“Just like the expanding Universe our knowledge, technology &
curiosity expanding too inspiring us to make an effort in order to spread our human
race beyond the horizon of our planet earth.”
We are living in the modern era of exponential growing technology
and transhumanism where human sensory system intertwined to machine and
programming. Aristotle said once “Educating the mind without educating the
heart is no education at all”. Hence with the current technological advances,
we are enhancing our intelligence with increased capability to understand the
things within no time, but are we getting wiser?
The famous quote from Einstein that “I fear the day when the
technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of
idiots”. Which I consider he meant regarding morality and today neither
scientific understanding nor religious beliefs are enough to bind us morally.
Hence there is need to change the paradigm from objective dumbness with delusional
high intelligence to the subjective curiosity for absolute wisdom and wasteful
relative competition to the absolute positive goal. And understanding the vastness of this
universe with space exploration can be that positive shared vision with which
next generations will not be idiots but wiser than today's because once the
vastness of this universe becomes accessible starting from Mars as just a way-point to go towards stars, new societies, cultures and human values will
arise that we can’t imagine yet. On the Valentine’s day of 1990, when voyager-I
space probe captured earth as a pale blue dot which inspired Carl Sagan with
its deeper meaning.
“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 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 Earth is
a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” – Carl Sagan.
Well enough to understand the unimportance of humanity in the great
context of the universe and the importance of our role in it at the same time. Making
us to rethink on our moral values and there are much better things to do than
wasting our intelligence, energy and resource on unnecessary things like
starting from manipulating individual’s insecurity for deceptive self-benefits
to the thought of starting nuclear war. At the end we are in the same game, so
like game theory why not to cooperate than compete. There are lots of
interesting things to do, universe kept us hungry with its mystery and
curiosity as its food. Let’s play the same together.
In my previous blog “Science-Philosophy Singularity” I could
conclude on the fact that going into fundamental has its immense significance
of getting benefits of absolutism to unravel the mysteries. As we are curious
to understand the origin of life and evolution of such a beautiful lucky planet
Earth as we know it. Scientist are looking for the fundamental conditions which
recorded this primitive life form and believes that one of the possible way to
search for the same on the another planets which were in the same environment
while formation of solar system took place and still has the record of these
ancient conditions.
Why Mars?
Mars can be considered as time frozen version of early earth and may
have the record for the same and also is the strongest candidate as a habitable
planet because it has 24.66 hour day (sol), seasons much like earth, requires
less delta-V to reach from earth, has all of the elements necessary to create
building material & been studied with almost 20 successful missions over
the past few decades including current operational rovers like opportunity
& curiosity investigating habitability
while recent space probes Maven , Mangalayan, ExoMars-TGO are observing
atmosphere orbiting around Mars . While other closest candidate’s like Venus
has favorable conditions only in cloud tops and Europa has its comparatively
complex missions.
Today though Mars is harsh desert with dusty storm of oxidized iron,
Mars images from satellite orbiting shows water marks, river lines. Curiosity
rover drilling and scanning for hints of an ancient lakes, fresh water and
organic molecules and already found the features like river deltas, channels
lake-floor mud layers making scientists to conclude that mars was once far
warmer and wetter with even magnetosphere blocking harmful emission from sun triggering
scientist to study further the reason behind the cosmic process that made this
planet cold, dry & oxygen depleted losing much of its atmosphere which is
also important to prevent the possibility of happening such transformation to
the planet Earth. One possible way to find the answer by studying the ice core
sample from water ice present confirmed by NASA’s Phoenix Lander on Mars
northern ice caps. The air bubbles in the in ice cores will give us the
information about trapped atmosphere of millions years ago and for the same
NASA is planning to sent human mission to Mars to make it more efficient
compared to the current pre-programmed robotic missions as they lack in
intelligence , adaptability and agility compared to humans.
In fact Mars can be made habitable.
