As humans, we are fascinated by the vast, mysterious, beauty of space. This is a time in human history in which we are becoming more advanced, giving us motivation towards reaching our goal of finding a planet that can support life. The other day, our teacher, Mr. Ferriter, showed us a video about these people who work for 13 cents an hour, for 16 hours a day. The minimum wage in North Carolina is $7.25 a hour. It would take 56 hours to make the minimum wage of North Carolina. So, that got us thinking; why would we be trying to find a planet that can support life, while people can’t support themselves where we are now?
We live in the US; a country trillions of dollars in debt. The government is aware of this major problem, yet they still spend billions of dollars on space travel and investigation. An example of this is the Hubble Space Telescope, which took $2.5 billion dollars to build. Hubble was designed to look at things septillions of light-years away. When the US first launched the space telescope, it had a warped mirror, which messed up the pictures that the telescope took. This took countless missions and eventually it was fixed, but in the process the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars on fixing the rocket. Imagine all of the people in poverty that we could of helped with that amount of money.
A few other examples would have to be the rockets, Challenger and Columbia. The Challenger was a test run of a new shuttle design that blew up 73 seconds after lift-off. The Columbus disaster occurred while in re-entry. There was a small chip in the heat shield that caused the whole ship and it’s crew to disintegrate in mid air. Combined, we lost $2.15 billion dollars from these disasters. That could of helped people all over the world be relieved of their disease called poverty.
So that is where the main question comes in. Is the cost worth it? In my opinion the answer is no. We should’t be focusing on trying to find a planet to support us elsewhere, when people are dying because they can’t support themselves where we are now. I mean really, people who are dying of thirst in Ethiopia probably don’t care about the recent space mission that was launched. I believe the key to finding a planet like ours is to solve the problems that we have here now. Once we do that, the horizon is bright to finding all of the answers of questions we have about our universe.
#FocusOnWhatMattersMost
By: Brendan C.