The Final Frontier

It is in human nature to explore every frontier attainable: from leaving the cradle of civilization in Africa, to the nomadic people crossing the Bering Land Strait to the America’s, and, more recently, the Americans who explored the western part of North America. These acts of exploration have brought new lands to settle, while also producing economic and social benefits to the people or nations that have explored these frontiers. Yet, for millennia, humanity has looked up to the stars in wonder, and it is only now in the past half century that civilization has taken its first steps towards exploring this final frontier. Nevertheless, our species are still far from making deep space travel plausible and reaping the benefits of space exploration.

Our universe is astronomical in scale, yet the human race can only see and

In fact, our solar system alone, while being small on an astronomical scale is actually very large in comparison to what we handle on Earth. To illustrate this reality, conceptualize all the planets concentered, while being adjacent to each other between the Earth and the Moon; all the planets would fit between the two celestial objects with superfluous space(Cain). In addition, Voyager 1, which took off in September of 1977, has proven to be the fastest satellite ever launched by mankind. Yet, only recently has Voyager 1 reached the edge of our solar system. Voyager 1 left our solar system on September 12th, 2013; meaning its trip took 36 years to reach the end of our cosmic backyard (Howell and Malik). Our galaxy alone transcends 200 billion planets and that’s a lowball estimate of what scientists have predicted (Siegel). A simple way to visualize how gargantuan this number is to look at the human population. Our population here on Earth is 7 billion people, meaning that if every person was its own planet, with