The infinity and what’s beyond
Photo by: Guneet Kaur, 11C & Khushi Malhotra, 11C
Cambridge International School for Girls
An estimate of one hundred billion galaxies, some three hundred billion stars in the milky way alone with around thirty billion planets with all of them revolving in perfectly set orbits, with a mere 7,714,576,923 people inhabiting this marvellous expansion. I'd say that the odds are against it.
The answers, presumptions or even the 'this-is-beyond-us' statements to the question of life beyond Earth have been traced back to the ancient times, but were, by all means stories of 'three eyed aliens' told by fatigued mothers of children not wanting to go to sleep.
Thankfully, that's not the case today. Mostly, there have been various candidates for what would be the next whereabouts of life and there is none other than the red planet to start off with.
The people of Earth had crazy obsession about Mars after a series of failures, when July 1965 saw its first flybys of Mars, the US Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to take close up pictures of Mars. That was it. We were hooked to our neighbour in the universe for any signs of life. Mars is known to have the three critical ingredients for the recipe of life. It has an abundance of chemical building blocks, liquid water and volcanic activity as an energy source.
Though the surface is inhospitable, the possibility of life existing deep beneath its frozen surface cannot be ruled out. Also, nobody really said that Martians have to be humans, right?
A couple light years beyond, the icy moon of Jupiter Europa has unthinkable potential. For starters, it has a layered structure like Earth: an iron rich core, a rocky mantel and a crust of ice. It can be considered as a dissimilar twin to the sea ice in Antarctica. Finally, for dessert, in 2022 both the ESA (European Space agency) and NASA plan to launch a spacecraft that will get up close to Europa for this very purpose.
Who knows? We might get to witness the next space race!
When being habitable doesn't really make a place a habitat, the possibility of 'what if' can never be waived. For when the head scratching early humans invented the first wheel, they never expected automatic cars to hit the roads.
But that's the refinement of the unknown void we call 'future', isn't it? A black, white or probably even a pink canvas waiting to be hued by the colours of inventions, realisation of earlier ideas and the beginning of newer ones. For, who knows, millions of light years away, there would be people, just like us, thinking if life beyond their planet was possible?
Jahnavi Mahajan, XI
Cambridge International School for Girls
2019-2020