The environment on Mars is very bad. Why do some people think that the civilization of Mars must be higher than that of the earth?

Compared with other animals, human babies are very fragile. The pony can walk upright on its own ten minutes after birth, and

Human babies have to stay in the cradle for a long time, during which they can't live without careful care from the outside.

To survive, one can never walk out of the cradle by one's own strength. The reason for this phenomenon is the need of evolution.

The human brain is so big that it is difficult to be born after it is fully developed. It was just born early, that is, all human beings.

Babies are all premature.

If the whole human civilization is regarded as a baby, it is also a premature baby. Civilization develops much faster.

Due to the evolution of nature, human beings actually entered modern civilization with the brains and bodies of primitive people. Then there is such a thing.

A terrible question: if there is no external care, will the baby of human civilization never get rid of it?

Basket?

Now it seems possible.

In the distant future, when people look back on the history from the middle of last century to the present, all the earth-shattering events that happened during this period will be great.

Everything will be diluted by time, and only two things that we ignore now will become more and more important: first,

Man has stepped out of the cradle; Second, mankind has taken back the steps it has taken. How important are these two things?

We cannot overestimate it. The year Gagarin flew into space 196 1 may replace the year when Jesus was born and become the first year of mankind.

The decline of space exploration after Apollo's landing on the moon will leave mankind with more painful trauma than being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

The late 1950s and early 1970s will be remembered as the golden age, only three years before the launch of the first artificial satellite.

Many years ago, the first astronaut went into space, and only seven years later, man landed on the moon. At that time, people were far away.

Excited by the big goal, I think that in about ten years, humans will land on Mars, and it is not necessary to reach Jupiter's orbit and board Europa.

This is a distant thing. Long before this, the heroic Orion project was born under the impetus of the constantly exploding atomic bomb.

Spacecraft can send dozens of astronauts to other planets at a time.

But soon, due to the interruption of funds, the Apollo moon landing plan was cancelled. In the future, human space exploration is like a piece.

The stones thrown up in the earth's gravity field, after reaching the peak in a short time, fall sharply. The last landing of Apollo 17

June197265438+February is an important turning point. After that, although there were still space stations and space shuttles, there were more and more.

All kinds of artificial satellites and the economic benefits they bring, including detectors flying to extraterrestrial planets, but the space industry of mankind

The nature of space exploration has quietly changed, and the vision of space exploration has shifted from the starry sky to the ground. Before Apollo 17.

Flying in the air is the effort of human beings to get out of the cradle, and then to live more comfortably in the blue. The aerospace industry has been included.

On the economic track, the output must be greater than the input, the lofty sentiments of development are replaced by the shrewdness of businessmen, and the wings of people's hearts are broken.

In fact, looking back, did humans really come up with a surprise? The driving force behind the upsurge of space exploration in the middle of last century

The driving force is the cold war, the fear of opponents and the desire to surpass, and it is a political advertisement that shows its strength. In fact, human beings learn from it.

I have never really regarded space as my future home.

Now, the moon has once again become an uninhabited desolate world, and the manned planetary flight plans of Russia and the United States have been changed one after another.

In vain, Europe's "Dawn Plan" to explore the solar system has also been shelved, and there is no dawn in sight. After the space shuttle retired,

After that, Americans who set foot on the moon even lost the ability to send people to low-earth orbit for a long time.

Why? The only reason we can think of is both technical and economic.

First of all, look at the technical reasons: it is undeniable that human beings do not have the technology to carry out large-scale space development in the solar system at present.

In the most basic and key propulsion technology of space navigation, human beings are only in the stage of chemical propulsion, while large planets

International navigation needs nuclear power propulsion, and the current technology is still a long way from here. Nuclear-powered rockets and spaceships are just

This is something from science fiction.

Let's look at the economic reasons: with the existing technology, it takes the same weight of gold to send a payload into low earth orbit.

; The cost of sending it to the moon and other planets will increase tenfold or even hundredfold, and before the industrialization of space development,

All these investments have achieved only a small return. For example, the Apollo moon landing project cost $26 billion, equivalent to the current 1%.

Hundreds of billions of dollars, only two tons of moonstone (of course, the technical achievements of the moon landing project were later commercialized)

Great benefits have been generated in the process, but these benefits cannot be quantified and cannot be considered as decisive factors in decision-making.

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From what has been said above, space development is a great adventure both technically and economically, and space is regarded as a new field of mankind.

It is politically unacceptable for the country to pin the future of mankind on such a big adventure.

The above reasons are solid and seem irrefutable, which also determines the current human space policy and the resulting.

The decline of the aerospace industry.

But let's take a look at one of the only ways for the future survival of earth civilization that human beings are currently working on.

A grand cause: environmental protection.

Technically speaking, aerospace and environmental protection are different in people's minds. The former is fierce and high.

Speed and adventure mean cutting-edge high technology; The latter is a kind of moderate green public welfare activity, which naturally has technology.

Among them, but its difficulty is far from the former.

But this is just an impression. The real situation is that there are many technologies needed to achieve the existing environmental protection goals of mankind.

It is much more difficult to start a large-scale interstellar voyage.

On the cognitive level, in order to protect the environment, we must first understand it, understand its laws on a global scale, and the earth's

Ecosystem is an extremely complex system. Although various disciplines have done a lot of research and understanding on its details, on the whole,

On the overall scale of the ball, at present, human beings have not mastered its laws from both basic science and applied science.

What can human science know about the operation of weather systems, the changes of large-scale biological communities and their relationships?

Very limited. Take global warming as an example. Contrary to the overwhelming publicity, is the global climate really warming?

If so, is warming related to human activities? At present, these two key issues cannot be determined by scientific research.

