Ramsey Kincannon
Since the Space Race, people worldwide have been foolishly captivated by the necessity and power of space exploration. We seem to think that we are about to find Earth 2.0, where we can move once we use up all of our natural resources. Movies like “Avatar” have continued to push this myth (even down to the silly symbolism of Unobtanium). It is time for us to wake up and realize that going to space is not worth the time, money, or emotional investment. Where we need to go is deep inside our own oceans.
The big debate for space exploration these days is whether or not we should continue to explore the moon or if we should push further and attempt to visit Mars. Both of these ideas are prohibitively expensive. According to Forbes’ Micho Kaku, it costs about $10,000 to put one pound of anything into merely a “near-earth orbit.” Sending the shuttle up into space costs between $500-700 million, and that’s before we even consider something as complicated as landing the damn thing. Kaku estimates that putting one pound on the moon costs roughly $100,000. In addition to these obscenely expensive plans, we are also exploring space incorrectly, with ludicrously inefficient shuttles and procedures. There are frequent delays in sending a mission up into space, and the price tag has tripled or quadrupled once the project gets going. Even the space station, what every kid saw in those IMAX propaganda films narrated by Tom Cruise from the mid-to-late-90’s, has cost upwards of $100 billion — with little to nothing to show for it. We are not even looking for life. There’s no space broccoli somewhere on Jupiter’s moons. We are looking for something as basic as the evidence that water could possibly exist on a planet or moon.
That is why the future should be spent looking in our oceans. We have left roughly 72 percent of our entire planet almost totally unexplored — everything we know about the ocean represents .01 percent of what’s actually there. In 2008, the budget for NASA could have funded NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the government agency that explores the potential of the ocean) for 1,600 years. With oceanic exploration, we can actually find real, valuable things. Instead of looking for the mere unlikely possibility of life, we can find resources that can make our lives easier, species that have been undiscovered, more of our own history than people realize. Bob Ballard, the man who discovered the Titanic and Bismark wreckages, has said that there’s more human history on the ocean floor than in all of the museums combined. He and his crew are constantly finding ancient ships, jam-packed with evidence of how humans lived. There are things worth exploring at the bottom of the sea. Considering what we’ve found so far in space, the same can’t be said for NASA.
We seem to think that with space exploration, we are similar to Lewis and Clark, searching out a vast area full of promise. However, that is just untrue. With space, we have to figure out if the planet or moon is even inhabitable in addition to figuring out how we’re going to get there (good luck getting the human body to go the speed of light). With ocean exploration, though, we are capable of discovering a variety of beneficial and profitable resources. We need to get our head out of the clouds and start exploring our oceans.