Stargazer by Andrey Klimkovsky

The path of man to the stars has never been simple and straightforward. There are no straight paths in the Universe at all. Obeying the laws of the universe, all cosmic bodies move along curved trajectories — orbits. People are also space inhabitants — whether they understand it or not. And the laws of our World, in a philosophical sense, act on them in a similar way. In our destinies, we make loop after loop around certain centers of our interests, move towards the goal, but suddenly we begin to move back, describe loops like the intricate movements of the planets. Generally speaking, the evolutionary line of the entire human race has the same character — the whole civilization sometimes reaches a dead end, with difficulty getting out of it, rushing in various directions before finding a more or less suitable path — sometimes by trial and error , sometimes by mystical prompts with heaven. But more often than not one gets the impression that we are in darkness, and we do not see the path. How is it possible to move forward in such difficult conditions, when no one has trod our path yet?

Something similar can be said about seafarers — the pioneers of sea spaces, the discoverers of new continents and oceans. Their path is full of surprises, but absolutely poor in landmarks. And therefore, luck sometimes depends entirely on those sailors who are on duty day and night in the observation barrel at the upper end of the ship's mast. They gaze intently into the distance and when their solemn cry of "Earth!" Is heard above the deck. the entire crew of the ship understands that they were sailing in the right direction, that they were not sailing in vain.

Our planet can be compared to such a ship. And it also has lookouts. These are astronomers — priests of the goddess Urania. Every night they look directly at the course of our universal voyage. They own all the discoveries of new cosmic lands, all the laws of life of this vast world. Now astronomers, armed with modern "telescopes", are ready to warn us about unwanted encounters with dangerous space tramps — comets and asteroids, they can indicate alternative energy sources — we still have a very long way to go and there will definitely not be enough oil and coal for it, new territories are striving for the foundation of terrestrial colonies — human settlements on other planets in the very near future.

Realizing how far we have come on this cosmic path is sometimes just breathtaking. And yet the frigate of our knowledge is flying in full sail across the expanses of the Universe not so long. For fifteen hundred years he was stranded on delusions, dogmas and fear of seeing what exists in reality. About four centuries ago, a sudden wave pushed this shell-covered ship off the reef, and slowly picking up speed, it moved forward — to the alluring, frantically calling starry distances and a fantastic future.

In this album, I tried to paint with musical strokes — mixing notes and noises — a picture illustrating the changes in our consciousness — a picture explaining how the views of the World have changed among those representatives of humanity who have chosen the role of lookout for our ship named "Earth".

After all, even astronomers are sometimes mistaken, reluctant to change old theories to new ones — more accurate, discard old ideas about the harmony of the world in order to find modern ones.

Already in the Renaissance it took about a century to admit that our place in the World is not central, and it took another two hundred years to understand that the World has no center at all — at least in the geometric sense in which we find a center on earthly scales and earthly objects.

Only for the last hundred years, astronomy has been using electronics in its research and the transition to software technologies has been overcoming significant resistance from the supporters of human uniqueness and irreplaceability. But now space telescopes-robots have almost completely ousted the living observer from the process of detecting new objects, from the process of measuring the exact positions of space bodies. A person can only reap the benefits of such measurements and try to draw conclusions based on data already processed by other robots.

The science of astronomy has changed dramatically. Instead of hundreds or thousands of objects to study, astronomers have to deal with hundreds of billions. And all these objects are very important. Some may have life, some pose a threat. But they all give us a chance to learn something new about our World. And this knowledge — their abundance — leads to the fact that we can no longer remain the same. This cosmic journey has taken us to such a distance where we can hardly recognize ourselves, and comparing with the images that we corresponded to in the recent past, we begin to realize that we cannot go back, and we cannot live in the old way.

The clocks of our computer assistants measure time in billionths of a second, streams of information of gigabytes and terabytes rush into our heads, even when we go for a walk we determine our position using space satellites, our letters are delivered to another continent by a computer network in less than a second, and we can see the interlocutor on the screen of the communicator in the palm of our hand, when we are separated by tens of thousands of kilometers — wasn't this reality described by science fiction writers some half a century ago? — we are already in it.

Believe me, the next step of this scale of accomplishments will be overcome by us in a much shorter time. In 5 — 10 years, we will see this frontier of knowledge as far away as we now assess the level of our technical development, dating back to the middle of the 20th century. The speed of our flight in space-time has increased many times!

And in this fast-paced era, it is more important than ever to look ahead — into the future flying towards us. In order to recognize it in time, to be able to bypass obstacles and wrong goals, to find the right guidelines. Who knows what awaits us in that unknown World of the future, which we will enter tomorrow? Perhaps we will find brothers in mind, whom we have been looking for for a long time? Perhaps tomorrow will give us the technology to control Gravity or even Time. And all these milestones on our way will be the first to be noticed by the looking out Earth — astronomers, astrophysicists.

Now they have such an important role. Once upon a time, their work was presented to many as an impractical passive contemplation of stars, which cannot be reached. They were called Astronomers — counting the stars. But in English there is another term — Stargazer — a person who clung to the stars with his eyes. He does not count them, he looks at them — he is inseparable from them, he is a part of them. And through him we are all connected with the stars by an unbreakable thread. Once upon a time it was not felt, did not seem relevant, important. But everything is changing. And now the fate of mankind depends on the people who "clung to the stars" — on the "Stargazers".

Andrey Klimkovsky is one of leading russian composers working in the electronic musical space. Images creating by him - "Music of Celestial Spheres", "Starry Sky", "ALEALA" и "DreamOcean" - stayed the classics of the genre, received popularity as in Russia, and abroad.

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