I have always found space and the cosmos to be extremely fascinating, both mysterious and beautiful. For me, all it take is one look at any of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope to reaffirm why I feel this way. In the house I lived at last year, some of my roommates and friends would spend hours sitting outside and watching the skies. We weren’t looking at anything in particular, mostly we were talking about how small we really are. With it being the 19th anniversary of the launch of the Telescope, I feel that this is a fairly relevant post, though it isn’t the main point.
In a dollar-and-cents comparison of what we are doing to explore the far reaches of space — and possible discover what made it happen — versus our other expenditures, the 2009 fiscal year has been budgeted for the entire government the amount of $3.1 trillion, with $17.2 billion allocated to NASA (.055% of the total budget). The government has been steadily cutting NASA’s funding since 1993, and it has dropped from 5.5% in 1966, which is the decade we first sent men to the moon — conspiracy theorists notwithstanding. In comparison, we are expected to spent $515.4 billion for the Department of Defense, about 16.6% of the budget. By no means am I suggesting that the money going to the DoD is misspent — I firmly believe that we must keep our nation well protected to deter our enemies from attacking us — but if we could take a little from here we could probably accomplish the same objective of the Department, which I will explain later.
I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “what practical use does looking at the stars have?” Well, potentially the very ability of the human race to survive as a species. If a meteor doesn’t impact the Earth, some plague doesn’t infect the entire population, or we haven’t managed to destroy ourselves by our own hands, in about 5 billion years our sun is going to start turning into a red giant and that will pretty much be the beginning of the end for us and our nice, habitable planet. What that means is in that time we need to find another planet capable of sustaining human life, and more importantly, find a way to get there. The fastest object we have put into space has been the Helios 1 and 2 which were sent to study the sun in the mid 70s and reached a speed of 150,000 mph. With the speed of light being about 186,000 mps (miles per second), that means we made it to around .0002%. Also take note that the closest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years, so we would have to travel for 18749 years. Here’s the stinger, the closest star with other planets that we have detected so far is Epsilon Eridani approximately 10.5 light years from Earth, and we don’t even think it’s habitable.
Even if we put the snail’s pace we move at aside, we also have multiple other hurdles to overcome before we can survive what will undoubtedly be a multi-generation trip through space. First, and by far the most important, is finding an effective way to recreate gravity. Why is this more important than food or water? If by the time we begin interstellar travel we haven’t came up with some sort of molecular sequencer to make food from energy, we are going to have grow or raise our own food. Seedlings depend on gravity to know which way is up, and by consequence which way the light will be coming. It is absolutely essential that we can grow food aboard a spacecraft because it is simply impractical to carry that much in storage. Animals need gravity because, well, I just can’t think of any way a cow is going to make it floating around its lot. Even humans need gravity to survive long-term travel in space. As we spend time in microgravity, our muscles begin to atrophy as a result of lack of use, which is why you always see astronauts exercising daily. If over many generations we lose more and more of our muscle, we won’t be able to stand on a planet with any appreciable amount of gravity. Some research even suggests that gestation is affected by gravitational relaxation. Mice (possibly rats) were sent to reproduce and carry their offspring to term. When they arrived back at Earth scientists discovered that compared to their Terran kin they had very underdeveloped motor skills that may have came from the brain not being able to experience gravity and program the mice appropriately. Should humans fall to the same fate, there would simply not be a way for us to find new land to call home.
Beyond the logistical problems of space travel, there are more shorter term benefits that can come from expanded space exploration. In 1969 when man finally landed on the moon, it wasn’t only the Americans celebrating the triumph, the entire world united in revelry. Knowing that we are just a small, insignificant speck in the vastness of space is the one thing that is universally shared. When you begin to see the bigger picture, you start to forget the petty differences and meaningless squabbles. The more we see how alike we all are, the easier it is for mankind to live with a renewed sense of togetherness. Back to the point of how more money for NASA means a better protected America, the fewer people who want to harm us, the less we need to defend ourselves.
While I could continue on for quite a while, my last point is that it is in our nature to need to understand how the universe works. Since we could first think there has been this innate desire to know why things happen the way they do, what makes the Earth tick. Perhaps it is because we feel that the more we know about the world, the closer we are to understanding our existence. We have by no means explored all of the reaches of our own planet, let alone all of the cosmos, but there will come a time that the only way to get the answers are to look up into the heavens and, with time, travel to them. Unless we are contacted by an alien civilization who finds us worthy enough to share their secrets of space travel, the only way we are going to accomplish this feat is to continue have resources available to the scientists and engineers who can make it happen. Oh, and for anyone who is wondering what will be the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope is slated for launch in 2013 and will let us see further into space than we have ever seen before.