Prediction as a sentence: good predictions moved history

His great-grandfather, Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the Moscow mayor, dragged the ancient capital into the 20th century: the first sewage treatment plants, a power plant, a telephone, a tram (then analogue of the metro). After the revolution, he was arrested, but the head of Moscow, Lev Kamenev, having received a kind of master class in managing the city, issued him a “safeguard certificate”. In 1931, Golitsyn wrote “Predicting the fate of the USSR.” The first five-year plan was successfully completed, many scientists of the USSR and the world predicted the victory of communism. And his grandchildren, great-grandchildren kept dangerous sheets with a completely different prognosis. Among the fantastically accurately predicted points: “His (USSR) fall will be followed by the force of inertia, and not in the gusts of a storm, by itself, by its own weight, unsuitability for the real surrounding world, its conditions.” Having received “The Prediction” from the hands of the Golitsyns in 2003, having published it for the first time in several media, I still feel the underestimation of this prognostic masterpiece and the no less amazing continuity of the gift in the Golitsyn family.

The beginning of the scientific glory of academician Georgy Golitsyn is a small miracle. In the scientific world, “discoveries at the tip of a pen” are especially valued – by the power of thought, without complicated experiments. At a conference in Texas (1969), Golitsyn predicted the parameters of the Venusian atmosphere. And the first flying spaceships transmitted the first measured data: a sensation – a complete coincidence! Since then, Academician Golitsyn has been one of the Soviet scientists that the United States most wanted to get. In my collection there is a photo of his conversation with Bush Sr., autographed by the President of the United States …

And here, in 1970-80, the writers Rasputin, Belov, Zalygin fought against the murder of the Russian North “by turning the northern rivers into the drying up Caspian.” The Ministry of Water Resources of the USSR broke through billions of “swiveling” budgets. The scientist’s forecast helped: there is no need to turn the northern rivers, the level of the Caspian will soon begin to rise.

It came true. It is somewhat reminiscent of the forecast of the biblical Joseph, who guessed in “seven fat, seven skinny cows” a worldwide famine, a change in the fate of the Jews and the world. Georgy Sergeevich once spoke about a funny continuation of the history of the Caspian forecast: “In the 1990s, I was the chairman of the scientific council at the Federal Water Resources Department, the successor to the USSR Ministry of Water Resources. And among the officials, punching through the budgets of “protection against the rise of the Caspian Sea,” I met old acquaintances who in the 1970s saved the Caspian Sea from drying out.

Sharpening the topic, I asked the academician: “Georgy Sergeevich, we were taught: science was born from economic needs, Archimedes, the calculation of the area of ​​​​fields … But there were scientific searches without practical reason. For example, useless then Newton’s law of universal gravitation?

“The law of universal gravitation,” replied Georgy Sergeevich, “even then was important, say, for navigation. I think Newton was helped by the idea: the world is the creation of the Lord, and there must be some general patterns “…

Isaac Newton devoted much more time to religious work than to physics and mathematics; He considered his main achievement to be the interpretation of the books of the prophet Daniel, the Apocalypse of John, the calculation of the date of the end of the world (to the attention of young readers: according to Newton’s calculations, this is 2060!) … Some of our conversations with Academician Golitsyn were in 2012, and it was impossible to avoid the end of the Mayan calendar , if only because one of the triggers of the Apocalypse was called global warming, and Georgy Sergeevich had a request from the Presidential Administration on the Kyoto Protocol on the table.

In our conversations, I confess, I switched the arrow to the sector of my writing interest. In Diary of a Messenger (2015), my prediction for alien invasions is the lack of traditional resource targets. In a homogeneous Universe there is nothing worth capturing or exporting expeditions. Distance weakens forces (and benefits) in a quadratic way: the same r2 in the denominator of Newton’s formula.

In that novel, I dissected some of the clichés that were passed down from science fiction writers to politicians, managers of real budgets. After all, there is an absolute real asteroid threat. Let me remind you: the Chelyabinsk meteor (2013), the damage is 490 million rubles, the explosion power at the entrance to the atmosphere, according to NASA, is 500 kilotons, 20 times more powerful than Hiroshima. And the governments, experts… in the wake of the alien attractions of science fiction writers are planning these absurd Martian, lunar villages. Economy? Even a non-specialist will imagine: the technique of withdrawing dangerous asteroids will solve the issue of their fitting into safe orbits, and the “receipt” of resources, without these Homeric launches to and from Mars. But the announcements, the current mega-sensations from people who manage real billions: “Flight to … in … a year!”, “Station to … by 2030!”. And to climb into the core of these megaplanes: the purpose of the expedition? And there … the song of the 1960s “And apple trees will bloom on Mars.” Will they bring apples?

The question of what resources such a delivery could cost is naively and cunningly omitted by Martian interests or borrowed from science fiction – such as the movie “Total Recall” with Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone. Turbinium was brought there from Mars, but with all the scientific and technical miracles under the dome of the “federal colony of Mars”, they could not come up with the properties of “turbinium”, justifying its cost.

In “Avatar” from a distant planet they brought “anobtanium”, i.e. impossible, the logical analogue of U-topia. I think this is the secret irony of James Cameron: there is nothing worth bringing from other planets!

“So what is the purpose of the alien invaders in your book?” – Academician Golitsyn specified (the conversation was shortly before its release).

“After a series of wars on their Proxima Centauri, they were convinced that even with material abundance it is difficult to resolve the conflict of generations. Naive youth and gerontocrats are a universal problem. Under the “nursing home” alien invaders have chosen Australia, the most environmentally friendly continent. They flew up to the solar system at the beginning of the twentieth century, the scouts, who were taken by earthlings for UFOs, repeated: in Europe, the First World War, chemical weapons, epidemics. Fenced off by quarantines from wars, typhus, “Spanish flu”, Australia is the cleanest country. Its isolation from the world’s troubles has become a bait for aliens.

Captured only Australia; all other continents – with louvres, hermitages, oxfords … – they absolutely do not need. Even humiliatingly uninteresting. They showed us their “Kuzkin’s mother” and showed that our “Kuzkins” are useless: they are destroyed by the dome placed over Australia. They demanded from the remaining continents a not very burdensome tribute: 144,000 dogs quarterly. According to their calculation, the code of earthly vitality, the means to take root here are dogs. And they smell (as in fairy tales they smell evil spirits) and stubbornly die, why such a tribute. The USA, Russia, China, painfully overcoming mutual distrust, are trying to rally the earthlings. When preparing a counterattack, they distribute “dog quotas” through the UN, because on the cover of the book there is an aircraft carrier, the deck is filled with cages with dogs.” Etc.

However, I rebuke myself: it’s easy for me to prove the pointlessness of resource invasions on my fingers. But here comes Elon Musk. And he is ready to invest all his billions in Martian settlements! What is colonization? Colonization involves commodity flows, exchange with the mother country.

Maybe the colonization impulse is a sublimation, a reflection of the long-standing hopes of the era of Efremov, the Strugatskys? And the Cosmos remains an oracle, a source of social prophecy, and astronautics a continuation of its namesake, astrology? And in their race of imagination, scientists and writers compete in the interpretation of “who art in heaven”? ..