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The nation just unveiled its five-year plan to find habitable exoplanets in nearby star systems.
China has come up with its 15th five-year plan, extending from 2026 to 2030. The new plan aims to boost domestic demand, mainly by raising living standards, expanding social security, education, and health care services.
Aside from this and upgrading its industrial systems, the nation has also put an emphasis on scientific innovation and reform. Within this bubble lies the nation’s most ambitious plan yet: to find a ‘second Earth’.
From Elon Musk’s desire for Mars colonization to the Cooper Station, a space habitat envisioned in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, humans have long imagined what it might mean to live beyond Earth.
While we aren’t close to building outposts in outer space, we are on the right path to do so. And China’s new plan might just boost our progress.
China’s plan to find another home
Using a series of new satellite missions that will be launched within the timespan of the five-year plan, the nation hopes to answer big questions on the origin of life while finding potential habitable worlds beyond our solar system.
There are three key elements to the plan, the first being the Hongmeng program which will deploy an array of ten low-frequency telescopes behind the moon. The region behind the moon is naturally radio-quiet, and the program aims to use this to its advantage to search for signals from the early universe, with hopes of possibly detecting faint biosignatures.
Simultaneously, the planned Kufau-2 satellite will focus on the Sun’s magnetic cycles by orbiting over its polar regions to understand how it affects space weather.
Then comes the big guns; the Exo-Earth Survey satellite which is the core instrument for finding a second Earth. The satellite will systematically search the galaxy for planets of similar sizes to Earth and are within the habitable zones of their stars.
In addition to these, there are goals to develop the Tianlin telescope by 2035 that would focus on characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets. China’s existing Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey would aid with this purpose by scanning nearby stars for exoplanets.
Do we need a ‘second Earth’?
Humanity is currently consuming natural resources faster than our planet can regenerate them, a phenomenon which scientists have called ‘Earth Overshoot’. This means that our consumption rate necessitates more resources than the Earth can currently sustain, especially with our population increasing exponentially.
Due to this overshoot, combined with the detrimental, already hitting effects of climate change, the depletion of vital resources could happen in 50 to 100 years or less. Climate change intensifies droughts, soil erosion, and biodiversity, accelerating the exhaustion of human consumption patterns, and in extension food and water security.
This growing unsustainability is why finding a new habitable planet is deemed by some as crucial. What if a single catastrophic event wiped populations out?
