Civilization, Technology, Progress, Space, Society

 what do all of these have in common?

 

These concepts are radically different from one another yet inevitably intertwined. As time goes by these concepts mentioned above takes us beyond the realm of understanding, of course, the technology developed from our advances in space exploration will not only help in the progress of our society but they also affect the current modern Civilization in ways that no one can perfectly understand.

 

Here I will discuss how space exploration the Technologies that come from it are fundamentally tied to the progress of our society. Generally, civilizations with the capacity for space exploration; a capacity we must remember we reached 60 years ago are classified into three categories of development based on how much energy they consume. These are known as Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 Civilization today we live in a Civilization what physicist Machu Kaku described as type 0.7 Civilization although our energy consumption capacity at 15 terahertz is limited by our consumption of fossil fuels. Society today has progressed to an unimaginable point. Only twenty years ago as we transitioned from dominating our planet to dominating our solar system to perhaps one day expanding across the Galaxy.

Now, if you focus on current advances and how it impacts our society let's have a look at an instance:

In 1957 after the launch of Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union, a scientist at MIT realised that radio signals coming from a satellite orbiting our planet could be used to pinpoint the location of anyone or anything on earth surface at the same time. This concept is known as the Doppler effect and is extensively used even today to plot velocity along the line of sight between Earth and space shuttles. Now, it was with this development of an application of Doppler Effect with which a vital aspect of modern society came into existence that is the
GPS.

GPS or global positioning system is a vast network of 31 satellites orbiting the earth and because of their communication with one another, we can figure out the location of any connected devices on the network. GPS helps us navigate your personal world and our surroundings in connection with society with ease. Consider this example:

 

Someone from a long and exhausting day of work wants to retire home; so, what he does is call an ola or uber cab and after agreeing to pay their extortionate price he or she tells the driver to take him or her home by plugging in his or her address in GPS. The route and location are instantly calculated.

 

Similarly, on a global scale GPS does so much more today modern passenger Jets use GPS to arrive the destination safely natural disasters have been spotted and prevented by using GPS satellite imagery. GPS is not limited to travelling but is very much prevalent in the society surrounding us, whether you need medical care or you want to find a place of interest or just stroll around GPS can be a way out. GPS has made a significant impact by catapulting the thinking, communication and the way people live in a society. It has made the domain and habitats a safer and easier to live in. Unlike earlier times today with the advent of GPS monitored buses and vehicles parents and relatives can be to an extent carefree about the children or loved ones but this GPS offered by space technology is the mere tip of the Iceberg.

Many other applications like Air Purifiers which we daily use in our lives was originally developed for space exploration so that astronauts can have a constant supply of clean air and can grow the plants in space and potentially extra-terrestrial worlds. The first working model was installed onboard the International Space Station in 1995. In daily life, if we look at the society, it is regularly combating immense amount of pollution which is hazardous to the health and a complete set back when it comes to quality and wellbeing of society. Air Purifiers are then adopted to improve the rapidly deteriorating environment quality and contamination of air, water, soil and food. To have a sustainable and progressive society and at the same time reduce the risk of chronic health problems we need a clean environment, which today is provided by the air purification systems initially developed and conceptualized for space exploration.

 

Moving forward: The advent of space has given as another great Tech at our disposal known at the CAT scan or popularly known as CT scan it was initially developed for Apollo space program to identify imperfections in aerospace structures and anomalies in its components. today CT Scan is playing a major role in the medical arena they have been since their Inception regarded as a synonym of greater life expectancy and declining cancer death rate. This technology which was a landmark in portable medical scanning Tech for astronauts have now expanded to the underdeveloped and developed regions around the world and is directly benefitting the lives of millions of people in desperate need for medical help in our global society. As it is a well-known fact that medicine on medical health is one of the key factors to keep our society running smoothly and efficiently and optimum level this adoption of space technology is playing the dominant role in achieving all coherent but distant goals of dynamic society today.

 

These developments mentioned above are an only small piece of Pie that shows how the standard of living is improved with the conceptualization of these Technologies it comes with a better understanding of the world around us and that is derived with the exploration of outer space.

