SPACE: Knowledge Frontier

It’s a wild time to be alive. Almost 8 billion people live together on this blue planet. We face great challenges ahead of us. Humanity shares Earth with its indigenous nature. We were the last ones to arrive and we might be the cause for its destruction. Our own selfishness inducing the climate to be artificially altered is causing mass extinctions and total chaos in this alive but fragile environment. It took over 5 billion years to create and could be destroyed in seconds. Socially we aren’t doing any better; hate is proliferating much faster in the past few years than it ever did in the XX century or the middle ages, unfortunately assisted by the globalization of information through the Internet. Global superpowers, once beacons for hope, innovation and positive influence have switched roles and are succumbing to the influence of demagogy, spreading lies, creating false enemies from the neighbor and sacrificing the efforts of the last decades towards global well-being for obscure, schizophrenic motives. Old conflicts are being refueled with the suffering of the bottom 50% by interested invisible hands while the top 50% is distracted with empty consumerist values dictated by shadow puppeteers. There is only so much denial before we are awoken by the cosmic slap of reality. If we are to overcome, as a species, we must behave like one civilization, which can adapt and evolve to the challenges it faces. Instead of fight each other over our few differences we must embrace each other for our many commonalities. Dinosaurs once ruled the Earth, and today we are sure that their silver bullet was asteroid shaped. It’s difficult to predict what will be the conclusive trigger to our own extinction, but today the odds are very high in favor of self-destruction.

Knowing that we are capable of understand the coding inside of a human cell or the amount of energy released by a black hole gives me hope. At some random moments in our brief history, some individuals have been allowed to make great punctual contributions to our limited understanding of Nature and the Cosmos. It’s very likely that for life to appear in a random corner of the Universe, more than trillions of unlikely events must have occurred in tune to each other. We are very lucky to exist and I feel a duty to ensure that civilization understands this. I also feel responsible to spreading awareness towards the potential risks that we could encounter, and how important education and science are to solve those challenges. It saddens me that science and technical careers are not popular among the well-off population. With my documentary, I try to showcase the exciting efforts that different groups in the world are working on towards the advancement of civilization, and how through these challenges, humanity benefits from all the learning experiences. Landing on the Moon in 1969 served to lift the spirits of those who felt a connection to the raised flag, it also served to stimulate a super-powered competition; but really importantly it served to inspire millions of people across the world to look up, dream and some of them eventually choose a career in the sciences. Today, luckily, the Cold War is mostly extinct in its original form; and countries have realized that they can reach much further and accomplish much more by working together instead of against each other. I firmly believe that if we are able to educate the next generation about how cooperating between neighbors is more profitable in the long term for the advancement of civilization, we will be able to face any challenge that is laid ahead of us. We just need to keep inspiring the young minds with success stories and the prospect of exciting adventures that can unravel when exploring space, on a ship or from a telescope; be it with Star Wars movies or with space documentaries. And Mars is only the next step. May the force be with us.