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Space exploration and society Space exploration advanced a lot through the last years. Especially during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were competing between themselves and invested a lot of money in that issue. Ever sinse, USA continued on with this project and sent ships into outer space to explore the endless universe thinking to bring up something interesting. In these recent 20-30 years space exploration has really affected the world.
Billions of money is put into the space exploration business, races were made to get to the moon first, satellites are all over, and that has already become our daily life. There are a lot of positive aspects of space exploration. But in the midst of all of these, there are negative things that affect the world society and should be changed. Space exploration has led to us finding out more about the planets surrounding us. The Moon has already been visited by human kind. Going on other planets helps us to make more conclusions on the structure of the earth and it’s atmosphere.
The over-reacting greenhouse effect only was discovered after humans were able to break out of the atmosphere. Space exploration has brought up a lot of things we now use in our daily life. Watching TV is now directed by satellites. GPS (Global Positioning System), weather stations are also. Going to space has helped solve a lot of small problems and developed new ideas. Linked with going out of space were some medicine machines like a device for measuring blood pressure, which was invented for the first space mission from the us, or the heart activity monitors that are used in hospitals world wide.
Other daily life things ???solar panel electricity, fuel cells, mobile phones, braces, fog less goggles, flat screen television, smoke-detectors, a water purification system that now is used by most of the people on earth, scratch-resistant glasses, thermo-wear for skiing, was also developed to space missions by NASA. Space exploration gave us the ability to predict weather more accurately using satellites, but one of the more inspiring achievements was the ability to tell the solar weather.
Space weather is the activity of solar flares, radiation and other “weather” changes in the outer space. Space weather is important to humans because it can help humans get their satellites to turn and get out the ways of unwanted conditions such as solar wind. But in another way, space exploration has also done some undoable changes that affected the society in a negative way. Now all sent messages could be overheard using satellites, which cause a loss of privacy. Deaths have occurred as a result of activity outside the earth’s atmosphere.
Proliferation of terrorist mechanisms aimed to kill people has developed. Now mechanisms are developed that can use energy to shoot from an orbit and kill hundreds of people. Terrorism in another way ??? GPS (Global Positioning System) can be used for disruption, as well as targeting. Some cases include crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. The most visible problem with space exploration is money. Even small failures cost millions of dollars, which is sad because that same money could be used to help make earth a better place instead of trying to get individuals outside earth.
A lot of famous people think that for that same money, you could help the poor, improve education, health care and other life conditions in less developed countries. People say it isn’t right for one third of the human population to starve so 50 people can go the the moon. And even thought satellites for television and the global positioning system (GPS) have become an important part of our life, that one third of the population could be fed and their life standard could improve at least to a point where they aren’t starving, are getting the basic education they need for work and more proper health care.
The rightness of these opinions vary. In one way, its true that USA is spending money on “unnecessary” things, when it could be used to help the poor, but it is certainly true that it is spending 30 percent of its budget on helping the poor and only 5 on space exploration. And if there was no satellites, there wouldn’t be weather forecasts, and people would die like in the past because natural disasters could be predicted without satellites. Communication over bigger distances wouldn’t be possible, and all the money that already has been wasted would have been turned out to be wasted for nothing.
In conclusion the best thing to say is that following the fact that space exploration does more benefits then disadvantages to the human society, space exploration should continue to try and find more resources about the outer space. The society is gaining more knowledge which is good, and is able to use new services which help humans live. New services make more connection and communication available. And that is what society is about ??? communication. The Areas of interaction that I personally think this issue is most fitting to be linked to are: Human Ingenuity ???
Space exploration is the progress of humans who are taking astronomy further and adapting to new technologies and inventions Community and service – The society basically is community, and space exploration’s effects on the society are being discussed in the essay ??? about what benefits and disadvantages space exploration brings us. My bibliography: Books: -” The Impact of Space Activities upon Society ” published by ESA (137 pages) link for download: http://www. esa. int/esapub/br/br237/br237. pdf Websites: -http://www. pparc. ac. uk/Ps/tss/tss_intro. asp -http://www. esa. int/esaCP/SEMPIVWJD1E_Improving_0. html