Importance of Space Research by Mackinley Clevinger, February 7, 2016
Humanity has always strived for greater things, reaching further out into the vast unknown to grasp whatever lay there and bring it into the light, benefiting themselves and those around them with the learned knowledge and scientific advances provided by these acts. We have worked as a race to bring ourselves out of the darkness in these past few centuries, and into a world we can better understand by the light cast by our expanding knowledge of the universe and its workings.
We have used this information to do amazing things as a species, the progress and achievements in the last few decades alone far beyond the expectations and imaginations of any but the most far-reaching science fiction writers and philosophers of yore. We have spread from one region of this vast planet to colonizing it entirely, advanced from the discovery of friction-fire to the levels of science that require a lifetime of devotion to further, and elementary school knowledge to use. More than any of that, we have taken a look at this nurturing planet of ours, the incredibly unlikely level of safety and life-providing capability, and have turned from it to gaze upon the stars, and made our dreams a reality.
When our eyes turned to the skies, we may not have moved as one to reach those celestial bodies, but even working separately, it was merely a matter of time before we learned how to extend our reach beyond this planet. Satellites that spanned the circumference of this Earth, men and women who left the bounds of our atmosphere and returned alive, and ultimately, our greatest accomplishment of them all.
We have walked on the moon. This has become blasé to many of us, now, but think about it. In a metal tube, we shoved three men, using the flame we once feared, out of our planet’s atmosphere, fought the forces of nature that kept us here, and let them drift in the empty void that is the vast majority of our universe. They landed on a celestial body impossibly far away, walked on it, claimed it, and then successfully returned home without dying. Mankind walked on the moon, and repeated that feat several more times since that first memorable occasion.
We proved – to ourselves, to the planet that birthed us, and to the universe awaiting us – that we could leave the nest. Earth created us, but it would not be our final resting point. It took us a mere decade to go from being bound to this wet rock floating in the infinite cosmos, to gaining a new perspective on the life we had never questioned in this way before. We are not kept to this planet by gravity or a lack of technology any longer. However, it has been over forty years since we reached the moon for the first time, and more has changed on Earth than we have out in the cosmos.
While humanity is capable of amazing things, startling developments, and the completely unexpected; we are also capable of terrible acts, born of negligence and greed. In our ignorance and unwillingness to face the facts, our advances in society and technology have come along with a painful side-effect that threatens the long-term survival of our species. A booming population with nowhere to go and insufficient resources to sustain them has developed due to a lack of education and knowledge of these issues, and as a race, we have a nasty habit of blowing each other up and shooting one another.
Our priorities have shifted in the last few decades, and yet they haven’t done so to fix any of these problems. Our attention has been diverted from the task of space exploration and development of all the associated sciences, and put into more terrestrial avenues. On the face of it, this makes sense. We need a strong base from which to propel ourselves further into the stars. However, we have, as a species, failed quite horribly in creating that strong base, and are instead making our footing less stable every day.
We are exhausting our planet, both in resources and in what we can learn from it. Our future, in scientific and social development, lies among the stars, but that future will never be realized if we burn out so early on in our time in this vast universe that those dreams can never be reality. We can get things done when we set ourselves to it, but there exists too much infighting among ourselves and a blindness to the things that matter in this unique existence we have to mobilize ourselves, to face the issues at hand that are stopping us from being able to divert our attentions back to bringing about the next age of mankind.
We created the society and culture within which these problems have developed, and we are capable of turning ourselves around to halt the numerous dooms posed by our actions. Climate change, overpopulation, or war; all of these are within our power to halt in their entirety and bring a better quality of life to our global civilization even as we become capable of turning our resources towards expanding that civilization to something much, much grander.
Space is our future, ultimately. Too much can go wrong on this one planet that could easily wipe out our entire species, so a recourse in the event of disaster is necessary for our long-term survival. It is inevitable that we will develop currently existing technologies to allow us access to the stars, so long as we, not as countries, but as a global species, work together. The conflicts we experience today are born of division among ourselves, perceived differences that have halted uniform progress and collective knowledge that would benefit all of mankind.
Solving the issues we face today, to be able to direct ourselves towards less terrestrial interests, will not be an easy thing to do, but for the kind of future dreamt of by the idealistic and the hopeful, we have to take action to make our Earth firm beneath us; to make it into the haven and host of mankind’s most brilliant and capable; and direct its efforts towards understanding and exploring the broad universe we exist in and know so little about. Humanity may be a unique event in the cosmos, and it would be a crime not to fulfill our potential to its fullest while we’re still here, and perhaps ensure we never, truly, leave the universe as we know it. How could we possibly let our own imperfections stand in the way of that?