No solo hay fantasmas en la Tierra

We have always been in between the idea of denying ourselves to believe that we are alone in a universe, with the idea that no matter how much we shout, there is no one listening, or at least no one answering. We went from "there are thousands of millions of inhabitants in the interior of the sun" to "there is no one close enough to listen to us",

Just getting the address would be a miracle, but to achieve it and be able to somehow receive messages from planets thousands of light years away, what we would be doing is trying to communicate with a ghost, since what we would see would be the testament of a civilization that existed, but died before its signal reached us.

It's always underestimated how small we really are. Since we started to emit radio signals and taking into account that they travel at the same speed as light, we have only covered about 100 years of light in small and random directions. More or less, look at the amount of space we have covered in 100 years.

To add more problems, radio signals become weaker over time, so if they miraculously hit our direction, a second miracle would be needed to avoid confusing those signals with random emissions from the universe. They would be so weak that they could easily be confused with a lightning.

William Hassell in 1794, after discovering Uranus, said that probably all the planets of the solar system were inhabited, in addition to the sun. It was believed, as popular culture has been in charge of transmitting to us over the years that their bodies would have adapted to those conditions, however hard they were, Hassell simply believed that somehow evolution would have created a species similar

ours, but able to withstand the temperature of the sun. So crazy was to think about it at that time, now because we have much more information, but it made sense to the world believe that if our planet had managed to create life, those who were close could have created it too. For a species that created gods to explain natural phenomena, believe that there were people inside the sun, it made a lot of sense.

That's how Hussle imagined the interior of the Sun. He thought it was made up of layers. The exterior would be flames, but the interior would be cold enough to be habitable. While many of his claims were mere assumptions, like those of the Sun, Saturn, Uranus or Jupiter, for those of the Moon he said he had proof

or what he believed were tests, confused the craters with small cities. Solar spots with openings, entrances to a supposed core that he theorized had to be cold. A good musician, better astronomer and telescope builder, but regular in terms of drawing conclusions from his observations.

The most incredible thing about all this is that he was not alone. Over the years, the idea that the other planets were inhabited gained a lot of strength, putting special emphasis on Mars and Venus. Later you will see how Nikola Tesla himself, at a given moment in his life, proposed to show that those inhabitants had contacted him. Both Herschel and other astronomers of his time thought the same thing. The evidence was clear, there is life on the other planets, don't you see how their cities illuminate the dark part?

Johannes Rother, like so many others, was interested in Venus. Which was no coincidence, since Venus is the planet that shines the most in the morning, it was the one that caught his attention the most. That glow was the beginning of the confusion. Although they could explain the lighting that the sun projected directly, they could not explain why they could see so well illuminated, as subtle as the dark part was.

It wasn't always clear, that was the strangest part. Sometimes it was completely dark as expected, and other times it could be seen. They knew since a long time ago that light is reflected. They understood that if we can see the dark part of the moon, it's because the light that reflects the earth illuminates it. And vice versa too. When the moon reflects the light of the sun, it illuminates the dark part of the earth, what they called "moon light". And that explanation would have been great.

If Venus had moons... When rational possibilities were exhausted, they started to fantasize. They had to be their inhabitants who provoked that light. It would be their cities, their parties praising the God of Fire. You could say anything because... Sinu, what other explanation did he have?

Except for Aristotle and a few who believed that the Earth was exceptionally unique, the rest did not reject at any time the idea of ​​finding other inhabited planets. Over time we have lowered expectations about what kind of life they can contain and increased the search distance, but at no time have we abandoned the idea. Christian Huygens in 1680 was perhaps the first to imagine those worlds. How will the rings of Saturn affect its inhabitants?

How are they able to live in the sun? Will they have houses? Are they social? Are they like us? Have they invented our inventions? Someone suggested that the inhabitants of the moon would have a much larger body than ours and a harder constitution, while Pythagoras believed that the moon was inhabited by plants and giant animals.

In 1755, Manuel Kant, in "The General Theory of the Sky", said: "The matter of which the inhabitants of different planets are formed must be of a lighter and finer species, and the elasticity of the fibers, along with the appropriate arrangement of its structure, must be more perfect as the distance from the Sun increases." What the hell? He started to debate about which planet would be with the higher race. Would these be stronger? Would these be smarter? Would these need to sleep less? A tier list of the solar system.

Anyway, they didn't assure it either. They threw probable ideas based on their observations. After all, most of them were also mathematicians. They just saw the universe in a probabilistic way, with uncertainty. To think that only the Earth had been able to create life... was unlikely. But back to the subject. What explanation did Venus have?

It's not known. There is no natural phenomenon that can cause a light visible from the Earth. If you look at modern observations, they all appear with the dark face as expected. Dark. This makes it possible that all those stories, not told by few people, precisely, have no explanation beyond believing that they were an optical illusion, a telescope failure, a flash in the eye.

Heschel believed to see cities in what turned out to be craters. Franz von Grutheisen praises the god of fire in the lightnings of Venus. And us, faces in stones, UFO ships crashed in stones, pyramids in stones, stones in stones. While the human remains human, he will see ghosts. And there are not only ghosts on Earth.

Years later, Thomas Dyck, in his book "The Sky and the Earth", praised the work of William Herschel and his 40-foot telescope, but he recognized that even with those tools, the knowledge they had about the universe was extremely limited and they always would be. All generations will die before they can explore it all.

