April 2015
Intermediate to advanced
52 pages
1h 3m
English
Content preview from BioCoder #7
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Chapter 4. The Gap Between the Stars
Elon Musk announced that he and SpaceX want to colonize Mars with millions of people within the next 20 years. While Dawn, NASA’s probe, is orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, NASA plans future probes to dive deep into Europa looking for signs of life, as well as a space submarine to navigate Titan’s methane seas. India is taking great leaps toward its first manned space mission, in a race with China and Europe. Things look bright for space exploration, yet something is missing.
Robotic exploration is accelerating, but biology is being left behind. Space is a hostile place for biology; no gravity, no atmosphere, the risk of decompression, and that’s just the start! The Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from 99.9% of the cosmic radiation in the open black void of space.
As we look to the stars, life may have found fascinating and surprising places to live. Perhaps there are new forms of life, as of yet unimagined, that exist in subterranean soil on Mars or deep in the oceans of Europa, waiting for our first robotic emissaries.
And What Happens When We Find Life?
To traverse the biologically hostile expanse of space, either we’ll have to shield ourselves from radiation through extraordinary means (think massive masses), or we will have to figure out how to understand and aggressively cure every conceivable form of cancer because in space, it’ll be a daily risk. Applied, interdisciplinary biology is woefully underfunded, ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.