Will humanity be able to master the solar system?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Where and why can we still fly, what will it give us in practical terms, and whether manned expeditions should always be put forward as a priority task. In principle, the list of space objects of interest to earthlings is easy to imagine.

First of all, we must continue to fly to the place where we have already flown, but we didn’t really know anything. Today there are all technical prerequisites for the exploration of the Moon and there are no obstacles - except financial ones. The moon is close, but we have little idea what useful things could be found there.

Yes, it is already known that there is water ice on our satellite, and this is good for organizing lunar bases in the future. There is helium-3 - a substance that is almost absent on Earth. True, the need for it will be determined by progress in the field of thermonuclear energy. But we do not know at all what is happening in the bowels of the moon deeper than three meters.

But it is known that there are conditions for the survival of terrestrial microorganisms. And who knows - perhaps our night star is hiding its own original life in the depths. This remains to be seen.

Moon just in case

In addition to purely scientific tasks, the exploration of the Moon could bring practical benefits to mankind. We could create there a backup storage of information important for humanity. Now on Svalbard there is a seed storage, where at a depth of 130 m, the seed fund of the main agricultural crops is saved from cataclysms.

But no matter how deep the bunker is, all of its contents can perish in the event of a global catastrophe, for example, a collision of the Earth with an asteroid. If we create another such storage facility on the Moon, the likelihood of not losing the seed fund will increase.

Any threat from outer space that affects the Earth will surely bypass the Moon. A powerful solar flare can erase all computer data from all solid media, and humanity will lose an abyss of information, which will then be extremely difficult to recover. And if you create several backup data stores on the Moon, at least one will surely survive: the Moon, unlike the Earth, rotates slowly around its axis, and the effects of the flare will not be felt on the side opposite to the Sun.

Mars is the closest target after the Moon for the development of earthlings. And, although no human has yet set foot there, unmanned probes that have been working on the Red Planet for decades have collected a huge amount of scientific information.

Into the scorching heat on the airship

The next most important object for development, of course, is Mars. Flights there are much more expensive than to the Moon, and the habitation is somewhat more difficult, but in general the conditions are similar to the lunar ones. Due to the high temperature and colossal atmospheric pressure, the surface of Venus is poorly accessible for research, but there has long been a well-developed project to study this planet using balloons.

The balloons could be placed in such layers of the Venusian atmosphere where both temperature and pressure are quite acceptable for the operation of research stations. Mercury is a planet of temperature contrasts. At the poles, severe cold reigns there (-200 °), in the equatorial region, depending on the time of the Mercury day (58.5 Earth days), temperature fluctuations range from +350 to -150 °.

Mercury is certainly of interest to scientists, but the creation of bases on this planet will require burrowing into the ground to a depth of 1−2 m, where there will be no sudden changes in the terrible heat and fierce cold, and the temperature will be within acceptable limits for humans.

Satellites of Saturn While a manned expedition to gas planets is not possible, their satellites are of great interest for flights from Earth - especially Titan with its dense atmosphere that protects humans from cosmic radiation.

Where to hide from radiation

The satellites of the giant planets with oceans are of great interest. Such as Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus. We can say that Titan is a divine gift to earthlings. The atmosphere there is almost like that of the Earth - nitrogen, but much denser.

And this is the only celestial body, besides the Earth, where you can stay for a long time without fear of radiation. On the Moon and Mars, where there are practically no atmospheres, radiation will kill any unprotected living creature in a year and a half. Jupiter's radiation belts have deadly power, and on Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, a person will live a maximum of a couple of days.

Saturn also has powerful radiation belts, but while on Titan, there is nothing to worry about - the atmosphere reliably protects from harmful rays. Since the force of gravity on a satellite is seven times less than that of the earth, the pressure of the dense atmosphere is only 1.45 times higher than that of the earth.

The combination of low gravity with a high density of the gaseous medium would make flights in the sky of Titan low-energy consumption, there everyone could easily move around on a pedal muscle (on Earth, only trained athletes can lift such a thing into the air). And there are also lakes on Titan, however, they are filled not with water, but with a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons (they would be useful in the development of Titan). Liquid water on Titan, obviously, is only in the bowels.

