Back to the Moon with Nuclear Rockets

Courtesy of Vladimir VoeikovAlexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964), the founderof heliobiology, studied the effects of dynamic solar activityupon the biosphere, human health, behavior and activities.He also discovered the vital effects of negative ions in the airfor all animals. He was a close friend and follower of KonstantinTsiolkovsky, the first man who suggested the use of reactiveengines for space flight.Along with many outstanding Russian scientists,Chizhevsky was arrested by the NKVD and spent more than10 years in the Soviet prison system known as the Gulag Archipelago.Even there, he found opportunities to perform scientificresearch, and studied the behavior of moving blood andthe peculiarities of the erythrocyte sedimentation reaction,which has remained an enigma until now. In this field hemade several important discoveries, which are very importantfor diagnostics, and which remain mostly unknown to Russianand foreign scientists and medical doctors.several-thousand-fold in the sequence starting with primitive45, 46Coelenterates and ending with Primates. It is notable thatfor Homo sapiens, this parameter is at least one order of magnitudehigher than for Primates. That means that Homo isdrastically different from his allegedly closest "relatives," evenin his physiology.Bauer never applied his principles to the social sphere andlimited himself mainly to considering the manifestations ofliving systems at the molecular, cellular, and cellular systemslevels. Vladimir Vernadsky, who came to the same conclusionsin respect to the biosphere as a whole, and who coinedthe term "biogeochemical energy" with respect to free energyof the biosphere, proceeded much further. He considered humanhistory in the light of general principles governing the developmentof living systems and regarded it as a lawful progressionof natural history. 47 The emergence of mankind is anew leap in the integral process of our planet's development.With mankind, emerges a new form of energy, the energy ofhuman culture, provided by the development of human reason.During the last millennia, precisely this form of energysteadily became the major geological force. As the history ofmankind progresses, its total energy consumption and transformationof external energy into free, "structural" energy,used for all kinds of work performance, undoubtedly increases.According to statistical data, both the total volume ofenergy powered by humanity, and of energy consumed percapita, grows from the end of the 18th century until recentlyin geometrical progression 48 (it is quite another question howthese resources have been and are distributed among peopleand their communities).Thus, Bauer's principles are quite justified by considerationof the evolution of the biosphere and even of mankind, as theprocess of development of an interlinked living system. Still,these principles are necessary but not sufficient for the constructionof a more complete concept of the development of aliving system. First, a "field factor" ensuring its integrity in timeand space is necessary. Second, the development of any livingsystem is a discontinuous process, consisting of separate stages.As was pointed out above, the previous stages do not automaticallytransit into the next, and an external impulse is neededto initiate a new stage of development.The existence of such a global stimulus was discovered bythe outstanding Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky in1924. He found a strong dependence of behavior of organizedhuman masses on factors stemming from space. In particular,he discovered a high correlation between the 11-year periodof solar activity and important historical events. 49 Later he providedthe evidence for correlation between cosmic rhythmsand the most diverse phenomena in the biosphere: agriculturalproductivity, great epidemics, and the physical and mentalstate of great groups of people. 50 There are no indications thatChizhevsky was familiar with Bauer's and Gurwitsch's works.Nevertheless, in an effort to explain how very small changes ofsolar radiation flux or of geomagnetic field could have suchprofound effects, he came to ideas of non-equilibrium of livingsystems and the essential role of branched-chain processes intheir functioning. He actually came to the understanding thatall these phenomena represent particular manifestations of thereaction of the whole system, the biosphere, composed of, anduniting together, living systems at all levels of organization.Thus, an approach to the phenomenon of life as processeswith a direction, taking place in bodies with special properties,and with different characteristics from lifeless systems, is notjust a declaration.The specificity of life has nothing to do with the powerlessnessof scientific methods to comprehend its essentialproperties. An approach to living systems as non-equilibriumfield-matter entities, possessing an inherited stock of free energyand using it to enhance their non-equilibrium state,does not reject—to the contrary, it includes—all knowledgeof the manifestations of life already gained by science. Suchan approach does not reject the idea that the particularprocesses in living nature proceed according to the knownlaws of classical physics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics,and organic and inorganic chemistry. However, thespecificity of life cannot be reduced to these laws alone, as it32 Summer 1999 21st CENTURY