Conquest?
Machine translation from the original, not yet reviewed by the author.
Original in Spanish
It is a mistake to call the little trots that homo sapiens sapiens has taken outside the Earth the “conquest of space.” Allow me to use an analogy with the ocean to illustrate my point:
The ocean is immense. Three quarters of the surface of our planet are covered by water. The ocean is deep. More than eleven thousand meters deep in some places. The ocean is rich in forms of life: there is more variety and quantity of plant and animal life in the oceans than on dry land, and more oxygen is produced under the sea than on dry land. Man has sailed all the seas of the world, gets his food from them, and uses them as a place of recreation. Nevertheless, man has not yet conquered the ocean (although he has already begun to destroy it). There are still events beyond his control, such as tsunamis; there are still unknown abysses and species yet to be studied; we still do not know how to use it without wearing it down irreparably. Now, let us return to space:
Space is immense. Objects are known that lie at a distance of 570 sextillion kilometers away (5.7 E +26 m). The devices that man has sent to explore (not to conquer) have not even left our tiny solar system. Man himself has not gone beyond the orbit of the Moon. So, how can we say that we have conquered anything?
Space is complex. The existence of many celestial bodies is known: nebulae, stars, star clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters, white dwarfs, black dwarfs, black holes, novae, supernovae, asteroids, planets, satellites, rings, gas clouds, pulsars, quasars, dark matter. If man does not yet know even the whole Earth or the Moon, how can we say that he has conquered space?
There are at least 100 billion galaxies, each with at least 200 billion stars. This gives us a total of 20 sextillion stars, many of them with planets, and these with satellites. If we do not know even our solar system or our galaxy, how can we say that we have conquered space?
We have conquered nothing. We have barely poked our heads out, with great fear and difficulty, and we have taken a couple of little turns around our house, the Earth. This is like saying that a child has conquered the ocean just because he has bathed in a little puddle on a beach. Space still is, and always will be, the final frontier.