High-Level Project Summary
Deciphering the risks introduced by the space exploration hazards was a critical step in terms of space exploration. However, only knowing the risks isn't enough. To overcome those risks, scientists started experimenting with living organisms to understand the biological impacts and how to overcome those hazards. we will introduce the idea of creating a biological organism that is resistant to all these stresses and make the user experience how space flight risks could fail the mission of the whole flight. The solution is to create a digital platform containing a simple-educational 2D video game—after a basic introduction to the hazards—that will thrill the users toward space exploration.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The human race is curious by nature. Human beings have always had their lives risked while venturing through their dear plant. Utilizing their technological advancement, they could venture even more into the universe, and, thus, a new concept was born, 'Space exploration. As you could imagine, the space environment isn't competent for life forms like humans. However, human curiosity got him through such harsh environments. Mainly because of the unknown risks and stresses they faced during their early space human life was threatened in space. Nowadays, most of the dangers and pressures become recognized. In order to adapt the human body for space exploration, scientists started experimenting with specific organisms to model the environmental stresses of space travel and understand how spaceflights impact the biological structure of the microorganisms. If you were wondering why all of these efforts were done, flights help to address fundamental questions about our place in the Universe and the history of our solar system. One could see how tremendously beneficial space travel is. Nonetheless, not many of us really admire the incomprehensible potential of space exploration. Thus, we wanted to merely contribute to raising the common knowledge about space travel and the accompanying biological challenges. Increasing the common knowledge of space travel would bring more significantly brilliant minds to the field, especially ones of younger ages. Raising the density of working knowledge in the field would accelerate the process of space travel and may one day save humanity from extinction.
The solution is to create a digital platform containing a simple-educational 2D video game that will thrill the users toward space exploration. Even though such a biological advanced level of information might overwhelm the player, the game was designed to be fully understandable for the average audience. To not forget the original premise of a video game, our game was designed to be fairly enjoyable. The game introduces you to the 5 NASA space hazards in an understandable yet enjoyable manner. After acquiring the basic knowledge to move forward in the game—in both the game interface and the website—you are to create your perfect biological specimen for space exploration, namely 'Synthetic Supe'. Your goal is to create a creature of aggregated advanced biological traits inspired by real-life creatures that handle extreme environment parameters, namely 'Extremophiles'. Your creature will travel through space passing through the five NASA space travel hazards. The challenge is to choose wisely your creature's biological traits (abilities) that will get it through the risks of the 5 hazards. The player should compromise between the abilities to reach optimal survival performance. In the early version of the game, all the abilities are digitally defined, where you can just choose between the usage of the ability or not. However, in future versions, the abilities would be in analogue form so they are more realistically inputted. The 2D game was developed in the Unity game engine and coded in C#. In terms of hardware, a school laptop was the only used hardware used for game development.
You might still be asking how just a game would change or even slightly alter the destiny of the human race and knowledge. Well, using such subtle strategies to ignite the minds of our and the following generations. Admittedly, changing the thoughts of someone or attracting his/her attention towards something wasn't and will never be done quite easily, though the change can be done subtly at longer time intervals. Embracing space travel wouldn't just help us through extinction in case of the Earth's incompetence in the long run, but it will also open gates to further advanced and beautiful scientific aspects like Biology and body adaptation, which in turn would help tremendously in curing a variety of incurable diseases. Exploration has always driven humanity toward exceptional discoveries that altered the destiny of humanity for the rest of history.
Space Agency Data
Starting on our project research, my team found it much easier to start with the resources provided by the NASA space apps challenge. First, as our challenge is to create a biology superhero from existing biology features to endure all space hazards, we have started to learn about the hazards that humans specifically, and all other living organisms. Fortunately, we have found a resource that includes space risks on the human research roadmap page on the NASA site. In addition, we have found an article on the resources page of the challenge talking about the 5 main categories of hazards of human spaceflight. After getting well knowledge about space dangers, we started searching for the biological features that can endure those hazards. However, after reaching the step of searching about biological abilities, we found it difficult to use NASA space apps provided resources, because some of those resources were irrelevant to our project needs. Moreover, some other resources needed high-level experience in astronomy and biology, so it was hard for us to use them. Instead, we used many peer-reviewed articles about biological organisms.
Hackathon Journey
Despite the highly challenging and stressful time during the hackathon, the event was filled with funny moments and new experiences. Although each member of our team had a specific job during the hackathon, solving problems in each branch of the project helped all of the team to learn new skills. For example, some of my team members learned more about web and game development for the first time. Our solution mainly was approached from modern learning tools for kids and beginners to provide an easier and more friendly way to get into the space field. Many obstacles faced my team during the hackathon. Solving those challenges was made by many methods including brainstorming new ideas for design problems. In addition, some problems in game development were solved with the help of our mentors in the hackathon. Finally, all of my team would like to thank the event hosts and all volunteers including logistics and competition teams, also we would like to thank NASA for organizing this hackathon.
References
Mars, K. (2018, March 27). 5 hazards of human spaceflight. NASA. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/5-hazards-of-human-spaceflight
NASA. (n.d.). HRR - Risks. NASA. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/risks/
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Tags
#Pixel, #2D, #Storytelling, #biology, #game, #space_exploring