Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible (13 page)

Let us examine another possibility. The 'thinking' computer will also be useful to man in the peaceful conquest of the universe. However startling its calculating achievements may seem today, the supplying of information by the electronic wonder is still in its infancy.

About 200 years ago the brilliant mathematician Leonhard Euler calculated the constant pi for the area of a circle to 600 decimal places. This fabulous achievement took him several years. One of the first computers spat out the constant pi worked out to 2,000 decimal places in a few seconds. As a routine task a modern computer gives the constant pi to 100,000 decimal places in a nano second = 1 milliardth of a second.

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Why did Mayan priests far the hearts out of the living bodies of their victims' Was it perhaps the memory of a misunderstood technique of operating used by the 'gods'?

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Today the 'brain' of a computer, its central core, operates with about one million information units. In computer jargon they are called 'bits'. The human brain works in a very similar fashion. Molecular memory units and nerve switches store and process information. The child in the cradle already stores it—even if unconsciously. Throughout our life we store information, so that we can call on it when needed. Only too often we have to admit that our brain does not operate very reliably with the 'hoarded' knowledge.

The central core of a computer works with a precision of a quite different order. Our brain works with more than 15 milliard switches, whereas a large modern computer uses only 10 million. Further elements can be set up between the switches by cross connections. Then why does a computer work so much more reliably than our brain? Because generally nine-tenths of our brain lies fallow, but the computer always has all its bits present.

Even today the superiority of the computer is shame-making. If our brain is to work at its maximum, we have to concentrate on a specific problem. But the computer can solve millions of different problems at the same time.

The fastest calculator in use in Europe today is in the Institute for Plasma Physics at Garching, near Munich. It carries out 16.6 million calculating operations per second. In the machine's electronic stomach 750,000 transistors are connected with each other in the shortest way by means of photolithographically produced plug board diagrams. The electromagnetic waves that make the connections move with the speed of light. Computer people talk of access times of 1 1/2 nano seconds as mere routine. In 1 1/2 nano seconds a light ray covers 1 ft 6 ins.

But when we learn that the newest computer of the Data Control Corporation performs 36 million calculating operations a second, then the fastest machine in Europe is already a rather antiquated model. In comparison, one of the General Electric models, the GE-235, can be called a home computer. It only solves 165,000 problems a second, but you do not have to buy it. Its services can be hired for four cents per second.

The ferrite storage unit of a modern computer houses 200,000 digits in a space of one square metre. Magnetic tape storage units swallow up 10 million bits of data. And computers of all kinds are first-class pupils. They check themselves and never make the same mistake twice.

Today computers still need interpreters who translate our language, figures and concepts into the various computer languages. Direct conversation with the uncanny creature is expected by 1980. In America, but even more so in England, which is far advanced in computer techniques, they are trying to dissolve human speech into symbolic groups that the computer understands. This is the direction in which all computer manufacturers are working. But for IBM, the biggest producer of computers, language is far too slow a means of communication between man and machine. They are looking for another medium of transmitting information.

I have said that computer technology is only at the beginning of the great possibilities that lie ahead of it. Future research has an eerie goal: the biotronic storage unit. Nucleic acids appear to possess magnetic properties. Should this assumption prove to be correct, they would be the smallest information carriers of all. If these investigations reached their goal, the processing unit of a computer, which still takes up a lot of room, would be reduced to the size of | the human brain. Biotronic information units would only be as big as chain molecules. I think that this line of research will ultimately succeed, but I am afraid that bio-tronic calculators would be susceptible to infection by viruses and bacteria.

 
Interstellar space travel operates with distances of hundreds of million of miles. At the speeds that are to be expected, the computer will be more than a mere ready Reckoner. Even if computer manufacturers today resist the claim that computers will be able to think and act independently one fine day, that day will come. Then computers will steer space-ships between the planets on their own.

Far be it from me to assert that our ancestors knew anything about computers, integrated or electronic measuring apparatus. But since I am convinced that extraterrestrial intelligences visited the earth, their space-craft must have operated with suitable instruments. And since we men are programmed by the 'gods', we shall soon be masters of the same technological miracles.

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7 - Conversations In Moscow

On Saturday, 18 May, 1968, Alexander Kassanzev, the famous Soviet writer, put the three sculptures which had impressed me so profoundly carefully back in the glass case opposite the window in his Moscow flat. They were old Japanese statues, cast in bronze, and they seemed to be dressed in space suits. The largest of the statues was nearly 2 ft high and had a diameter of about 5 ins. Tight-fitting bands ran from the shoulders, crossed the chest and joined up again between the thighs at the height of the buttocks. A broad belt with rivets on it was round the hips. The whole suit down to the knees was fitted with pocket-like protrusions. The helmet was tightly bound to the trunk with pads and bands. Comical-looking hollows appeared to be openings for built-in breathing or listening apparatus. I noticed two more openings on the lower half of the head.

But the most fascinating thing about the figures was undoubtedly the large glasses with lenses set at an angle. I could not see any weapons, unless the short staff in the gloved left hand could be called a weapon. 'A mini-laser beam,' the author of a science-fiction novel might say.

Agog with curiosity, I asked Kassanzev where these figures came from and who had given them to him.

