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Have you ever felt that winter has become longer and summer has become hotter? If so, you are experiencing global warming firsthand. As the threat from global warming continues to increase, mankind is desperate to find other inhabitable planets. We must also not forget about the scarce resources in our overpopulated earth. To many people, the only foreseeable solution we face is for us to invest in space exploration to inhabit a new planet. Although space exploration seems to be the logical solution, is it worth taking a gamble and spending billions on exploration that may not end in a desirable solution to our problem? Throughout this paper, we will be examining the benefits and downfalls of Japan investing in space exploration. We will explore past and present ways of space exploration as evidence to see whether it is worth cutting costs in other areas for space exploration.
Benefits and reasons
To put it into perspective, some of the reasons why we would be interested and have been interested in space exploration are the following; Research and Technology development and colonization. In terms of Research and Technology development, we currently use GPS in the form of, navigation devices such as Google Maps. For us to accurately predict weather, we also need to have satellites in space. Most importantly, we currently have medical research going on in space that if it is successfully done, could cure disease and prolong human life. By investing in space research, we also could study the threat of asteroids. Asteroids have crashed into Earth several times in the past, most of them causing a mass extinction. This is less of a matter of if and a matter of when. As mentioned in the introduction, the scarce resources of Earth would be less of a concern because many materials in outer space are becoming more and more rare on Earth.
The reason to colonize, if we can accomplish this, is that humans have a backup plan in case of any major disaster such as climate change or the case of an asteroid colliding with Earth.
Downfalls of Space Exploration
Some of the downfalls of space exploration are the following; Cost, bad for the environment, no guarantee of success, and logistics. Space exploration doesn’t come cheap. On average, each mission will cost an astonishing amount of $450 million according to Nasa. Specifically in terms of Japan, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has an annual budget of 183 billion yen ($1.6 billion ). This is money that could be used towards projects such as finding ways to reduce global warming. An example of reducing global warming is creating renewable resources. Taking this idea full circle as stated in the beginning, fossil fuels are no longer an option as our earth becomes more and more damaged. We need to find ways to preserve our resources rather than ignoring them and being forced to find alternatives. While on the topic of global warming, the amount of litter every space mission creates is devastating, there are more than half a million items of debris that are currently being tracked as they orbit our planet. The next con is that even after investing all this time and resources there is no guarantee of success in finding our next habitable planet. This means that no matter how much money research and time we invest into space travel we are not guaranteed to find the next Earth. This makes space exploration a very risky matter making it questionable if we should keep exploring. Finally, the last problem we face with space exploration is the logistics of it. As written in the first paragraph our ultimate goal for space exploration is us to find a habitable planet, surprisingly we have found multiple inhabitable planets and every single one of them has two things in common. The first common point of all of these plants is that although we believe they could be inhabitable, we do not know for sure if they are. This is because we classify them inhabitable because they have similarities to earth such as the temperature, period of days, and radiant flux, although these are very important factors we are not sure if there are resources that human life requires such as water. The other common factor there is is even if we were to find a habitable planet it would be too difficult if not impossible to send the whole human race there. This is because planets we believe are inhabitable such as the Kepler 22b and the Tau Ceti and too far away. Back in 2009 NASA used a satellite telescope and found Kepler 22b, and they estimated that it would take an astonishing 23.4 Million years to reach. Not only is it too far to reach the tile that space travel has on the human body but it is nearly impossible to get to anywhere outside of the earth without extensive years and years of training.
Past and Present
Past methods of space research were heavily influenced by religion, philosophers such as Aristotle Ptolemy and Claudius Ptolemaeus who were widely respected astronomers used religion to study space. Specifically, they believed in the Geocentric theory. The Geocentric theory, as Aristotle describes in his writing, is the belief that the Earth is at the center of the universe, and all of the other planets are orbiting around the Earth. This means that from anywhere on Earth, the Sun appears to revolve around Earth once per day. While the Moon and the planets have their motions, they also appear to revolve around Earth about once per day. This was widely believed due to a literal interpretation of the Bible He set the earth on its foundations so that it should never be moved.
Currently, we have a more objective way of researching the universe. Some of the ways we study our plants are; JMARS, Analyst Notebook, and LROC. Firstly, JMARS formerly known as Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing , the JMARS is a geospatial data analysis tool meaning that it is the gathering and projecting imagery, in other words, it is information that has a geographical aspect to it. This program allows us to take high-resolution photographs of certain spots on planets such as Mars. This gives us the chance to research the materials and conditions of plants to see whether it would benefit us to explore them. The next commonly used method for space exploration is the Analyst Notebook. The Analyst Notebook is a NASA database that allows the user to pull up detailed data such as photographs from the missions, mission objective documentation, mission planner goals, and other various data points from previous missions. This allows NASA to create hypotheses, and estimations and to find improvement points for the next missions. Finally, the third approach we have for studying space is the LROC or Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The LROC is a high-resolution camera system that is equipped on the lunar reconnaissance orbiter which is a NASA robotic spacecraft that is currently orbiting the Moon. This robotic spacecraft was developed to help render the data captured by the satellite.
Conclusion
After researching the Benefits and downfalls of space exploration, I believe that although space exploration seems very intriguing, I think rather than ignoring the major problems such as global warming and lack of materials in an overpopulated earth we should use space funding and try to find ways to fix our earth. Saying this I do understand why people would support space exploration but I think that the risks and logistics outweigh the benefits.
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