Back in 1999 the first satellite to ever monitor the atmosphere of another planet was launched and sent on its merry way to Mars. All was going according to plan until the Mars Climate Orbiter arrived at its destination a little too fast. Turns out that someone forgot to convert the units of force needed to decelerate into a stable orbit from pounds to newtons, or was it the other way around? In any case, the craft smashed into the atmosphere and broke up before falling to the surface. Its safe to say that if there were people on board they would have burned up too. Obviously if this was a manned mission someone would have probably double checked the calculations - NASA takes these things kind of seriously when lives are involved. Just another good reason to adopt the Metric System. I'm looking at you America (also Burma, Liberia, and partially the UK).
Honourable mention: Seeking Out New Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4kmBX0J3K8 Whilst it's technically not space, the possibility of finding aliens receives a mention because of all of the cool stuff that's been happening with Mars recently. Namely: the discovery of water. One of the reasons this is exciting is because it increases the likelihood of us finding alien life on our closest neighbour. Let me be clear - if it turns out that there is life on Mars it's likely to be in the form of something that resembles a single celled organism, like a bacteria, or even a pre-cell biochemical sludge. We've already mentioned the Drake equation here on What Culture, one of the factors is the amount of planets in a solar system that are actually capable of supporting life. If Mars fits that criteria, it means there are two planets in the Solar System alone which have such an ability, which could indicate that the conditions needed for life to exist aren't so uncommon throughout the universe. Unfortunately though, we're not likely to find out any time soon. We could of course send one of the Mars rovers to take a closer look at what's going on, but consider the possibility that there may still be some Earthly bacteria clinging to it. What's to stop this bacteria from contaminating the water and out-competing the life that may reside there? As history on our own planet will tell us, humans aren't very good at introducing species to new environments. I for one don't want to add mass extinction of a foreign planet to our list of failures. This could of course happen the other way around - such is the plot line of countless sci-fi productions, Independence Day, Enders Game, and Stargate being but a few. Stephen Hawking seems to think this would be the case, he famously said ''If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.' Perhaps our species is destined to be nothing more than a footnote in the history of an interstellar alien empire. The other, and probably less exciting prospect is that we really are alone. The Great Filter concept argues that this might be the case; nobody really knows what the great filter is, or whether we've already passed through it, or if there are more than one. Robin Hanson thought it up to explain the apparent lack of intelligent life in the universe; he proposes that some kind of universal event leads to the downfall of many forms of life, leading to their extinction. We know that in the next hundred years or so, humanity will have to overcome some monumental hurdles in order to continue thriving - any one of which could be the filter. Is it feasible to continue living the way we do if our dependence on fossil fuel continues? Can we expect that the Earth will remain an ideal environment for human life if we continue to belch gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere? Will we continue to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons as a response to our adversaries doing the same in a self perpetuating cycle which could ultimately lead to our destruction?
