The North Park Student Newspaper Since 2023
The positive impact of space exploration on society
OPINION/EDITORIALS
Japji Sandhu
6/11/20262 min read
Many people find space travel to be useless. They believe it to be a waste of money, especially when governmentally funded. However, what if I told you that without space travel, life would not be as you know it today. Over the decades, experiments and research have been conducted off of the earth to aid in human advancement and it is significant to understand the importance of spending time, resources, and money to do so.
For starters, space exploration is crucial for scientists and researchers to ensure the safety of humanity as a whole because the Big 5 might turn into the Big 6. Now, the Big 5 are the 5 near-extinction events that our planet has faced since life began on it. Each of these events, spanning over the past 540 million years, wiped out 75% to 95% of all species that existed at the time. Although not all events were like the cretaceous-palagone, which was the extinction event with a meteor that marked the end of the cretaceous period, sending probes and satellites out of our atmosphere can help us monitor the earth as a whole.
Additionally, human activities are slowly disrupting the natural environment and scientists are stating that we may potentially be entering a 6th extinction period. Space exploration takes time and who knows what the future holds. Who knows if one day earth becomes so inhabitable and unsafe for life to thrive that our species must evacuate it. Space exploration is not done for fun; it is being done to see if there is any threat in space or possibility for life off of our planet.
Furthermore, space exploration is what caused the invention of certain things that we use in our daily lives. Memory foam, GPS systems, CAT scans, pretty much all of global communication, monitoring pretty much all of our earth and the environment, weather reports, medical research in microgravity and the most obvious, job creation and a boost to the economy.
Space exploration may have begun as a race to be won between the United States and the Soviet Union but advancement and innovation has come a long way since and it has benefitted society as a whole in such major ways.