Winners of the CGTrader Annual Scholarship 2018 announced

For a couple of years now, CGTrader has been organizing an annual scholarship for students around the globe inviting them to dig into the field of technology. The way we see our future now has drastically changed since technologies are evolving faster than ever. Last year, we encouraged students to think of how life on a spaceship would look like. Will it be an exciting experience? Will it change our daily habits forever? Or maybe, it will be a change to which it will be difficult or even impossible to adapt?

Our team received nearly thousand of essays where students just burst out their thoughts and aspects of the idea of living on a spaceship. We are very grateful to everyone for participating and congratulate Jonathon Cramer, a Biomedical Engineering student from The University of Texas at Austin on winning first place and the $2,000 scholarship.

Two runners-up, Danielle Delia Johnson from Richmond South University and Samira Ahmed from the University of Florida, took second and third place and earned $500 each to help them with their education expenses.

We invite you to read Jonathon's winning essay below.

If you missed your chance to apply for the scholarship, don't worry! We will be announcing a new essay topic soon, so keep an eye on our website.

Our life on a spaceship: the future of mankind

essay by Jonathon Cramer

Imagine a world where you can gaze out your window to observe the infinite plains of starry speckled dust coating the seamless black blanket of space. Between the known and unknown, vibrant supernova explosions burst through time barriers splattering superheated matter onto the canvas of the universe. This is a world far from Earth, yet near and dear to curiosity fueled individuals. This is the visual world of space. I, like many other humans, have constantly speculated what life might be like separated from Earth, and to that end, I would like you to explore a realm of inquiry with me, so that we can begin to imagine a realistic interpretation of a human’s conscious experience in space. As such, this essay will not address the specifics of providing and creating a maintainable ecosystem contained within metallic vesicles – which some refer to as spaceships. Instead, I want to capture a scenario in which humans have already succeeded in developing such complex technologies in order to understand what our human experience will be like aboard these vehicles of science. Let us focus on the what and the why as opposed to the how.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details, I would first like to convince you that cultivating a society in space is a necessity for humanities growth. In many scientific outreach mediums, there is much excitement and worry when it comes to pondering the drastic changes, or as I like to think of it, the adaptations that humans will undergo in space. To understand these sentiments, we must understand why change can be beneficial.

The interpretation of change is a bizarre construct of human thought because, without it, we become lost in a nihilistic version of reality. As humans, we frequently navigate through change to see if we can find better tools to progress society. To put this in context, think about why most humans find it beneficial to learn. Simply put, we learn in order to change progressively. We subject ourselves to environments of learning in order to detach ourselves from our previous conceptions of reality. We remove the inaccurate and replace it with the accepted – a natural process of evolution. By doing this, we can develop concentric models of knowledge, in which we can utilize to develop better societies, sustainable energy and agricultural infrastructures, and social relationships. However, this whole knowledge game is based on one sole principle – the widely accepted evaluation of stimuli. To this extent, is seems inventible that we humans must venture out into the far reaches of space in order to continue our exposure to new stimuli so as not to exhaust the ones present on Earth. Expanding our ecosystems to space must surely be one of the next steps we take in furthering our competence.

Okay so assuming we make into space, now what? Luckily, or unluckily, depending on your perspective, living is not a unidimensional process. There is also the component of time to worry about. Specifically, what will we do with it when we’re in space? This might be an understatement, but there is a lot of ground to cover in space, and we will do what we do best. Explore. I see the expedition of space as a magnificent opportunity to continue building humanity’s collective knowledge. There is, quite literally, an infinite amount of material to explore in space. We should utilize these spacecraft to open a new wave of human thought. For instance, space expeditions will create a whole new assembly of jobs for people to begin pursuing. On board, you might see new forms of agricultural developers, asteroid miners, gravitational and solar energy managers, space cartographers, astrophysicists, cybernetic specialists, and many other professions. Of course, with these new careers, many technologies and devices will come to the surface. You might see rooms dedicated to creating renewable oxygen sources, or biotechnologies that remove the need for consumption of oxygen and food. Instead, our lives would be sustained by transforming solar radiation into bio-consumable energy sources. To combat disease and organic deterioration in space, you might see a completely new form of human, a cybernetic human. We might also employ the use of gravitational devices to help us navigate the magnetic fields of space. In developing these new technologies, humanity could create societies purely dedicated to finding new ways to sustain human life while exploring new locations for humanity to call home.

And then there’s the matter of recreational living to consider. Specifically, what kind of intra-human social behavior mechanisms could we observe if we were to dive into the life of these space-dwellers. Human connection is also a bizarre phenomenon that we’ve tried to elucidate for countless years. After language developed and we were able to loosely translate the electrical signals in our brains into sound vibrations, social dynamics exponentially changed. In many cultures, language is the propelling force of ideation. You might have heard people ask you, “What language do you think in?”, and to that end, most construct their internal dialogue with their native language. So, the question is: What will the native language of space be? It seems necessary to address this issue because communication is the driving force for all the good and bad things in the world. If you imagine for a moment how highly complex one of these space shuttles might be, then it must certainly be true that any misinterpretation of speech will be catastrophic for space survival. People might be communicating through their raw electrical signals instead of sound. In this way, people could relay information instantaneously, and the signal would be translated through a complex variety of signal processors to relay the data accurately.

And again, all of this is purely speculation. I invite you to consider all the possibilities we could explore so that maybe, we can redefine what it means to live and to prosper. “The only true wisdom is in knowing [we] know nothing”- Socrates.