23 Exploration

It would seem that human beings are born to explore: certainly this is the nature of infants as they interact with their surroundings, allowing their brains to rapidly develop. Keeping this desire for exploration strong through childhood and youth, while providing safeguards against injury and ill-judged choices, is a worthy challenge…and such exploration can certainly include the investigation of natural phenomena. Support for professional exploration is a hallmark of thriving cultures. On earth, exploration continues across geographic territories, under the land, in the ocean, and even through novel adventures in atmospheric flight.

Tools for explorers range from navigation equipment to methods for documentation (cameras, sound recorders, etc.) to all sorts of field measurement instrumentation and sample collection devices. Now the inventory of such tools includes robots, autonomous underwater vehicles, and drones. Special vehicles are designed to carry humans into inhospitable domains and special habitats likewise enable safe human encampment. In some cases, this has evolved into elaborate permanent installations, such as the base at the South Pole.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, human exploration has now included venturing into outer space – first in earth orbit, then to the moon, and now (with robotic spacecraft) distant planets, their moons, comets, and asteroids. Next big steps will be to enable humans to establish a permanent presence on the moon and to venture to Mars. While direct participation in such exploration is highly selective, it is based on a much wider network of technical development in which physicists can be deeply engaged.

Finally, physical devices and methods allow large numbers of people to take a renewed look at familiar environments, seeing things at different scales, in different lights, at different speeds, etc. An example is an attachment for personal mobile phones that takes photographs in the infrared. Such physics-based tools allow homes, backyards, parks, nearby wildlands, urban spaces, schools, and workplaces to be explored in new ways, keeping a culture of exploration healthy and active in our society. This helps us make good decisions about caring for our environment and it fosters popular support for the costly but exhilarating efforts to send humans “where no one has been before.”