The Commited MAY 2015 | Page 43

TED ATAKENT BAHÇEŞEHİR COLLEGE / 8-A Should We Colonize Other Planets? Atahan ÜNAL There are some concerns and ideas that have started to arise about colonizing other planets. Humans might want to colonize other planets for various reasons such as global warming, a global scale famine, global overpopulation or for further space exploration. If we wanted to, with a lot of time and a lot of money, we could theoretically colonize other planets. The closest exoplanet to Earth is “Proxima Centauri b” which is about 4.2 light years away. But we would need to take a lot of equipment just to protect ourselves from the harsh conditions of space. Also, we would need to take a lot of equipment and manage our food, water, energy carefully. But someone should be in charge to distribute our resources equally and make the right choices concerning the colony. It would probably be someone responsible and trustworthy and chosen for this mission. We could do valuable scientific experiments to understand our universe better by testing different things in a different environment or to invent new technologies if we colonized other planets. I think we should colonize other planets because humans will eventually have the technology and when the technology gets there, we will have to look further in space for humanity to continue advancing. I think that colonizing other planets would be beneficial to humanity as a whole. If we decided to colonize other planets, we would be able to do it in different ways like building a base on the surface of the planet. If we colonized other planets, we probably wouldn’t find aliens, but we could possibly get some resources such as metals, water or other things probably from underground. If we found resources, we would probably not bring it back to Earth but, instead use it for our colony.