We humans are a curious species. As NASA says on its website，"Humans are driven to explore the unknown, discover new worlds, push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits，and then push further. ”
And space exploration is where we have been "pushing” our furthest curiosity.
The year 2019 began with two pieces of exciting space exploration news. On Jan. 3, China landed a spacecraft，Chang'e 4，on the moon's far side—the side we can't see from Earth—for the first time in human history. And according to a report published on Jan. 9 in Nature, scientists from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detected repeated radio signals from a galaxy 1.5 billion light years away, possibly sent by intelligent aliens.
However, what's even more exciting than the news is the fact that whenever speaking of space exploration, we forget our political and cultural differences—the things that so obsess us.
"When you go into space, you become part of this overall collective (集体) called ‘humanity'”， Ken Liu, ChineseAmerican scifi writer and translator，told Quartz website. "You're no longer Chinese, American, Russian...Your culture is left behind. You're now just ‘humanity' with a capital ‘H'．”
This magic has worked all the way along our journey into space. When US astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930～2012)became the first human to set foot on the moon in 1969, for example，he told the world: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind，” Now, with Chang'e 4 touching down on new moon territory, China's aim is to help scientists from around the world find out more about Earth's only satellite. And with the discovery of the CHIME astronomers, we ' re one step closer to answering a common question in science: "Are humans alone in the universe？”
It's true that we are a curious species. But instead of being curious about the "unknown”， perhaps we're really more eager to "push further” our own human "boundaries” and "limits”．
