THE SPACECRAFT OF THE FUTURE
NASA (National Aeronautics Administration of the United States) plans to create a fundamentally new spacecraft, which will not, like a shuttle, drop fuel tanks at the start. It can be used to deliver astronauts to space stations and in operation will be much cheaper than the shuttle. Tests of the first version of the new spacecraft with the working name X-33 were conducted in 1999.
SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
Observations in the galaxy reveal three star systems that have suitable ecospheres and are good candidates for the role of luminaries in planetary systems where life is possible. Even such a tiny part of our galaxy's stars may have a planet similar to the one we live on. This does not mean that such a planet should serve as a shelter for a reasonable civilization, nor does it even mean that life should arise on its surface. But this suggests that the Earth is almost certainly not unique. To discover extraterrestrial life, we must begin a more thorough search, perhaps within the limits of many parsecses from our solar system.
Methods of contact
The main search method used so far has been to listen to space in the radio band. With the help of radio telescopes, scientists hope to find either a radio transmission aimed at us, or an omnidirectional signal sent blindly in the hope that someone will intercept it, or radio conversations of some civilizations, or some artificial radio emission, appearing, for example, in the work of numerous radio and television stations of civilization. The search time has been measured for tens of years, and there are no positive results. But the works continue and are planned for the future.
In 1974, a radio message with coded information about the Earth and its inhabitants was sent in the direction of a huge ball star cluster numbering hundreds of thousands of stars, and all of them are older than the Sun. Given the distance, the answer should be expected, if given, only after 48,000 years.
In 1977, in the table of automatic printing device of the computer connected to the radio astronomical complex, there was information indicating the reception of a strong signal with all signs of extraterrestrial beacon during the whole minute. Space callsigns were 30 times higher than the general background level and were intermittent like an earthly morseine.
The area where the signal came from was carefully studied; it is located near the galactic plane, near the center of the Galaxy. There are no solar stars in the existing catalog. The repeated "combing" of the sky with a radio telescope antenna was not successful. Space - again! - set a riddle, but it remained unanswered.
Another method of search is a thorough analysis of all available data about celestial objects, as well as space flights. However, scientific analysis of the problem shows that the best means of interstellar contact is radio communication, not space flight. Thus, it can be assumed that the first contact with other civilizations will be an exchange of television programmes rather than direct communication in space.
INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
Although many believe that interstellar travel will soon become a reality, analysis, taking into account the laws of physics, shows that interstellar space travel remains incredibly complex, if not impossible, in the foreseeable future. Human-made spacecraft are moving at a speed of about 1/30,000 times the speed of light, so even a flight to the nearest star will take 100,000 years. To move faster, new ways of accelerating the ship to higher speeds need to be found; this in turn requires a huge amount of fuel.
If we could somehow build a spacecraft capable of moving at sublight speeds, thanks to the time dilation effect discovered by Einstein, space travelers would age slower than those left on Earth, as time flows slower for those moving at sublight speeds. However, relativity theory also predicts that at velocities close to the speed of light, every tiny particle of interstellar gas or dust turns into a projectile of enormous energy for the spacecraft and its occupants. Consequently, a way to avoid collision with these projectiles will have to be devised, making it even more difficult to create an energy source for accelerating the interstellar ship to near-light speeds. If we think about the huge distances between neighboring civilizations and the laws of physics, we can draw a conclusion in favor of radio waves as the best means of interstellar communication.