The Bright Future of Space Exploration

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(Edited)
The Earth’s population currently stands at almost eight billion souls. Each sovereign being involved in living a life filled with shopping, working, surfing the web and keeping up with their favorite Kardashian. Life just seems to go on and on as usual like the tick-tock of an old grandfather clock. The future is barely a thought to most of you busily gobbling up the present. Governments and individuals are doing their utmost to make every single dollar count. Every year the budget for NASA and space exploration in general, comes up for debate. While some may see the space agency as a bloated carcass ripe for the picking, others see a vital tool starved of resources. Spending on space exploration is not a wasted luxury, but a crucial investment in the future of our species.

From the time man first looked up at the vast night sky and wondered about the twinkling stars overhead, we have seen our future in the stars. With the Milky Way stretching far beyond the visible horizon, space makes us wonder what’s beyond our earthly home. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson alerts us in Natural History Magazine that in a few billion years “the Sun will swell to occupy the entire sky” surrounding our planet like a molten hot oven. At some point, the search for a new home might be a very good thing.

However that search won’t come without some compromises on the part of a skeptical public used to pinching every single penny.

Considering the amount the United States continues to spend making war, and the weapons thereof; $4.5 billion seems a paltry sum to invest in the future of mankind. The past has shown us that it’s an investment that pays off. From advances in telecommunications, fiber optics and computing, the many rewards reaped from our space program have changed our world for the better. At the dawn of the 20th century, the average citizen could not possibly have imagined how much the world would change in a just a few short decades. From the launch of Sputnik 1 to the announcement of the first personal computers by Apple’s Steve Jobs, technology keeps advancing. The Sun -- that silent sentinel in the sky – has watched over us for ages, and now seems to cast a disapproving gaze at the folly of man bent on destroying his only home.

Overpopulation, war and the twin specters of climate change along with the future loss of Earth as a habitable planet, means now is a great time to get serious about planning for our future. In the United States alone, a child is born every 8 seconds, and that coupled with a world population of 7.8 billion with no end in sight. One welcome tool that emerged to help propel the search for alien worlds, arrived in the name of: The Kepler Space Telescope.

The Solar System Exploration Program

That incredible eye in the sky, allowed us to magnify the search for Earth-like worlds as part of the Kepler Mission. The results of NASA Discovery mission #10, have been “hits” for over 2,600 and counting, new exoplanets in the habitable “goldilocks zone” around a parent star. Finding this twin Earth won’t be easy given the distances involved and the myriad difficulties in finding a close enough match to our own troubled sphere. Future missions such as DART, JUICE and the Europa Clipper, will continue gathering information about our solar system. Hundreds of years ago, one could envision a crusty old ship’s captain setting sail during the age of discovery. Pressing his ever-watchful eye against the worn scope, our ages-ago captain scans the horizon for any trace of landfall.

The welcome stability of terra-firma seems just within reach. Fleeting images of a spectral shore dissipating like a watery mirage in the desert taunt our dispirited explorers. Lost at sea and battling angry waves seemingly intent to hurl each offending ship over an imagined edge of the world; the exhausted crew feels blessed relief sighting a sliver of land and finally, sanctuary. Today’s intrepid explorers are more likely to clutch an iPad instead of a worn scroll. Gleaming computer screens have become the new sextant charting precise measurements in the search for a new home. The arguments for not funding this important work rings hollow as each month brings news of yet another possible planetary candidate.

Carl Sagan

With the rapid fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a “Peace Dividend” was proffered to solve the world’s problems. However with the advent of the “War on Terror,” a new wall quietly went up in the minds of many against any new spending for space exploration. The only dividend would end up trickling into the bulging pockets of shareholders already heavily invested in the machinery of war. That same decade saw the loss of an amazing visionary and futurist: Carl Sagan. Dr. Sagan’s wise advice and counsel were on full display in his excellent book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, when he wrote:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The late cosmologist’s wisdom is needed now more than ever before during the ever-present budgetary battles over spending for space exploration. I firmly believe he would make a strong argument in favor of reducing the bloated military budget, and ending the endless wars overseas. The discussion for at least a doubling of the budget allotted for space exploration deserves to be heard loud and clear. War is a deficit in our present, while spending on the search for a future home is a wise investment in our future. I believe the forecast is indeed very bright for every single one of us. We will crack the code that prevents us from seeing with clear eyes the way forward. Mankind is not destined to find his end in a polluted world facing certain destruction. Like the explorers of old, we too will set off for that distant shore on an other-worldly journey to the stars.

One day a determined space pioneer will feel the crunch of alien soil beneath his boots as he sets foot onto a vista never before seen with earthly eyes. The hope is that by then, we will have learned the lessons from our old world, striving to treat our new world, and each other with the care and respect they both deserve. With the prevalence of binary star systems, we may gaze up at two Suns overhead sending light and warmth to a welcoming world below.

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