“I fear for our future. Our planet earth is threatened with an ever expanding population and only finite resources. We need a plan B.” - Quotation by Stephen Hawking, renowned physicist. Our world is dying. We have been mining coal for only two hundred of our 200 000 year existence as a species, yet we have already caused irreparable damage to the environment. We face a huge array of potentially disastrous threats to our planet, many of which could spell the end of humanity itself. The only way to feasibly secure the survival of our species is to leave Earth and colonise other planets, and to facilitate this we need to improve both our understanding of space and our ability to traverse it. The way onwards from this dangerous stalemate can only be the necessary investment of both resources and brainpower into the exploration of this vast and rich frontier. …show more content…
However, one must consider that not only does the USA (The highest investor into space exploration in the world) dedicate less than half of one percent of its budget to NASA, but also that, as the NASA spinoff program has showed us, even with this relatively tiny budget NASA has provided huge benefits to increasing the quality of life to those on Earth. From innovations in solar energy to artificial limbs, one does not need to look far to see the influences that space exploration is having on the world today. One example that excellently shows how NASA positively affects us is a particularly economic solar-powered refrigerator, which can run solely on the power provided by the sun, and that is being used in third-world countries to keep important vaccines