Learning Life: Prerequisite to Space Life
The surface area of our Earth is far from increasing, and the rate at which we populate it is far from decreasing. Larger countries, such as China have even applied certain taxes and laws to prevent families from becoming too large by their own standards. For example, the taxes a family pays would dramatically increase with each new child that the parents conceive. With tactics such as these being applied, the ultimate question becomes a matter of where we go once Earth can no longer support an overabundance of resource feeding life forms such as humans, animals, plants, bacteria, etc. Natural inclination, so far, has been to look to the sky for refuge on another planet and it has been discovered that another life form's way of life may lead to the technology necessary for humans to live under completely abnormal conditions. Although we are far from obtaining the necessary technology to make such a move, and we really can not be certain which planet we would even populate, our technology has been and continues to rapidly advance in a direction that would solve these problems. To put the rate of our advancements into perspective, we look at Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." In this poem, the speak
Faced with the murkiest of conditions, the speaker in "The Root Cellar" by Theodore Roethke experiences an underground cellar populated mostly by gangly plant roots, decomposed wooden crates, a putrid stench, piles of manure, and a depressing darkness. To the majority of the collective, these surroundings have a negative connotation. No sane person that I know of would choose to live in a cellar similar to the one described in the poem; however, the cellar represents the basis of life for the plants. The cellar provides the roots with water and fertilizer, the plant's requirements for life. If one form of life can live under these conditions, there must be a way for humans to adapt to similar conditions if absolutely necessary. I'm not suggesting that I could be shot off to Mars, step out of my space probe, take a fresh breath of Martian air, and my body would suddenly reconfigure itself to entirely new physical standards of living. What I am suggesting is that if one form of life can live under inhumane conditions, there may be a way that we can study this life form and eventually develop a way for us to live under similar conditions whether they are comfortable or not. The fact that life is hard does not mean that life is over. When it comes to the roots in the cellar, "nothing would give up life; even the dirt kept breathing a small breath." (Roethke 740) Humans will also endure hardship if necessary, and other forms of life under extreme conditions will help us to learn how. The details of how this would be done are currently unfathomable to the majority of people, but the possibility of life under exceedingly harsh conditions in Lake Vostock in Antarctica may be the key to initiating this type of research. The world is becoming overcrowded, there are people who are hungry and thirsty, and there are conditions that people live in that are steadily headed toward being labeled unsuitable for life. In th
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1303
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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