With the successful return of the Shenzhou 12 manned spacecraft and the successful lift-off of the Shenzhou 13, the development of China's aerospace industry has entered a period of rapid development, and while countless people are cheering for the motherland's strength, many people have also raised questions, this aerospace science and technology belongs to high technology, and what does it have to do with the lives of ordinary people? Today, let's talk about the most direct relationship between aerospace science and technology and our lives!
01, space breeding
Space technology is closely related to our lives, for example: space breeding. It is to send the seed to space to mutagenically, so as to form a new seed.
Over the years, we have developed rapidly, so many people have not been able to pay attention to the food problem, and even the problem of waste has appeared frequently.
However, the issue of food has always been one of the core problems of our humanity.
I believe everyone has heard that the people take food as the heaven, but what about the heaven of food? The answer is seeds.
Remember Nolan's sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar? Why would humans go to Interstellar? The answer lies in the fact that crops have encountered blight that has led to food harvests, and this brain hole is also a major issue found by a group of top experts at the time after repeatedly comparing the possible crises of mankind, that is, if crops go wrong and humans cannot cultivate blight-resistant varieties, then all of humanity will face extinction, and only a few people can carry embryos and seeds to other planets.
In fact, the first step in seed as food has been a vital part of mankind since ancient times, and without the appearance of wheat, rice and millet, mankind still lived in the Stone Age of ru mao and blood. Without the introduction of corn and potatoes, human beings would not have a population of today's size.
It can be said that seeds, which are the basic conditions for human survival, cannot be left like oxygen.
02, seeds, not easy
Let's take a look at breeding, which is a very large systematic project.
Seeds, how to do it?
In fact, breeding itself is a technique that humans are good at, after all, we have been breeding since the agricultural era. It can even be summed up in two words: selective breeding.
Those with high yields, good tastes, and strong stress resistance stay for hybridization and inbringing, gradually strengthening their advantages.
However, behind this is a complex set of genetic problems, such as the genome of plants with billions of base pairs, and the sites of decisive traits are as few as thousands and as many as tens of thousands, so we can only vaguely breed.
Therefore, in a considerable period of time, we cultivate a variety, which takes a very long time.
For example, the first staple food revolution in human history was the domestication of the crop wheat.
This process involves continuous selection and breeding from wild wheat, and it takes a long time just to improve a certain characteristic. For example, early wild wheat will crack after maturity, causing wheat to fall into the soil, reducing people's actual income, and then more than 6500 years ago, the problem of wheat ear cracking was basically solved The whole seed selection and breeding process has gone through more than 4000 years.
Like other characteristics such as yield, lodging resistance, pest resistance and even its own starch content, it takes thousands of years to breed.
How long this process is, the longest dynastic era in our history has not been so long, and many people will find it difficult to see enough seed improvement in their lifetime.
It was not until the 19th century, with the deepening of human understanding of the nature of life and the emergence of genetics, that we gradually realized that behind seed selection was essentially a genetic problem. So breeding began to accelerate. We have also given birth to a series of new breeding methods, typically mutagenic.
In fact, the reason for mutagenesis is very simple, because genes are decisive, and they are essentially genetic variations. In the past, natural selection actually relied on pure natural spontaneous variation, and this frequency was very low. Through various means, the rate of genetic mutation is accelerated, then breeding can be accelerated.
03, why can space breed?
Space breeding is a typical example of this new breeding.
Why can space breed? This is the power of "heaven"
In fact, this is mainly due to the very unique environment of space. Space has an environment that Earth cannot simulate.
The first is the vacuum environment and microgravity in space, which will have an impact on DNA breaks and recombination, and it is more likely that genome translocations will occur and new mutants will be generated.
Secondly, it is particularly important that the cosmic high-energy ion radiation and the cosmic magnetic field in space, which are weakened by the atmosphere, the ground is very weak, and in space is very abundant, these high-energy particles will lead to a great increase in mutation, triggering genetic mutations and even chromosomal-level mutations, thereby greatly enriching the variation species, and the breeding cycle is also greatly shortened, providing more basic resources for the next breeding.
In fact, the effectiveness of space breeding has long been proven, for example, there are space peppers in green peppers, which are several times larger than the volume cultivated on land, and the weight can reach more than 1 kg. Many of these new varieties are characterized by high yield, high quality and strong disease resistance.
Compared with traditional breeding, space breeding is not only effective, but also fast, often in space for a few days, you can achieve a large number of mutants, which compared with the past decades or even hundreds of years, really confirmed the sentence "a day in the sky, a year in the ground" ah.
Because of this, China's space program, has always included space breeding, according to incomplete statistics, China has carried out more than 30 return satellites, Shenzhou spacecraft, Tiangong space laboratory and other retrievable spacecraft breeding, plant breeding alone, China has cultivated more than 700 new strains and new varieties of space breeding, which has become another important direction in the field of seeds in China today.
With the increasing space activities in our country, the fruits of space breeding will also meet more with us. Of course, you don't have to worry about these crops. Space breeding is essentially just an acceleration of genetic variation, and there is no essential difference between traditional breeding and will not introduce foreign genes, so it can be used with confidence.
Therefore, aerospace science and technology is definitely not a technology that has nothing to do with us, but can really bring about changes for us ordinary people.
Just like the space breeding mentioned above, it has now become an important part of China's breeding methods and can provide us with more products.
In the future, with the normalization of China's space activities, it is estimated that you will see more and more unheard of space breeding products.