All the Arguments for Space Exploration Ever — Part 2
The greatest show on earth, the night sky, plays every night. I have a strong belief that this show has been a silent galactic-years-old call to human curiosity. As documented records go, for more than a hundred generations, humans have kept a watch on the sky. Humans could predict gross positions of major celestial bodies more than 2000 years back.
The one big even that changed it all when it comes to how humans studied space was the invention of the telescope. The human eye could now access deep space, limited only by the resolution of devices. What this did was to open up a new world to satiate human curiosity. Let’s look at the impact of this one by one.
Imagine having neighbours that you never knew before. In the cold vast space, this fragile little oasis of Earth is all we know. Limited knowledge about our own backyard is dangerous. Fortunately, after the invention of the telescope, the discovery of our immediate neighbourhood picked up. Humans already knew the existence of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars Jupiter and Saturn from prehistoric times.
With telescopes to help us, the rate of our discovery of objects around us was: 9 bodies in the 17th century, 5 in the 18th , 10 in the 19th and more than 70 in the 20th century. Along with these discoveries came planetary sciences — planetary astronomy, planetary geology, atmospheric science. Planetary sciences aim to determine planetary composition, dynamics and formation. If we were to even attempt to answer the greater questions like those of our origin, we need to consider the evidence from planetary sciences as key pieces of the jigsaw.
As science writer Ross Andersen points out, “Cosmology wrenched the Earth from the centre of the universe and heaved it, like a discus, into its whirling orbit around one unremarkable star among the billions that speed around the black-hole centre of our galaxy, a galaxy that floats in deep space with billions of others, all of them colliding and combining, before they fly apart from each other for all eternity”.
In 1676, one of the first quantifications of the speed of light was a result of the observation that Io, the most active geological object in the Solar System with over 400 active volcanoes, had eclipse time delays that could be explained by the position of the observer on Earth. This helped quantify the speed of light within 0.1% error.
Space observation helped identify celestial phenomena like novae, super novae, red giants, white dwarves, black dwarves, pulsars and quasars. All these observations either led to formulation, confirmation or even outright overhauls/upheavals in the global physics community. Be it debates on the completeness and correctness of the General Theory of Relativity for gravitational physicists or that of the Standard Model for particle physicists. The recent findings at Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the preliminary results from the LISA Pathfinder (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission have encouraged gravitational physicists to obtain a key measure and to determining the nature of the fabric of space-time, i.e. gravitational waves.
Doppler measuring that the velocity of galaxies is proportional to the distance from Earth was one of the first observations that shook up the belief that universe was neither expanding nor contracting. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for universe that explains a broad range of phenomena: abundance of light elements, cosmic microwave background, large scale structure and the Hubble’s law. The fact that Earth is a speck in the field of a few lights among vast, enduring nothingness is a humbling one.
The discovery of the magnetosphere and the Van Allen Radiation belt through the Explorer 1 mission broadened our view of the close relationship between a system’s central star and its planets. Just the mere existence of an active planetary magnetic field powered by its internal dynamo increases the chances of a rocky or water-bearing planet to sustain life. The absence of such a shield around Mars is often quoted as a probable reason for the absence of long-lasting life-forms on its surface.
Space observation has also allowed the discovery of near earth objects and assessment of consequences of the impact of the these objects.
The accurate map of Earth was developed as a result of precision remote sensing using satellites. This has led to numerous breakthroughs in human understanding of our planet. From the dynamics of climate, hydrology, tectonic movement as well as knowledge that helps build application-based technology that feeds directly/indirectly off these breakthroughs. A common example of this GIS-based resource management that help economies strategize their growth and investments.
The contribution of space exploration to science and human understanding of the universe is hence, undeniable.
Also read other parts of the series: