Folio Draft 1 Introduction Space Exploration is a common topic you often hear about these days in places like the news, youtube, and social media. Some people are against space exploration because they don't truly understand it and believe that funding for inventing new technology for space exploration can be spent better elsewhere. In this essay, I hope I can persuade you to adopt my beliefs on space exploration. There are multiple experiments being performed in the international space station every day. Most of them are experiments trying to understand and cure diseases and illnesses that would be impossible on earth reason being - earth's gravity. For example, because of the microgravity environment in low earth orbit, nasa scientists were able to grow Parkinson's cells big enough to be researched, This research would then later help greatly in finding a cure for this disease, a task that would be impossible on earth since earth's strong gravity restricts the cell to grow to a certain size which is not big enough to be examined with current technology. Another example this time from the Tiangong space station - China's space station, These Chinese scientists, thanks to the microgravity of space were able to 3D print organs in low earth orbit, by precisely growing biological cells in the correct way over time a real functional organ could be formed. These cells faced no resistance whatsoever because there was gravity to weigh them down and stop them. A Lot of things would not be possible without space; one of them is the internet. The internet is what keeps the world connected and that is only possible because of space, satellites anywhere between 2 kg and 15 metric tonnes machines that orbit the earth at faster velocities than your brain can even comprehend, these machines allow strong signals to be reached on any point on earth utilising the beaming method, this is when a satellite receives a signal from the ground and beams it to the destination on earth, therefore, the signal does not have to travel through earth and can instead travel through space which is so much easier, because of that my sister and my mum can enjoy watching strictly come dancing on TV. Satellites connect the world without them there would be no internet, TV, phone calls, messaging, WIFI and MD, GPS/navigation, and surface data. Your phone would be useless. As Elon Musk says “The window for our civilization to go interplanetary is open now and who knows how much longer it will be open for”. Everything on our planet is finite and will exhaust it at some point however space is a different story. Everything our civilization needs can be found in space in abundance whether it be rare metals or precious metals, hydrocarbons, or a new planet to settle on. If we continue to move in the right direction, slowly into the cosmos, the risk of a disaster that wipes us off our planet decreases. 1 Folio Draft 1 Nowadays all it takes is another mad leader like Hitler with nuclear weapons, then we are all dead, we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. It is only natural that we take the risks and go and explore the cosmos, just like the Europeans did when they decided they would leave Europe to discover what's over the ocean. I believe the most significant inventions and discoveries, the world's first trillionaire, and man's greatest questions, Is there life on other planets? What is the meaning of life? How did consciousness evolve? will all be found in space. Some may think thatwwww space exploration is too expensive. There are starving children across the world and Nasa is spending 20 billion pounds a year. We should solve all the problems on earth first then go and venture out into space. I don't agree with this counterargument and I will explain why. To the average man, 20 billion pounds is an enormous fortune, but to the US Government, it's basically pennies. 0.48% of the US Government spending is NASA. over half is their military. If anyone can use 0.48% or 20 billion pounds a year and solve world hunger then, I would think that the money should be spent elsewhere, however, this isn't enough money to make an impact on any of these world problems. The US Military gets over 40 times more than NASA gets annually and still, no one complains about the military. I believe that space exploration is worth all the time, risks and money and I know people of the future will be thanking me for saying that. Imagine the day that we discover the cure for cancer, we have fellow humans living in other star systems and we are able to answer the questions we have asked for eons, All of that will not be a reality if we make the foolish decision right now that space is not worth pursuing and we should be confined to this planet for the rest of our existence.