The solution lies in the Earth currents biggest problem, global
warming which has to stop on earth but Mars needs it to get terraformed into a habitable
planet. There are several theories proposed to bring frozen water and carbon
dioxide beneath Martian surface to the atmosphere by rising temperature to have
a green house effect because as it will thicken the atmosphere causing more
photons to trap from sun creating autocatalytic effect to reach equilibrium which can hold water in
liquid form which is one of the key essential for sustaining life, others are
energy from sun, abundance of methane & volcanic features which already present
in the Mars atmosphere.
Such theories are as building a large solar reflector in space to
direct the solar radiation to heat the surface of Mars, setting small automated
factories that can produce super greenhouse gasses without ozone depleting side
effects, redirecting comet to hit mars, covering the poles in dark dust mined
from Mars moon, human-engineered microbes that could survive, bring the
industrial revolution to Mars which are responsible for Earths global warming. Till
entire terraforming process human have to live in artificial self sustaining ecosystem
with either in underground habitat like bunker or in optimum transparent dome
structure to survive from cold temperature and radiation.
Definitely it will be challenging task but with our evolving
technologies we already accomplish wondrous things like Dubai’s spectacular
construction projects of artificial islands or Charles Darwin’s successful ecological
experiments on ascension isle back in 18th century. This examples
gives us inspiration to believe in our capability to terraformed Mars in recent
future. If Mars eventually loses its terraformed atmosphere again over a period,
before that it will give us more understanding about our mysterious universe,
new theories, new experience and many more possibilities of space exploration.
Martian waves on Earth
For anything to happen in reality had to happen in our mind first.
Mars is happening and we are there already in our minds. Today’s generation
with worldwide societies like Mars Society, Mars Generation etc., grad
students, research scholars, bloggers, vloggers, Hollywood are acting to
realize their Mars imagination and buzz is growing in autocatalytic way. Real
life Mark Watney’s are studying to grow Martian potatoes here on earth, Hi-seas
project sending crew to simulated Mars to study what’s like living in
“Mars-like” conditions, and in fact few scientists are living according to
Martian time every sol. The rusty planet Mars have already been studied with so
many mission till date and many more lined up for the coming year with current
active and more new countries joining the curiosity with their space research
plan with varieties of rovers and landers including NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, an
advanced version of curiosity rover which is not only designed to look for
biosignatures but also sample retrieval.
NASA’s rovers already scratched the Martian surfaces setting the
frontier for mars exploration. In fact the rover names inspired quote which I
mentioned in one my previous blog as Mars Rover Quote, “Curiosity should be in
our spirit to find new opportunity for a hopeful future of
mankind”. Along with space agencies private companies have also set their eyes
on the Mars for the ‘fruitful race
towards amazing space’. SpaceX and blue origin mesmerized the world with
reusable rockets, Ad Astra Rocket Company electrifying the rocket technology
with VASIMR plasma engine which is ten times faster and fuel efficient than
chemical rockets revolutionizing rocket technology in the same way Tesla did in
automobile sector. Many kick-starter campaigns contributing with working on
self-sustained ecology, space 3D printing technology, virtual reality &
robonauts concept, cost effective tiny satellites named CubeSats,
industrializing moon, asteroid mining etc. all for sustainable space
exploration.
Martian waves are all over the planet Earth inspiring diversity to
unite for optimistic goal of discovering Martian flora and fauna, if not then
feel the importance of same of our own planet Earth and take care of it.
Friendly nature of Mars
Since the rusty red planet Mars named after roman god of war who
also known as lover of love goddess Venus and father of lovely kid cupid, well
enough for any poet or philosopher to imagine soft spot in the heart of roman
god Mars. In parallel to philosophy scientist are trying to understand and get
more familiar to the planet Mars and ready to embark an adventure of exploring
the soft spot of frozen water and carbon dioxide deep beneath the Martian
surface to see the friendly nature of planet Mars.
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