On the surface, it would inevitably turn into ice, since it is very cold there: the average temperature is -179 °. Keeping warm on Titan, however, is much easier than keeping cool on Venus.

Iron, but not gold

Another important area of research is asteroids. They threaten the Earth, and therefore we must more accurately find out their orbits, determine their composition, study them as potential enemies. But the main thing is that asteroids are the most accessible building material in the solar system for bases, stations, etc.

It costs tens of thousands of dollars to lift a kilogram of matter from Earth into orbit. It costs nothing to take matter from the asteroid, since the force of its gravity is negligible. Asteroids are very diverse. There are metal ones containing iron and nickel. And iron is our most common structural material. There are asteroids made from dense minerals such as rock. There are also those that consist of loose "primordial" material - the initial substance for the formation of planets.

It is possible that there are asteroids containing large amounts of non-ferrous metals, as well as gold and platinum. Their "danger" is that if they are once included in the economic turnover, all these metals on Earth will be depreciated, which may affect the fate of many states.

Asteroids Asteroids are our closest neighbors and potential enemies. That is why they became the object of close study, Japanese and American probes were sent to them. In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx probe (USA) will deliver a soil sample from the asteroid Benu to Earth.

Man and doubt

The main directions of studying the celestial bodies of the solar system are clear. The main question remains. Should we strive to ensure that all these cosmic worlds must be stepped by a human foot? Many scientists of my generation, whose childhood and adolescence were spent in the atmosphere of space romance during the flight of Gagarin and the American landing on the moon, with both hands for manned astronautics.

But, if we talk about scientific results that you want to get with minimal costs, we must admit: sending a person into space is ten times more expensive than launching a robot, while there is no scientific sense in this. The presence of humans in low-earth orbit or on the moon has not brought any significant discoveries, and spacecraft such as the Hubble telescope or Martian rovers have provided an abyss of scientific information.

Yes, American astronauts brought soil samples from the Moon, but it was possible and automatic, which was proved with the help of the Soviet station "Luna-24".

Technologically, humanity is already close enough to a flight to Mars. Within the next 5-10 years, ships and super-heavy launch vehicles should appear, suitable for this mission. But there are problems of a different kind. It is still not clear how to protect the human body from radiation during a long flight outside the earth's atmosphere.

Is a person psychologically capable of enduring a long space journey without any hope of help in an emergency? After all, even a cosmonaut who has been aboard the ISS for many months knows that the Earth is only 400 km away and in which case help will come from there or it will be possible to urgently evacuate in the capsule. Halfway from Earth to Mars, there is no hope of anything like that.

Robots in Space Experience shows that unmanned space platforms have made a much greater contribution to science and technology than manned space exploration. There is no need to rush to trample the "dusty paths of distant planets", it is better to first entrust the robots to learn more about our space environment.

Reserves of someone else's life?

There is another important argument against manned flights: the possibility of contamination of space worlds with terrestrial living organisms. Until now, life has not been found anywhere in the solar system, but this does not mean that it cannot be found in the bowels of planets and satellites in the future. For example, the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars can be explained by the vital activity of microorganisms in the soil of the planet.

If autochthonous Martian life could be found, it would be a real revolution in biology. But we must manage not to infect the bowels of Mars with terrestrial bacteria. Otherwise, we simply will not be able to understand whether we are dealing with local life, so similar to ours, or with the descendants of bacteria brought from Earth.

And since the American research apparatus InSight has already tried to explore the soil of Mars several meters deep, the risk of infection has become a real factor. But spacecraft landing on Mars or the Moon are now being disinfected without fail. It is impossible to disinfect a person. Through the ventilation of the spacesuit, the cosmonaut will surely "enrich" the planet with the microflora that lives inside the body. So is it worth rushing to manned flights?

On the other hand, manned astronautics, while not providing anything special for science, means a lot for the state's prestige. Searching for bacteria in the bowels of Mars in the eyes of the majority is a much less ambitious task than sending a hero to the "dusty paths of distant planets."

And in this sense, manned space exploration can play a positive role as a means of increasing the interest of the authorities and big business in space exploration in general, including projects that are interesting to science.