Space Exploration — To Infinity and Beyond
By: Aaradhan Bagri
Tags: Space Travel, NASA, Space, Space Exploration, Mars

Countries are currently spending billions of dollars on getting ahead in the space race. Billionaires are going into space. However, Earth has enough problems of its own, with poverty, climate change, and a raging pandemic. It is a no-brainer to allocate more resources towards solving these problems first, instead of going ahead and ruining another planet, isn’t it?

Well, yes, but actually no.

Solving Problems on Earth

Believe it or not, space missions help solve many problems that we right now face on Earth. NASA’s SMAP satellite measures the soil moisture levels here on Earth, which can be used to predict future droughts, floods, and crop yields. In 2019, 5 ISRO satellites detected the devastating Cyclone Fani in the Bay of Bengal, alerting the respective government to evacuate lakhs of people in advance and saving their lives. Space agencies constantly report such developments across the world, thus saving countless lives.

NASA’s SMAP Satellite was used to monitor soil moisture levels on Earth.

Champions of climate change could not be more wrong when they sought to defund space programs worldwide, favoring more funding towards “climate-friendly” projects. Space programs have played a huge role in detecting climate change. For example, in 1984, the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite provided an early insight into how human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, affect the planet’s radiation balance and helped discover the hole in the ozone layer. Similar satellites and technologies have played a key role in gathering more data about rising temperatures and hence speeding solutions towards the issue of global warming.

Space programs directly impact our daily lives as well. GPS, Internet, Television, etc., would not have been possible without sending satellites to space.

Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life

We cannot truly define life. Our sample space is very low. From our perspective, we have only terrestrial life to look upon. We know that they use nucleic acids like DNA and RNA to register biological information and then replicate and pass on that information to future generations. What if some other process is used by some other form of intelligent life to carry out these tasks. How, then, would we define life? We would find out what is common between our process and theirs and then work upon a solid definition. Our current definition is vague and entirely unscientific.

How do we find ET life? Over the past century, scientists have extensively searched for signs of alien life by monitoring electromagnetic radiation and via various ongoing radio search projects like SERENDIP, Allen Telescope Array, Breakthrough Listen, and FAST. All these projects come under a collective term called SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

The Breakthrough Listen Project searches stars and galaxies for radio signals and laser transmissions.

Eliminating Chances of Extinction

The dinosaurs and almost all other species living at that time were wiped out when an asteroid hit the Earth, causing the 5th mass extinction. Humans, no matter how intelligent, have a high chance of meeting the same fate. The dinosaurs did not have the technology to help them watch out for the asteroids, nor did they have space programs to evacuate them to Mars.

On the other hand, humans have realized this quite early and are in the process of building relevant technology to help our species in case such a calamity arises.

India’s own Mars Orbiter Mission aims to explore Mars’ atmosphere and topography.

We continuously track asteroids and comets, and evacuation systems are being built when a potentially hazardous one comes close to the Earth. We have sent rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance to Mars to study its atmosphere, surrounding, and whether it would be suitable for humans to live in. Over the past sixty years, our continuous efforts aim to establish a civilization on another planet. Hopefully, when the next mass extinction arrives, we will be ready for it.

The Most Important Aspect

Humans are explorers by nature. We have existed on this planet for over 6 million years. From the hunter-gatherer early man to the humans of today, we have evolved quite a bit. We have explored, innovated, survived the toughest of times, and here we stand today.

Perhaps, the most important reason for exploring space is its humbling nature. Knowing that we are just a Pale Blue Dot when seen from 6 billion kilometers away, having achieved so much, yet so little is humbling but reassuring. Humankind still has a lot to achieve, to know, to explore.

The Earth seen from 6 Billion kilometers away, is nothing but a Pale Blue Dot.

Is conquering space the final frontier? We do not know. Nevertheless, we know that if we stop now, our efforts to survive would have gone to waste. If we stop exploring space, we may never have a concrete definition of life and our existence.

That is why we should continue doing what we do.

Sources

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/SMAP_generic.jpg/1200px-SMAP_generic.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/GBT.png/330px-GBT.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Mars_Orbiter_Mission_Spacecraft.jpg/413px-Mars_Orbiter_Mission_Spacecraft.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png/435px-Pale_Blue_Dot.png