Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
How Far Have We Come ?
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| How Far We Have Come |
The Universe we know about came into existence about 13.8 billion years ago. That very moment, everything around you see around yourself burst out from a singularity. If you consider the Universe infinite in size, you can say that the Big Bang happened everywhere, even in the exact place where you are sitting right now. There was no matter in the early stages of the universe and not even light existed then. It was only about 380,000 years later that the light from the Big Bang embarked on an eternal journey which scientists now call the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation).
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| Cosmic Microwave Background (Source:Wikipedia) |
Quite a lot has happened since then, for instance, 13.8 BILLION Years have passed! Hundreds of millions of stars that light up our night sky have and are still being created in stellar nurseries. Planets and galaxies were created forming clusters of giant Galaxies. These galaxies now host hundreds of billions of stars which are probably shelter to thousands of billions of planets. These numbers sound way too big right? But that's not it, the universe also gave birth to some fascinating structures like Supernovae which mark the death of a star, Neutron stars that are incredibly dense and have extreme rotational velocity and mysterious stuff like Black Holes which can't even be precisely defined right now. But a lot more has happened here itself on our blue planet Earth. Some of which isn't even related to the physical phenomenons produced by this Universe. It is believed that our Sun is 5 Billion years old and the same is for our Planet. Data collected strongly suggests that our planet and the 7 neighbor planets were created from the Sun during our star's formation. This can be related to how the Moon was created from our Planet Earth.
Life is supposed to have started by chance in a primordial soup(pond) of organic chemicals about 3.6 Billion Years ago. There is still a debate on whether the reactants responsible to kick start Life on our planet were transported by meteors from other worlds or resulted from fortunate combination of compounds present on Earth. It wasn't until 3.4 Billion years ago that cyanobacteria started performing photosynthesis. These unicellular organisms evolved into complex life including everything you see around in "nature". The lovely fragrance of the lilacs, the cheerful face of a Dolphin, the yawn of a kitten (are you reading Salma?), all of that exists due to a chemical reaction dating 3.6 billion years back. Humans have wandered the planet for only 200,000 years now and I think we have accomplished a LOT though it's still very LESS. First humans are said to have lived in Africa who then traveled to other continents. The first humans to have lived in the Continent of Americas date back only 14,500 years. Not even close compared to the 5 billion year old Earth and Solar System.
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| Destruction of Earth by Humans |
It took more than a billion years for complex life to evolve from unicellular organisms after origin of Life but it took only 14,500 years for Earth to witness countless conflicts(literally) , fall and rise of great empires, two shattering World Wars , murders of millions of innocents, depletion of resources which took eternity to be formed, division of land on the basis of color and views, etc. Seriously, do you want to be remembered as a part of a civilization responsible for all this?
Keeping that aside, in just about 15000 years of existence, Humanity has gathered and produced a plethora of information. The flame of curiosity in the souls of humans has helped humanity reach the frontiers of science and other fields. The internet you're using right now is an excellent example. We started from the forests and now live in the concrete forests we built ourselves from our thinking(irrespective of whether we like living in it or not). We humans learned the art of survival from nature and now have completely changed our way of living, survival still exists but not exactly in the 14000 year old form. Today's survival depends on how well you score on your test or how good of a person you are in your society. Your strength or your physical ability is nothing but just a hobby today which would have been considered the most important factor for survival back then. We built civilizations that were controlled by a single ruler, created systems that ran a whole country and what not. Our imagination paved the way to almost every place we dared to discover. In only 400-500 years, we turned from using pigeons to instant messaging for communication. We are now able to keep surveillance on a bottle of water from hundreds of kilometres above surface.
Great minds like Nikola Tesla, Sir Isaac Newton, C.V.Raman, Albert Einstein, Ramanujan walked and died on this planet. We have developed machines that execute work once thought to be impossible by the highest of intelligence. Invention of electronics like telescopes which enable us to stare back into the history of our Universe has only become possible in the last few hundred years. There are our representatives out there like Voyager and Cassini and Rosetta who have voyaged distances no man-made product has ever achieved. We landed on moon just a few decades back but our knowledge of the universe beyond it is literally jaw-dropping and we still continue to explore this uncharted territory once thought to be inconceivable to the human brain. We have created and managed to run super-organisms like cities and countries. And I can't even imagine what else can we concur in the coming years, decades, centuries and millenniums! Humanity can be considered as a light of hope for this Universe to understand itself, maybe that's the reason the Universe created us... or maybe not.
