrestrial intelligences. Space patrols without astronauts? Franke assumes that the electronic equipment would be operated by a brain separated from a human body. This 'solo' brain, kept in a liquid culture medium which would have to be constantly replenished with fresh blood, would be the control centre of the spaceship. Franke thinks that the brain of an unborn child would be the most suitable for programming, because, not being burdened with mental processes, it could be fed with the data and information necessary for the special tasks of space travel. This programmed brain would lack the consciousness that makes normal brains 'human'. Herbert W. Franke says: 'Stimulations, as we know them, would be alien to the cyborg. It would have no feelings. The human solo brain is promoted to ambassador of our planet.' Roger A. MacGowan also predicts a cyborg, half living being, half machine. In the view of this scientific authority the cyborg will ultimately reach the stage of a completely electronic 'being', whose functions are programmed in a solo brain and translated into orders by the latter.

The Frankfurt Jesuit Paul Overhage who enjoys considerable fame as a biologist, said about this fantastic project for the future: 'Its realisation can scarcely be doubted because the rapid progress of biotechnology is constantly making it easier to carry out experiments of this kind.'

During the last two decades molecular biology and biochemistry have advanced very rapidly and achieved results which have completely changed a great deal of medical science and practice. The ability to slow down the process of ageing or even interrupt it completely lies within our grasp, and even the fantastic construction of a cyborg has already been removed from the realm of pure imagination.

Naturally these projects create moral and ethical problems which will perhaps be harder to solve than the actual medico-technical problems. But all this will fade into insignificance if we keep our eye on the other highly probable possibility that one day space-ships will reach such incredible speeds that they can traverse cosmic distances even within the normal life span of astronauts.

The explanation of this technical phenomenon lies in the time dilation effect, which is already an accepted scientific fact.

We must realise that 'terrestrial years' are quite irrelevant as far as passengers on an interstellar space journey are concerned. In a space-ship travelling just below the speed of light, time 'creeps by' slowly in comparison with the time they rushes along on the launching planet. This can be accurately calculated by mathematical formulae. Incredible as it may seem, we do not have to take these calculations on trust; they have been proved.

We must free ourselves from our conception of time, i.e. terrestrial time. Time can be manipulated by speed and energy. Our space-travelling grandchildren will break the time barriers.

Those who doubt the technical possibility of interstellar space travel adduce an argument that deserves close examination. They say that even if rocket propulsion units were ultimately built to reach a speed of 93,000 miles per second or more, interstellar space travel would still be impossible because at such a speed the minutest cosmic particles that struck the exterior of the space-ship would have the destructive and penetrative power of a bomb. Undoubtedly they objection cannot be rejected lightly, but how long will it be valid? Scientists in the USA and the USSR are already engaged on the development of electromagnetic safety rings to divert the dangerous particles floating in space away from space-ships. These research projects have already met with some success.

The sceptics also say that a speed of more than 186,000 miles a second is just a Utopian dream, because Einstein has proved that the speed of light is the absolute limit of velocity. Even this counter-argument is only valid if one starts from the premise that space-ships of the future will have to be launched with the energy of millions of gallons of fuel and carried into the universe with the same source of energy. Today radar sets operate with waves travelling at 186,000 miles per second. But, the reader will ask me, what connection have waves with the propulsion of spaceships of the future?

In their book The Planet of Impossible Possibilities, the two Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier describe the fantastic project of the Soviet scientist K. P. Stanyukovich, who is a member of the Commission for Interplanetary Communications of the USSR's Academy of Sciences. Stanyukovich plans a space sonde which will be propelled by anti-matter. Since a sonde travels faster the faster the particles on board it are emitted, the Moscow Professor and his team hit upon the idea of constructing a 'flying lamp' that worked by the emission of light instead of red-hot gases. The speeds that can be reached in this way are enormous. As Bergier tells us: 'The passengers in such a flying lamp would not notice anything unusual. Gravity inside the space-ship would be the same as on earth. They would feel that time was passing in the normal way, yet in a few years they would have reached the most distant stars. After twenty-one years (by their time), they would be in the heart of the Milky Way, which is 75,000 light years from the earth. In twenty-eight years they would reach the Andromeda Nebula, our nearest galaxy, which is 2,250,000 light years away.'

Professor Bergier, a world-famous scientist, emphasises that these calculations have nothing to do with science-fiction, because Stanyukovich has verified in his laboratory a formula that can be checked by anyone who knows how to use a table of logarithms. According to one of these calculations, only sixty-five years of cosmic time would pass for the crew of the 'flying lamp', while four and a half million years would go by on our planet!

Even in my wildest flights of fancy I cannot imagine the consequences of a development that is brewing in the dark mists of the future. In 1967 Gerald Feinberg, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University in New York, published his theory of tachyons in the scientific journal Physical Review. (Tachyon comes from the Greek word 'tachys' = fast.) His article was not just the ravings of a visionary; it described a piece of serious scientific research. A course of lectures on it has already been given at the Eidgenossischen Technischen Hochschule in Zurich.

The following is a brief description of the tachyon theory. According to Einstein's theory of relativity the mass of a body grows in relation to the increase in its velocity. A mass (= energy) that reached the speed of light would be infinitely large. Feinberg supplied mathematical proof that there was a counterpart to Einsteinian mass, namely particles that move infinitely fast, but become slower when they approach the speed of light. According to Feinberg, tachyons are a billion times faster than light, yet they cease to exist when they are reduced to the speed of light or below it.