24.06.2015

Catch up Before the Limit

Another exhibition was held last week near Paris, which regularly for more than a hundred years reminds us that a dream no matter how distant it might seem eventually becomes the reality.
Every two years, the oldest air show in Le Bourget displays the most modern, darting and magnificent in its perfection human hands’, whose existence was unimaginable for thousands of years.
By the way, the Le Bourget salon has the aerospace status. Hardly having mastered the airspace, the humankind strives to take the next step to the other stars now. However, the main question is why?

The large part of the exhibits produced by more than 2 thousand companies from 46 countries of the world in Le Bourget are the wonderful and at the same time deadly weapons: the combat aircrafts and the means to destroy them. However, if the humankind still has not realised how small and fragile is our Earth and that the ability to cooperate in the common interest is more important than to invent the new ways of self-destruction, then what we are going to do in the outer space?
At the time, I proposed the UN members to sign the agreement amongst all the countries that they should commit themselves to pass their annual military budgets to the development of medicine. Just for one year!
This proposal was not made by chance. I had previously discussed it with the world's leading medical specialists. Moreover, they all were positive that by making that step the civilization would face a real revolution in the medicine within two years. We would be able to cure the terrible diseases, such as the cancer and diabetes, and learn how to prolong the man’s life.
However, the invention of the new ways to kill, probably, brings more benefits than finding the ways for prolonging the human life. Unfortunately, I quite often saw that people, who take responsibility for governing the states, sometimes act not only against the interest of the all humankind but against the interests of their own people...
I visited Lviv during the opening of the air show in Le Bourget. I was the first Russian politician who came to Ukraine after the certain events took place. I arrived there as the FIDE President upon the invitation of the mayor of Lviv Andriy Sadoyi and the Lviv Chess Federation.
The matter of fact is that after the Ukrainian chess player Maria Muzichuk has won the title of the World Champion we received a proposal to hold a match in Lviv between her and the contender from China- the triple World Champion Hou Yifan. True, we have already had a bid to host the tournament in Beijing but I decided to go to Lviv and see it with my own eyes.
Looking ahead, I should say that I really liked the Lviv. It is a beautiful, clean and cosy city. Now I think that we really should hold the match here, not in Beijing. We have held the World Intellectual Olympics twice, the Grand Prix and the Women World Chess Championship in the Chinese capital. Meanwhile, not only in Lviv but also in Ukraine in general the international chess tournaments were not held for decades.
This is not fair because the one of the world's strongest chess school is in Lviv. The fans of the ancient game are well aware about the names of the Ukrainian grandmasters like Adrian Mikhalchishin, Alexander Belyavsky and Vassily Ivanchuk. Today, in this series is the name of Maria Muzichuk who was incidentally, trained by Belyavsky.
Since one of the main tasks of FIDE is to promote and popularize chess, the holding the Championship match in Lviv would serve to the best interests of our federation as well as this city and Ukraine as such. The Lviv children would see the living legends of chess and be able to choose them as their role models. Is not that wonderful?
However, I am being a little distracted. I remember, and I spoke about this at the press conference in Lviv, how the Ukrainian web sites raged with the unprecedented passion before the final match between Maria Muzychuk and the Russian chess player Natalia Pogonina. They wrote that "Putin will use all the measures against Muzichuk up to the psychotronic gun" and advised her to refrain from eating the unusual food possibly poisoned with intoxicating drugs...
However, Maria won the hard-fought and intense fight showing the audience the exciting finale and therefore all were able to make sure that her victory was absolutely sporting and honest and that FIDE was the transparent federation not being involved in the political games.
I faced the similar passions from the opposite side when I was preparing to fly to Lviv. I was discouraged to go to Ukraine being frightened by the ‘Bandera followers’ and was even offered a protection.
Of course, I refused any protection, and did not regret it. We walked with the mayor Andriy Sadoyi round the streets of Lviv; the people recognised us and asked for permission to take a picture with me. I have never met any ‘Bandera follower’ or heard the slogan ‘moskalyaku on Gilyaks’! (‘The Russians go to gallows’-.Ed.)
Moreover, we met a woman who was the head of the Lviv Railwaymen Palace of Culture. She just told me: "I am the Russian, the very’ Moskal’. (The derogatory name for the Russians in Ukraine- .Ed). I live here for 50 years, and nobody ever blamed me for my origin."
She and many others citizens of Lviv approached me, saying that they did not want war or violence. Moreover, they asked me to convey their views to Putin, although I think it would be more logical for them to apply to their own leaders.
Anyway, people of Lviv, the inhabitants of the Western Ukraine, and the whole country are against the war. The normal people around the world cannot be willing to fight a war with the inevitable blood and tears because there is no justification for the violence. People do understand that the life on Earth is too fragile to destroy it recklessly. However, unfortunately we have succeeded in destroying it.
The scientists are concerned: we are facing the process of the sixth’s mass extinction of the vertebrates. An average of two species out of ten thousand for a hundred years was disappearing in the past. These days, 228 species disappear out of the very same ten thousand within a century in the current times. In addition, this is the entirely human fault. However, the man is a vertebrate just as well...
In fact, for the life as such; the rate of disappearance of certain species does not mean anything even if those are at least three times more ‘sapience’. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky describing the journey to Mars contended that the galaxy is literally teeming with life. The Japanese scientists have confirmed his brilliant suggestion not so long ago. By calculating the probability of the existence of life on other planets, taking into account not only those that we are aware of, but all the possible forms of life they were amazed: a life really should swell in the universe.
Of course, eventually we all would die. Everything that appears in this world from the smallest microbe to the entire galaxies and even the universe itself eventually goes into oblivion. However, why should we try to drive ourselves to the limit beyond which if anything remains but the humankind?
That is why I so stubbornly promoted the idea of ‘One billion chess players – one billion clever people’. I am deeply convinced that the more people who are used to think first and then to act are in the world, the more rational and considered decisions would be made.
These days, according to our calculations, 800 million people play chess in the world. Increasingly the colleges and universities introduce this game in their curricula every year. I hope we still have time to stop at the dangerous limit beyond which there is only the death and disaster and by doing that to prove that the humankind is a real community of the intelligent beings that value the life more than the ambitions and greed.
And that’s’ when we would be able to think about the deep space, the other worlds with so many forms of life and, who knows, where we might meet the intelligent beings.