10 Items You Need to Add to Your Amateur Astronomy Toolkit Today
Liquid water on Earth is the reason humans can thrive on this planet. If we ever want to colonize the stars beyond our home world, we'll need to find water out there. But that's not the only reason finding water in space is so important. Water also informs our understanding of the great beyond.
Water is Required For All Known Forms of Life
Admittedly, humans are only aware of the forms of life we have discovered. If there are aliens out there, it's possible that they might adhere to different biological rules. We have no way of knowing for sure. But as far as we know right now, all forms of life require water in order to live. It's not as simple as mere hydration, either.
Water is also a fantastic solvent, dissolving all types of substances into the building blocks lifeforms need to survive. It provides a liquid medium that those substances can move through, and plays a key role in many chemical reactions crucial to biological existence. There are some species on Earth that consume very little water or can even go extremely long periods of time without it, but ultimately, all life on Earth needs water to exist in some capacity.
This means that the presence of water is, as far as humanity knows, absolutely required for any form of life to exist. Therefore, finding water in space is crucial to our scientific efforts to locate aliens. If they are out there somewhere, it seems likely that they'd need water to survive too, even if we can't confirm that for sure. That said, water in space is important to our own future as a species as well.
Long-Term Settlement in Space Will be Limited by Water Supply
When humans were first expanding across the Earth and settling lands far and wide, one of the most important factors for them to consider was the availability of fresh water to drink. You needed a reliable and consistent source of fresh water to settle anywhere, and that will continue to be a factor as humans consider the possibility of colonizing other planets in our solar system.
There is plenty of water on Earth, but getting enough of it into space to support large colonies is unfeasible. Water is incredibly heavy, not to mention effectively incompressible. It would take up a lot of room on craft being launched into space, and it would be very expensive to lift all of that weight beyond our atmosphere. Simply put, the logistics cost of transporting sufficient amounts of water from Earth to any large space colony is too extreme.
Sure, small settlements might be feasible, but if humanity ever wants to establish large cities with thousands of people on other worlds, we're going to need to find readily available fresh water in space to do so. There are many planets in our solar system, such as Mars, with present water, though we may have to jump through some hoops to access it. The mere presence of that water at least makes Mars potentially habitable.
There will come a time when humanity seeks to truly spread beyond our own planet, and fresh water in space will be the primary factor determining where we can and cannot colonize.
Water Can Be Disassembled Into Valuable Substances
We've been talking a lot about water as a crucial resource for life, but it's not the only thing humans will need to survive out in the cosmos. Ignoring everything else, we at least need oxygen to breathe! Now, it would be much less costly to transport oxygen into space compared to water, but it still wouldn't be very efficient. Instead of doing that, we could break down water to serve our needs instead.
You probably know that water consists of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule. Well, there's nothing stopping humans from disassembling water into those core components. Because of this, a source of fresh water in space is also a potential source of oxygen, which has many uses, not the least of which is allowing humans to live.
Of course, those hydrogen molecules are very useful as well. Space travel is likely to evolve in the future, but for now, we still need combustible fuel to lift our rockets into the sky and propel us through space at any respectable speeds. Hydrogen is a crucial component of some types of rocket fuel, meaning water could both help humanity survive in space and provide us with a means to move our spacecraft around. Hydrogen can also used to produce ammonia, which is an essential component in things like fertilizer.
There's plenty of other valuable things we can do with hydrogen and oxygen as well, so water will truly be one of, if not the most valuable resource needed by humans to thrive in space.
Water is a Vital Player in Chemistry
You may recall earlier when I stated that water is a fantastic solvent, which makes it crucial to life. Being a good solvent makes water valuable in many other areas as well. A solvent dissolves other substances and turns them into solutions. Water isn't the only solvent in existence, but it's very good at being one, which means it plays a big role in many chemical reactions, even outside of the biological processes of life.
For instance, halogens, alkaline earth metals, and alkali metals all have strong chemical reactions with water. As humans move into space in the future, we'll probably need to do many of the same things we do here on Earth in order to thrive. This undoubtedly means that we'll need to conduct a lot of chemistry, and we'll almost certainly need water to serve as a solvent, reactants, and much more.
Do We Know Where to Find Water in Space?
You may have gotten the impression at this point that humanity is searching for water in space and not finding much of it. While it's true that we are constantly looking for new sources of water, we also know where to find plenty of it. In fact, we've located more water in space than there is on Earth.
For example, NASA currently believes that there are entire oceans on various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, including Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Enceladus and Titan. On Ganymede, a saltwater ocean is hypothesized as being trapped between two huge layers of ice, and we have plenty of ways to distill fresh water from saltwater. Many of the moons that orbit Neptune and Uranus likely have water on (or in) them too.
There are also large asteroids floating around our solar system with water trapped in them. Even the Moon, which is drier than any desert on Earth, has water in the form of small icy crystals trapped in the lunar soil. Believe it or not, even incredibly hot inner planets like Venus and Mercury have water on them in some capacity.
Frankly, the issue is not locating water in our solar system, but rather, finding out how we can reliably access and utilize it for our own ends. Once we find an efficient way to do that, humanity will have a realistic means to expanding beyond the confines of Earth, even if it's only a little at a time.