He chuckled into his beard: 'A Japanese colleague gave them to me before the war, in the spring of 1939. The figures were found during excavations on the island of Hondo in Japan. They are dated to long before our era. The figures have striking, indeed unmistakable, space-traveller characteristics, but no one can say how or why Japanese artists dressed their figurines in such suits. But one thing seems to be clear. Neither "snow goggles" nor lenses of this kind were known in ancient Japan.'

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No one can say when snow-goggles like these were worn in Japan. Did the sculptor carve the image of a space traveller whom he had seen?

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Then Alexander Kassanzev got into his decrepit old car and drove me through the splendid broad streets of Moscow to the Sternberg Institute of Moscow University, where he had arranged for me to meet Professor Josef Samuilovich Shklovsky, the Director of the Radio-astronomy Department.

What an experience it was, this Institute at Universitets-prospekt 13! It hummed like a beehive, teemed like an ant colony. The students' desks and tables stood higgledy-piggledy wherever mere was room. Empty tin cans served as ashtrays.

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This is another very old Japanese statue. Both show markings which could be straps and fixing points for equipment.

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On the walls there were gigantic astronomical maps and in front of them students arguing. In one corner students struggled over a mathematical formula, in the opposite one others were busy with a complicated measuring apparatus. You felt instinctively that research was carried on here as teamwork.

The door to Professor Shklovsky's workroom was ajar, The room itself had the strange mixed smell of books, files and dust peculiar to rooms—as I have often noticed—in which the old is preserved and the new critically tested.

Professor Shklovsky rose from behind his massive desk, which was covered with printed papers and manuscripts, and greeted me with a suspicious laugh: 'So you're the Swiss!'

It sounded like a rebuke, as if the gaunt old man really meant: 'So you're the man who upsets the subjects of that quite peaceful country with your shocking theories.' As a result, our conversation, carried on in English, began with a certain amount of reserve. Calmly, deliberately, often looking for the right word, the famous man—and he knows that he is famous—explained his Martian moon theory. He thinks that the two moons of our neighbouring planet are artificial satellites. While he explained his arguments in favour of this theory, he would repeat in all modesty that it was only his private opinion.

After lunch in the crowded canteen, Professor Shklovsky relaxed his suspicious attitude a little. We began a lively argument about the impossible possibilities in the cosmos. In the end I had the satisfaction of realising that this leading expert of the eastern world, too, does not exclude the possibility of a visit in the past by unknown intelligences from the cosmos. He suspects that there are planets with intelligent life within a radius of 100 light years.

'But what about the distances, Professor? How will the incalculable distances between the stars be bridged?'

Shklovsky answered unhesitatingly: 'Obviously there is no cut and dried answer to that. Automatons or cybernetically controlled stations are not subject, as you know, to the calendar of 'normal' years. So what is there to stop a robot making a thousand year journey undamaged? After all, some of the satellites sent on their travels by us will still be functioning when we have long been in our graves.'

That is the opinion of a scientist who is an expert on the subject. It points to the technical possibility of bridging unimaginable distances. However, it still does not explain how and by what means intelligences could survive such periods of time.

My helpful friend Alexander Kassanzev was waiting for me in his old car. He had been talking to the students. The Institute is like home to him. Now he wanted to take me to the Pushkin Museum, which houses magnificent collections of Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman art. En route we spoke about a fascinating piece of Chinese research which would have made a great impression on our archaeologists. As we drove along Prouzenskaya Quay, Kassanzev told me many details of the latest conclusions Chinese scholars had reached and I spoke the key-words into my portable tape-recorder. When we stopped at traffic-lights as we did at Zoubovski Boulevard, I spelt out names and places clearly. The story I took home on tape was so exciting that it richly repaid the expense and efforts of the journey.

Kassanzev mostly talked about the remarkable finds in the Chinese mountains of Baian Kara Ula. His story sounded like a fairytale.

This Kassanzev's story: 'It was in 1938 that the Chinese archaeologist Chi Pu Tei discovered graves arranged in rows in the mountain caves of Baian Kara Ula in the Sino-Tibetan border district. He found small skeletons of beings with delicate frames, who nevertheless had rather large skulls. On the walls of the caves he discovered rock drawings which portrayed beings with round helmets. The stars, sun and moon were also scratched on the rock and connected by groups of pea-sized dots. Chi Pu Tei and his assistants managed—and this is the sensational thing about the find—to salvage 716 granite plates, which were 2 cm thick and looked very like our long-playing records. These stone plates had a hole in the middle from which a double-grooved incised script ran out spirally to the edge of the plate.

Chinese archaeologists knew that the Dropa and Kham (Sikang) tribes had once lived in this deserted region. And anthropologists said of these mountain tribes that they had been of small stature, with an average height of only 5ft 3 ins ...'

'And how did they get the big skulls?'

'It was that part of the discovery that upset all previous anthropological classifications. Scholars could not place the high, broad skulls on the tiny skeletons of the Dropa and Kham. Not with the best will in the world. When Chi Pu Tei published his theory in 1940, he met with nothing but scorn. He claimed that the Dropas and Khams must have been an extinct species of mountain ape.'