Today, the whole world runs by the tick of the clock. Each and every second, thousands of millions of dollars worth transaction takes place, lives change, economies build up, societies change,etc. We live in this chaotic world where everything seems so well organized. But wait, we didn't start like this. At the beginning, it was just a bunch of tribes living their lives with the only aim being survival. It is clear, over the period of time, which is not very long on the Cosmic scale, that we've CHANGED the game "nature" planned out for us. I think it's fair to say that we've really come quite far for where we once started... but the journey's not over yet...it will never be...
The Search For The Origin Of Life
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| Life On Earth (Source: Discovery Channel/Google Images) |
Life is present anywhere and everywhere we see; in the trees, the plants, the birds, the animals and even in the most remote places on this planet. It can survive the greatest of destruction's, the grandest of explosions and still continue to thrive. Such an amazing thing life is! While "some" humans are trying to find out whether "life" is present only on our planet Earth, we might be closing in to finding the origin of life on this pale blue dot.
ESA's Rosetta Spacecraft :
Rosetta Spacecraft Model
The ESA or the European Space Agency launched a space probe named Rosetta more than a decade ago on 2 March 2004. Rosetta was sent to perform a detailed study of its target, a comet named 67P/Churyumove-Gerasimenko. Rosetta space probe has been racing towards the comet since 10 years and has traveled a whooping 4 billion miles. The spacecraft after its launch has orbited our planet Earth thrice and the red planet Mars once as part of its trajectory. The purpose of this winding path around the two planets was to use the gravity of these two planets for a speed boost. Along with that, during its 10 year period before closing in on the target comet, Rosetta also flew by asteroids - Steins and Lutetia. During its decade long journey, the spacecraft also went into Deep Space Hibernation for 31 months and then woke up from hibernation to finally get into orbit around its prey comet - 67P/C-G or Cherry-Gerry(its nickname).
Rosetta is the first ever space probe to rendezvous with a comet. The probe inserted itself into the orbit around 67P on the 6th of August'14 and will continue to do so for some time. The probe has now reduced the relative velocity between itself and the comet to just 1 m/s which I believe is itself a great achievement for those controlling Rosetta from our home planet. The probe won't itself land on the comet but will deploy a lander named "Philae Lander" on the surface of the comet 67P. The lander is equipped with ice screws on its legs and harpoons as the comet's gravity isn't strong enough to hold the Philae on its surface. The lander weighs 100 kg and is the most important part of the mission. The lander will collect samples of water vapor, dust surface of the comet, analyse it and send the data back to the Space Agency on Earth. One of its objective is to study the chemical composition of hydrogen in the water on the comet. If it is the same as that to the hydrogen here on Earth, it will suggest that comets might have filled up our Oceans when they smashed into our planet many billion years ago. The Philae Lander has been scheduled to land on 67P in November 2014 if everything goes well.
First Pictures sent by Rosetta when it approached comet 67P/C-G to enter into its orbit :
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| Closest Picture by Rosetta |
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| Rosetta Appraching the Comet |
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| Comet Activity |
"Rosetta Spacecraft has created history as it is the first EVER probe to orbit a comet and hopefully land on it. There are endless possibilities to what the Philae Lander after landing on the comet may reveal to us here on Earth. Whatever it may be, I think we humans should be prepared to be amazed! Since its origin, man has only looked around and has had the curiosity to find out why does something exist and how it got there. I think its time we find out how WE got here......"
EDIT(08/20/2014) : Comparison of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to the City of Los Angeles.
EDIT(08/20/2014) : Comparison of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to the City of Los Angeles.
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| Comet 67P comparison to Los Angeles Source : All Science, All the Time(FB) |