Astronomer, yes, but also a believer and a writer. His book is read as a mixture of reality, fantasy and a splash of his own faith in God. As you know, by trying to understand the infinity of the universe, both the faith of the believer and the skepticism of the atheist become stronger. Chapter 18

Planets, wherever they may be, in our own system or others, are inhabited by conscious beings, and not only conscious, but surely intelligent. I continue arguing, and I imagine that, because of that human trait that tries to find a purpose that planets were born to be inhabited, but what would all those balls of fire, gas and stone do wandering eternally in the nothingness? They are there for...

Those beings would have similarities with our bodies or the animals, although the size, shape and ability to move could be different due to the transformation they would have suffered to adapt to the conditions of their planet. Dedicate two or three pages to make it clear that they would have eyes because, of course, if they were given the sun they would have evolved developing vision.

it's not unlikely that the inhabitants of Jupiter have a vision that resembles our telescopes. This book was published in 1844, 50 years before the popularization of the aliens who became known as the "little green men", later renamed as "grays". It doesn't give precise descriptions, but you can see how it was insinuating the form. "Why do you have such big eyes, grandma?"

to be able to see all the moons of Saturn, what's that supposed to be? Before the illustrations of Wells and the descriptions that these books gave, the image that they had of aliens was very human, like we are. In fact, they imagined them as if they were indigenous, which at that time was the most similar to beings from another world. In his book, Thomas Dick continues doing the same for every property he considers indispensable. They would have locomotion capacity, no matter how strange it was,

because there are no rational beings that are confined in the same place as plants. They would have the ability to hear and emit sounds because without them you can't relate or share emotions. As you can see, he was inventing the reasons as he wrote, or really believed that sign language can't transmit emotions. In essence, what he said is: "They have to be similar to the Earth because we don't know if intelligent life can be given in drastically different ways from ours."

That way they had to sleep, eat, be curious and pursue knowledge, so they would be also astronomers and I don't know why he said he had reasons to believe it. Of course, although they understood that the Earth was not the center of the universe since Copernicus, not even the center of the solar system, they still believed that a single god had created all the worlds. Somehow they were ingenious to continue being the center of something.

And finally, as he was still a Catholic, he thought that all rational creatures would have been created to be naturally good. He considered that much of the other worlds would not have known the evil of the earth, our sins, which still preserved that primordial innocence of Adam and Eve. He thought that, because if he didn't, it meant admitting that God, that pure, perfect and good being, would have made the mistake of creating beings with the innate ability to sin.

A French woman, very rich, called Annemiele Clara Goget, died in 1891. In her will, she created a 100,000 francs prize, more or less half a million dollars nowadays, for the first to be able to contact a planet that wasn't Mars, since she firmly believed, like so many others, that there was life on Mars and not

It would be a merit to communicate with them. This prize was a problem because the premise to win it was to contact another planet, which, said otherwise, attracted only those who in advance believed to have contacted another planet. In this way, when they put money in front of you to prove something, mysteriously you are more prone to want to see signals where there are none. For 78 years, it only attracted fans, crazy people and very optimistic people.

This is where the crazy and optimistic fan of Tesla comes in. Motivated or not by the prize, four years after the death of that woman, Tesla invented his radio system. In 1923 he believed that aliens had contacted him, although he could not decipher the message. He interpreted the pulsations, of course, as a language based on numerical sequences, deduced that they would use numbers to communicate, since they are universal. During all those years he never stopped believing.

and in 1937 he said convinced that he would win the prize without any doubt, but he could not convince the rest of the world that what he captured was being caused by an intelligent being on another planet. In the end, as no one could contact other beings, they gave the prize to those who believed that they had approached the idea more, that is, to the crew that went to the moon. Remember that he only left out Mars, the rest was worth planets, moons, stars ... Thankfully, if they had made a trip to Mars, they would not have won the prize.

But what were those messages that Tesla received? Did he really receive something or did he confuse a stone with a face? Or in his case, a lightning bolt with an extraterrestrial message? Only Tesla knows what he captured with his radio, but if they were engineered to build a radio telescope and he captured something similar to this, it is understandable that he confused it with aliens. In the 70s this sound drove people crazy.

Even nowadays it's fascinating the sounds that can be made from planets, pulsars and black holes. This is what Juno captured flying over Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. One of the many pulsars that they have captured: the black hole of the galaxy Perseus.

These strong emissions were caused by a lightning in Saturn. A lightning in the Earth sounds the same, being realistic and assuming that Tesla did not build a radio telescope. Surely he heard this without knowing that provoked it, although I do not see how you can get a numerical sequence from here.

We haven't changed anything in that aspect. Maybe now we know that the sun has no inhabitants and that this sound is caused by a pulsar, but we keep giving extraordinary explanations to unknown events whenever we can. We are still programmed to think that at first an event is causing it a smart being. As you well know, an evolutionary risk to always keep us alert to threats. The bad thing is that this risk is so strong that, not seeing that it is causing it, you will continue to think that it is doing something that can hurt you, only that you can't see it.

ghosts, gods or aliens. We look further and further and look for more and more subtle signs because we refuse to believe that we are alone and we can never know for sure if we are the first to exist or the last, trying to find life in an infinite cemetery. *Music*