Recently we have witnessed special events. The docking of the SpaceX Dragon with the International space station, inside of 19 hours from lift-off. Stunning live broadcasts made the event special. An extraordinary event by any standards
Who thought of it? Who validated the idea? Who designed it, Who engineered it, and who made the execution faultless. A collection of human minds; curious, creative, strong belief, and the deep commitment. Where did these teams come from? They were like anybody else when growing up, and getting educated, curious to push boundaries of “thinking” probably came from family upbringing, innate talent, and the Education system must have played a big role in inspiring these minds and an extraordinary leadership that could make the teams believe in what they were doing. All real science, mathematics, physics; essentially inter-disciplinary thinking and high quality engineering, precision execution.
Those of us who were surprised by the moon landing of Apollo11, Trip to Mars, International space station, the Hubble telescope, the space shuttle journeys (the successful ones), here was the SpaceX mission.
This year has seen human kind being capable of “seeing” deeper into the Universe, find new celestial objects, including one which is most likely made of the 5th state of matter, the Plasma.
The human minds when educated to stay curious and creative, has limitless capabilities. We dig deeper and never content with contemporary discoveries and inventions. they keep going further, digging deeper into new knowledge areas.
While scientists are going farther into the Universe and even trying to understand the origin of life, matter, space and time.
Scientific communities have also been looking deeper into Earth itself. Recently they have found evidence of a different kind of matter encompassing the extremely fiery and molten core of the Earth.
While high quality thinking, unsatiated curiosity, and creativity, enabled by Education and learning, as catalysts have pushed the envelope of collaborative human quest,
Have we failed to use the same set of human minds in finding solutions to real world “Here & Now” challenges. The nCOVID19 pandemic: we have not found a vaccine yet, we of course not found a cure too. The climate change and its outcomes; the glaciers are melting due to global warming, rising sea levels, predicted consume a lot of land over the next few decades, natural calamities like floods and earthquakes. Peaceful co-existence in spite of manmade geographical borders has evaded us. This dilutes the mankind’s ability to invest, resources and collective research, thinking, and finding solutions to mitigate these challenges. And many more challenges, the biggest being poverty, economic disparities, wars and increasing military spending, human sufferings, diseases, health care systems and community wellbeing. The excitement as we think of human minds being able to conquer the scientific challenges that are exotic, dies down when you go out into the streets and see poverty, homeless people, social strifes.
The new Education paradigm should be inclusive of encouraging curiosity, design thinking, innovation to create new social order of equality, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence. This implies reimagining many of the attributes associated with existential issues.
We should look farther and deeper to discover more, and invent newer marvels. That is the purpose of life and Education. The quest is everlasting and challenges will be newer too. All until life exists……….