Therefore, curbing global warming is more like a political movement. It is no exaggeration to say that human beings are not interested in the surface of the earth.

If you know more about the surface of the moon, you may soon know less about the surface of Mars.

At the operational level, the technologies currently needed for environmental protection, such as replacing fossil energy with renewable energy, are harmful to industry.

Treatment and recovery of waste and urban garbage, protection of biodiversity, protection and restoration of forest vegetation, etc.

, involving complex technology, a considerable part of which is not much easier than the interstellar navigation technology in the solar system.

But the technical challenge of environmental protection is mainly not here. Now, global war and turmoil have gone, and people

Quasi-society has entered a period of sustained and peaceful development, especially in the third world and underdeveloped areas, with unprecedented development speed.

These rapidly developing regions have the same goal: to reach the economic level of western developed countries and surpass them.

Modern and comfortable life. Now it seems that this is not an unattainable goal. At the current rate of development, it only needs

In another half century, most underdeveloped areas, including third world countries like China and Brazil, will fall behind economically.

We can catch up with the west.

But people ignore the fact that if all human beings live like developed countries in Europe and America, the resources they consume will be needed.

It takes four and a half earths.

In this case, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of environmental protection, maintain the earth's ecology from collapse and stop the current situation.

In the case of species extinction faster than Cretaceous extinction, only self-discipline can reduce pollution, and only energy conservation and emission reduction are necessary.

Far from enough, even if all the goals of Copenhagen conference are achieved, the ecological environment of the earth is still like Titan on the ice ocean.

Nick is sinking, too

The only hope is to stop developing. But development is unstoppable, and people in some countries and regions lie in modern civilization.

When relaxing in a comfortable lounge chair, let the rest of the earth stay in the backwardness and poverty of rural industrialized society.

This goes against the basic values of human beings and is totally unfeasible politically.

Let's examine another possibility: environmental changes caused by non-human factors. The earth's environment has been fluctuating, but

The history of human civilization is too short for people to notice. In every wave, the overall environment of the earth will change dramatically.

It may become completely unfit for human survival. For example, the last ice age ended only ten thousand years ago. If ice

Once again, all continents will be covered with ice and snow, the existing global agriculture will collapse, and the modernization with a huge population will be greatly improved.

This will be a social disaster. And such environmental changes are almost inevitable in the long run, even very

A big possibility will appear in the not-too-distant future. For such environmental changes, the existing environmental protection measures are only a drop in the bucket.

If human civilization wants to survive for a long time in man-made or natural environmental changes, it can only passively change its environmental protection behavior.

Actively and artificially adjust and change the global environment as a whole. For example, many schemes have been put forward to reduce the greenhouse effect.

, including building a large number of giant solar evaporation stations on the ocean to evaporate seawater and spray it into the sky to increase cloud cover; exist

The Lagrange point between the sun and the earth will build an umbrella with an area of 3 million square kilometers for the earth. . . . .

. And so on, all these projects are unprecedented super-projects, and their scale is like the hand of God, involving

This technology is also a super technology that only exists in science fiction, and its difficulty is far greater than interstellar navigation in the solar system.

All right.

Apart from technical difficulties, from an economic point of view, we find that environmental protection is also very similar to space development: both are.

It needs to invest a lot of money, and there is no obvious economic return at the beginning.

However, compared with the investment in space development, human investment in environmental protection is disproportionate. Taking China as an example, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan

The planned investment in environmental protection exceeds 3 trillion yuan, but the planned investment in space exploration is only 30 billion yuan.

That's right. The situation in other countries in the world is similar.

There are huge resources in the solar system, and human beings need these resources for survival and development on the eight planets and the asteroid belt.

From water to metal to nuclear fusion fuel, everything, according to the earth can eventually feed 100 billion people, then the whole.

The total resources of this solar system can feed100000 earth population.

Now, what we see is that human beings have given up100000 earths in space and only intend to stay in this place.

Living on the ball, their means of survival is environmental protection, which is as arduous and dangerous as space exploration.

Like environmental protection, space development and technological progress are interactive, and space development will promote technological progress.

Before the trip, the United States did not have the technology needed to land on the moon, and a considerable part of the technology was developed during the project. nuclear fission

Variable technology has become a reality on earth, and there is no insurmountable obstacle to nuclear propulsion in space; Although controlled nuclear fusion.

However, it has not yet been realized, and there are only technical obstacles rather than theoretical obstacles.

We should see that the navigation and control computers on the spacecraft that landed on the moon more than forty years ago only have the same function.

One thousandth of the current IPHONE4.

Space exploration is much like the era of great navigation that has passed, and it is also a voyage for human beings to explore the unknown world.

Living space, open up a better life. The era of great navigation began when Columbus discovered the new continent.

Sailing was supported by Queen Isabella I (more precisely, the daughter of the Kingdom of Castilla).

King, independent Spain didn't exist at that time), the queen herself could hardly afford this fleet. It is said that she put her jewels.

All pawned and then provided Columbus with a voyage. Now it turns out that this is the smartest venture capital, even

Some people say that the history of the world began at 1500, because then people knew the whole picture of the world.

Now, mankind is on the eve of the second great voyage. We now even have an advantage over Columbus, because

Columbus could not see the new continent he was looking for. After sailing in the Atlantic for several days, he hasn't seen land yet.

His heart must be full of hesitation. And the new world we want to explore can be seen when we look up, but now we can't see it.

Someone has come to pay.

Perhaps, as a whole, human civilization is like an individual baby, without the help of parents.

Really never get out of the cradle.

But from the perspective of the universe, the earth civilization has no parents, and human beings are orphans of the universe. We really need to take care of ourselves.