Friendly nature of Mars

“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 18^th 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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