Leaving Planet earth

The shared dream: Reaching beyond our sky

The world beyond our sky has always fascinated human being since the dawn of time. From Neanderthals to modern day human everyone has once dreamt of stars, moons, the world beyond our sky. But making this dream into a reality was not that easy, because reaching beyond the sky is not a feat that can be achieved through ordinary means. You need special vehicle for escaping earths gravitational force as it always attracts everything to its center and as there is no temperature and air in space you need special suits to survive there. As we can see there are only obstacles and those weren’t some easy obstacle to overcome but we did eventually overcome these obstacles and conquered the space and went beyond that.

Start of achieving that dream

The first step of achieving this dream was taken by German-American aerospace engineer the father of the NASA’s lunar program Wernher Von Braun. He propelled the human kind to space and conquered the moon in 1969 by making the Saturn V launch vehicle along with other pioneers.

A new dream 

 

Conquering moons wasn’t enough for us, we humans are a curious and greedy creature we always want more, we want to achieve more, we want to know more. So we started seeing a new dream, a dream of finding a new home, a new earth, a new planet conquered by humans.

As days are going by we can see that slowly our planet earth is dying, becoming hostile towards us. So a lot of scientists think that it is high time that we start looking for other options because sooner or later this world will come to an end, will be polluted beyond saving and if we don’t do anything mankind will perish. To avoid such catastrophe scientists are trying to find new planets, and they have found a lot of planets suitable for mankind but sadly those are beyond our reach, they are thousands and thousands of light years away, we will never be able to reach there with our current propulsion technology. So what are we going to do?

Mars: New home for mankind

 

As scientists cannot reach the planets, which are light years away, they thought of a new way, quite intriguing solution if you ask me. They thought why find a new planet which is beyond our reach, when we can make a planet suitable for human kind and for that we don’t have to search so far, there is a planet in our solar system that can be made suitable for us and that planet is ‘Mars’ which is in our solar system and almost resembles our planet earth in many ways.

There are lot of differences between mars and earth mostly in size and in atmosphere but there are similarities too. Like earth, a day in Mars is 24 hours 39 minutes which is a little bit longer, now barren this red dry planet once had enough liquid to sustain primitive life forms, there are volcanos, ice caps in Mars like our very own earth.

Ways to make Mars habitual

 

Although mars is not habitable yet but it can be make habitual through terraforming. There are lot of ways to do that. Like Elon Musk the founder, CEO and Chief engineer of Space X has stated that if we can nuke the red planet, it will cause terraforming and we can hope to make mars habitual, but he was meet with a lot criticism for this idea. One of the other idea was to release greenhouse gases in that planet which will cause the ice caps to melt. The irony in that idea is that we are now struggling with greenhouse gases because it is causing our polar ice caps to melt and which is in result destroying our ozone layer, making the ultra violet rays emission uncontrollable and melting the ice caps. So to make Mars habitable we need to recreate the exact situation we are dealing with in earth. So what is destroying us might be the way to save mankind from going extinct.

Attempts to reach Mars

 

Even though Mars is really close to us it takes 9 months to reach there with our current propulsion technology. So there are attempts to make our technologies far better than the current one. There have been 50 successful and unsuccessful missions of NASA to mars the current ongoing mission is Perseverance rover, which is searching for signs of life on mars and it has found the signs of canal systems in Mars which is a clear indicator that the red planet once had water that could sustain life form. Another mission called “Curiosity rover” along with “Perseverance rover” has found organic matter in the mars soil. And the next mars mission is called “Mission Artemis” which will take man again in moon and then on mars. Even our neighboring country India has launch the satellite “Mangalyaan” to orbit mars. So we can hope that soon we will be taking a giant step on the dry surface of Mars and hopefully make it habitual for us.

 

The controversy

 

Even though it’s a great achievement to make an unknown planet habitual but a lot of people are opposed to the idea of leaving this planet. They want to save this planet to make it remain habitual for mankind, to them leaving this planet just because it’s becoming hostile towards us isn’t logical because with the fund that is being used for such space exploration mission they believe they can use it to make our planet Earth suitable like before, with less pollution, with controlled emission of greenhouse gasses etc. And then there is another party which believes that mankind was never meant to save this planet, we are meant to leave it. Apart from the controversy I believe that it’s will be the greatest scientific achievement of mankind if we can make another planet habitual for our race and maybe go farther make colonies in other planets making so many sci-fi novels come true.

We will prevail

Mankind has always prevailed no matter what obstacles they faced whether it’s a natural calamity or world ending wars. So I believe we will be able to achieve this shared dream of mankind and propel us farther in the deepest region of this unexplored vast, never ending galaxy. Make colonies in not only mars but also in many planets and in the face of extinction I pray and hope that we will prevail and Godspeed ahead.

 

References:

• https://www.futurelearn.com/info/blog/is-mars-habitable-human-settlement#:~:text=Terraforming%20Mars%20would%20entail%20three,the%20new%20atmosphere%20from%20being
• https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/5-8/features/F_JASON_Expedition.html#:~:text=Yet%20in%20many%20ways%2C%20Mars,little%20bit%20longer%20than%20Earth's