 

 

How culture and society are changing thanks to the diffusion of Technology in the world?

we will study this question in a very different context with very different communities

 

let's look at a few instances:

 

Today we live in a world with approximately 7 billion people and astonishingly about 5 billion of the 7 billion now have mobile phones in hands. Some 2-3 billion of these 7 billion have access to the internet though that's very diverse and very different in different circumstances and contests around the world what this creates is a very uncanny, interesting, fascinating and surpassing intersection.

consider an Indian Guru like a typical one will not be the first of the consideration of who should have a mobile phone but considering the fact that the mobile phone is providing some sort of utility to him. if we consider the floods of Southern India a fisherman man with a mobile phone would have warned his family in villages by saying that- ‘he's seeing these large waves coming so they a must evacuate’. The Tribe of ‘shamanic cult’ who worship the crocodile spirit which typically involves hunting the crocodile in the middle of the night does not find the crocodile in water by a Flashlight because they don't have batteries in that remote region of the world so what they do is they use the light emitted from their mobile phones which they had to locate the eyes of the crocodile they have to catch.

 

Talking and shifting back to the context of India taking into consideration the communities who are sort of on the margins of society in rural parts of India have very different sorts of perspectives about their lives and about their abilities to generate economic development, social and political power in various ways. In the rural areas generally, what happens is when people have meetings in villages they sit around and talk about their dreams and visions and so on but usually what comes out of the meeting is – ‘there is nothing we can really do about the process’

 

Now the question is:-

 

Is there really a way to change this dynamic and can Technology somehow facilitate the changing of this dynamic? to answer this question we need to look at the invention of the video camera how the people use the video camera to document different edition, stories, issues, realities that they were experiencing collectively and thereafter sitting together and watching the videos with one another having intellectual words for creating methods; in such a way to actually inspire collective action. The result observed was that people were using video cameras to document abuse by the government to document their trades and their capacities by creating these videos they were able to collectively rally around the content produced by that technology to actually try to generate some forms of what we call in Social Sciences collective actions from below. So, we can see various forms of mobilisation that can occur but only if you trust communities if you trust culture if you trust people to have a power with technology rather than presuming what technology does or does not mean for people.

 

Now, these mobile phones and cameras which we are talking here that they are changing the society fundamentally by transgressing thoughts of people the thoughts of communities and paving the way for a more efficient and adequate method for the survival of personality of society as a whole have Origins in space exploration as the very concept of Digital Photography was developed in 1960 by Engineer at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, calif. These digital cameras were very first introduced as miniature cameras onboard interplanetary spacecraft while maintaining high image quality for scientific purposes. Similarly, the concept of mobile phones, the concept of transistors and various electronic devices used in the creation of mobile phones was first developed for the space orbiters, landers and Rovers which were ideal for integrating and reducing the size of space entities without hampering operation-ability.

In the conclusion, I will like to say that increasing application in space Sector and exploring the far rim can be a way forward for humanity to have a better understanding of society; because people locate their experiences locate their histories think about themselves and articulate the dreams only when they have a medium to do so and in this rapidly transforming world we need a  medium to exist in parallel which could invoke a radically new way of rethinking everything from a Google algorithm to a Facebook filter feed, to the ways we create a database that order and structure the world we live in.

So, when different forms of knowledge meet one another it creates what biologist call emergence, but to make it possible in today's digital world according to me we need to empower culture voices around Space-age Technology and to allow others different voices to exist in parallel and speak to and inform one another. When we look at the space age and Earth these are two different ecosystems that exist in parallel but they inform one another they have weak ties within one another and what comes out of those links between the nodes and the network is a meta-morphed society, but another link which is also true that not everyone in this world engages with technology, in the same way, most of those technologies are locked in two black boxes and white iPods. Integrating the space Technology with the modern society is a way to rethink the codes to hack out new meanings and to empower those diverse people coming to the Digital table and in turn, this will empower the digital revolution to fulfil the early grassroots promises that we were a part of what we thought about when we invoke the internet, to begin with. This came out as a countercultural movement which taught us to think diversely and globally and which is now pursued further by the link between Space age and Modern Society.