Editorial 1: It happened in Gurgaon
Context:
- New cities are emerging in India due to expansion of urbanization with newness, speed and mobility. These emerging cities are spectacular landscape of constant mobility and transformation.
- In these cities, white collar professionals move in and out of gated communities, satellite technologies convert medieval era mussavi (cloth) land maps into GIS ones, poor populations from different parts of India arrive for service sector jobs and there is extraordinary movement of goods and commodities across many landscapes of aspiration and desire.
What is Urbanization:
- Urbanization is the movement of people from rural to urban regions, expanding cities and towns. It is the process through which cities grow as higher percentages of the population come to live in the city.
- It involves a complex set of economic, demographic, social, cultural, technological, and environmental processes that increase the proportion of the population of a territory that lives in towns and cities.
What leads to urbanization?
- Industrialization: Because of better job possibilities, more individuals have been drawn to relocate from rural to urban regions since the industrial revolution.
- Commerce: Commercialization and commerce are associated with the belief that towns and cities provide better business possibilities and returns than rural regions.
- Facilities: There are several social advantages to living in a city or town. Better educational facilities, higher living standards, improved sanitation and housing, improved health care, improved recreation facilities, and improved social life are only a few examples
- Job prospects: Higher-value-added occupations are created and increased by services and industries, resulting in additional work possibilities
Current Concern over unity in Diversity within the cities:
- Cities are meant to be different from villages, allowing for a diversity that flourishes in the absence of rural attitudes and constraints but certain incidents of religion-based violence are observed. Such incident defeats the idea of modern cities and basic principle of unity in diversity
- As, the regional diversity of the population that lives within the city’s new residential localities the gated communities is simultaneously characterized by a remarkable religious homogeneity.
- land acquisition by both private and government bodies has intensified for building the cities, that shows the rise of newly enriched populations. The rise of urbanization-linked rural wealth has, however, had a peculiar effect on caste and religious identity.
- Therefore, such frame of ideas creates and retreat to mono-religious spaces, effectively wiping out traces of actual diversity that is essential to a peaceful and equitable urban life.
Such cities compromise the ideas of religious harmony and peaceful existence:
- In such scenario, newly enriched rural population becomes even more enmeshed in ways of the past through means of the present.
- These are ripe grounds for the making of a dystopic urban future, one that may give off political dividends but can only damage the social fabric. They are also conditions that allow for religious vigilantism and tolerance for it.
Conclusion:
- A city is just a collection of buildings and governance processes whereas urbanity is a particular attitude.
- Therefore, idea of Urbanity holds belief and education in the arts of co-existence which should not have place for religious disharmony or discrimination within the cities.
Editorial 2: The legacy of the Voyager mission
Recent Context:
- Recently, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) detected a “heartbeat” signal from the spacecraft Voyager 2 after losing the communication with it .
About Voyager 2 Mission
- It is Earth’s longest-running space probe which was launched in 1977.
- Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter interstellar space the region that lies outside the impact of our Sun’s constant flow of material and magnetic field. The first was Voyager 1, sent to space about two weeks after Voyager-2.
- The two probes have helped in exploring the outer giant planets of our solar system and discovered over 40 moons and numerous rings. They have provided invaluable data on planetary astronomy, and inspired many future space missions
Why were the Voyager spacecraft sent into space?
- Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, two weeks before the September 5 Voyager 1 takeoff.
- This reversal of order took place as the two spacecraft were put on different trajectories —Voyager 1 was set on a path to reach Jupiter and Saturn, ahead of Voyager 2.
- The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings the mission was extended.
- Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain.
What are the features of the Voyager spacecraft?
- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are identical spacecraft. Each of them is equipped with instruments to carry out 10 different experiments.
- The instruments include television cameras — to take images of planets and other celestial bodies; infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors, and cosmic-ray and charged-particle sensors.
- Both spacecraft feature a large antenna, 3.7 metres in diameter, which is used to receive commands from Earth and radio their findings back to the planet.
- As their mission involved going far away from the Sun, they aren’t powered by solar power, like other spacecraft are. “Instead, Voyager relies on a small nuclear power plant, drawing hundreds of watts from the radioactive decay of a pellet of plutonium.
- Each Voyager spacecraft is adorned with a golden phonograph record — a 12-inch disc, intended to be a sort of time capsule from Earth to any extraterrestrial life that might intercept the probes in the distant future.
What are the most notable achievements of the Voyager spacecraft?
- The most interesting discoveries made by Voyager 1 included the finding that Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, was geologically active.
- The spacecraft noted the presence of at least eight active volcanoes “spewing material into space, making it one of the mostgeologically active planetary bodies in the solar system.
- Moreover, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 discovered three new moons of Jupiter: Thebe, Metis and Adrastea.
- While passing by the planet’s moon Titan, Voyager 1 discovered that it wasn’t the biggest moon of our solar system
- The spacecraft also noted that Titan’s atmosphere was composed of 90 per cent nitrogen, and it likely had clouds and rain of methane.
- Voyager 2 arrived at Uranus in 1986 and confirmed that the main constituents of Uranus are hydrogen and helium
- It also discovered 10 new moons and two new rings in addition to the previously-known nine rings, among other significant findings.
- After the Neptune encounter, Voyager entered into interstellar space.
- These exits were instrumental in enabling astronomers to determine where exactly the edge of interstellar space is, something that’s difficult to measure from within the solar system. They showed that interstellar space begins just over 18 billion kilometres from the sun.
Conclusion:
- Voyager mission of NASA, extends NASA’s exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence and possibly beyond.
- Therefore, it will help in better understating and evolution of solar system.