Mars has been getting a lot of attention lately, but there are also some Martian moons in the crosshair that we haven't been able to study yet. Despite many attempts, not a single research apparatus has landed on these natural satellites of the Red Planet. NASA has decided to join forces with the Japanese space agency JAXA, which intends to end the losing streak and deliver its spacecraft to Phobos.
So far, space missions to the Martian moons have ended in failure. In 1988, as part of the Phobos program, the Soviet Union sent two research probes to Mars. The Phobos 1 probe died as a result of a mistake made by the flight controllers, and the Phobos 2 probe, although it actually reached the moon and even took numerous photos, did not manage to drop the landers due to a failure. Another space mission began in 2011. The Russian Phobos-Grunt probe crashed shortly after take-off, which put it in orbit around the Earth and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere shortly thereafter.
Mars and its moons are extremely unlucky for us. In 2016, the Martian lander Schiaparelli hit the planet's surface at high speed, damaging it. Fortunately, the ExoMars mission was not a complete failure, as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is still in Martian orbit.
Despite all these failures, scientists are not going to give up. The Japanese agency JAXA wants to accomplish the "impossible" - it organizes a space mission to the moon Phobos under the name MMX (Mars Moons eXploration). The MEGANE spacecraft (Mars moon Exploration with GAmma-rays and NEutrons instrument) is to analyze the chemical composition of both moons and land on Phobos. The research instrument will take samples and deliver them to Earth.
If all goes to plan, the MMX mission will begin in 2024 and the return to Earth is scheduled for 2029. We recently learned that NASA will be working with Japanese scientists on this important project. JAXA is believed to have a good chance of success because in 2003 it launched the Hayabusa space probe at the asteroid Itokawa, which successfully landed, took samples, and delivered them to us on Earth in 2010. It was the first such feat in history. The MEGANE spacecraft will be based on proven technology that was used during the Itokawa mission.
Phobos, one of the two satellites of Mars, is a very intriguing celestial body. Nobody knows where he came from. Astronomers say it is some object captured by Mars' gravity. This object is indeed strange in terms of shape and orbit, and most amazingly, according to scientists, at some point, it will fall to the surface of Mars, just like a deorbiting space station.
This moon behaves quite differently from any natural satellites known to us. First of all, it is extremely close to the planet. The satellite's orbit is much faster than the planet's rotation. In total, Phobos is 3.4 times faster, with its east and west occurring on Mars every 11 hours and 6 minutes. This makes it very similar to artificial Earth satellites.
A group of Russian transhumanists and futurists recently announced that the creation of a megastructure known as the Dyson Ball could allow the resurrection of dead people. Such a technological resurrection will not take place in the physical world but in something like a digital paradise.
The energy obtained from the star can allow humanity to create artificial intelligence of complexity unimaginable to modern humans. Such a machine would be able to faithfully reproduce every human being. The originator of this concept is Russian Alexei Turchin.
Since 2007, Turchin has been actively involved in the Russian Transhumanist Movement. In his opinion, after creating a digital copy of a human being, everything will become possible, including creating a replica of your body reconstructed from traces of DNA. However, the plans of the transhumanists are to resuscitate all people with a documented trace of them.
It is an operation impossible from energy and, above all, a computational point of view. For this, the two futurists explain, we need something like a Dyson sphere that will support the entire global resurrection operation. We are talking about a completely hypothetical megastructure proposed in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. It is supposed to be a huge shell that wraps the star to capture some of the star's energy.
Even if it could be made and anyone's "digital twin" could be produced, one simple truth cannot be denied. Each digital copy will be different from the original. So can such a process be called a resurrection?
What's the best way to achieve longevity or even immortality? Professor Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has made quite controversial words on the subject. He believes that thanks to the latest technologies and genetic engineering, humans will evolve, become more powerful and live much longer - they can even become immortal - but this will only apply to the richest.
An Israeli professor said rich people would become cyborgs within 200 years as a result of the gradual merging of man with machine. It sounds like a script for a science fiction movie, but the words were spoken quite seriously. In his opinion, humanity will develop to such an extent that it will even be able to overcome death.
Work on techniques to ensure longevity and to put human consciousness into a machine has been going on for a long time. For example, Dmitry Itskow, a Russian billionaire, wanted to achieve immortality by becoming an android. Even the famous scientist Stephen Hawking believed in his lifetime that his project was as feasible as possible. Itskow aims to do just that in the next three decades - by 2045 he'll be around 65.
Professor Yuval Noah Harari believes that man has already been programmed in such a way that as soon as he achieves some achievement, after some time he wants to do something even greater. Our "eternal discontent" is to drive humanity first to achieve longevity, and eventually immortality as well. Ultimately, according to the professor, future humans will be as different from today's humans as today's humans are from monkeys.
"God is extremely important because without religious myths you cannot create a society. Religion is mankind's most important invention. As long as people believed in their belonging to these gods, they could be controlled. But what we see in the last few centuries is a fact. that people are becoming more powerful and no longer need crutches (it is a rehabilitation device) from God. Now we are saying that we do not need God, we need technology, "said Professor Yuval Noah Harari.
He continued his statement with the statement that the most interesting place in the world, from the religious perspective, is not the Middle East but the Silicon Valley - the region in the northern part of the US state of California, where the "techno religion" is being developed. The local scientists and specialists believe that even death is only a problem that can be solved with the help of technology.
The Israeli professor added, however, that all this salutary technology that will turn us into cyborgs and give us immortality will not be available to everyone. Only the richest will receive this honor, while the poorer people will be sentenced to death - they will leave this world like an animal species threatened with extinction. This is obviously a very distant future, but who knows what time and constantly evolving technology will bring us?
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