A few days ago, humanity returned to the Moon fifty years later and broke the record for the longest crewed journey into space. NASA's Artemis II mission successfully took four astronauts, three men and one woman, to the far side of our satellite. The next major milestone will be a new human landing, which, if all goes as planned, will take place at the beginning of 2028. From that moment on, with missions every six months, a permanent lunar base will be built, which should be completed around 2029-2030.

The arrival on the Moon in 1969 was a technological feat, but above all political and symbolic. It emerged in a polarized world where every scientific advance was, or wanted to appear, a demonstration of strength. In that context, the United States turned the Apollo program into a priority operation. It was necessary to demonstrate that its social, economic, and ideological model was capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not, and to underline in the most theatrical and incontestable way possible the superiority of a political system. The pressure generated a concentration of funds and a collective will that is hard to imagine today. They were the happy sixties, yes, but what drove the joke up is disconcerting: during the peak of the Apollo program, between 1964 and 1966, NASA's budget reached between 4% and 4.5% of federal spending and approximately 0.8% of US GDP, which at that time was, and by a very large margin, the richest country in the world. It was a disproportionate amount, but even so, it met with little opposition. The technology available at the time – computers with ridiculous capacity, materials still in experimental phase, etc. – is also disconcerting, but the political and social determination was absolute. Risk was assumed as part of the project, and society accepted a dose of almost suicidal audacity, which today might not be accepted.Artemis II, on the other hand, fits into the framework of the “new world disorder”, where bloc logic has been replaced by a multiplicity of actors, interests, and often contradictory priorities. The space race is no longer a grand ideological duel, but a modest foosball match of economic competition and technological exhibition. Space agencies must justify every euro invested to fragmented public opinions, shaped by a media ecosystem that demands immediate and photogenic results. Technology is immensely superior – state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems, ultra-sophisticated materials, simulations that anticipate thousands of scenarios – but collective will is more diffuse. Risk, which in 1969 was an exciting element inherent to the epic, is perceived very differently today. The paradox – exponentially more advanced technology, yet achievements perceived as less epic – reveals a profound shift in postmodern mentality.

The splashdown of the Orion capsule early Saturday morning, marking the end of the Artemis II mission, was extraordinarily spectacular and suspenseful. In the most dangerous stage of the mission, other elements come into play, such as the beauty of the images, the violence of the contact with the atmosphere, and the eventual loss of connection with the crew.

While Artemis II was circumnavigating the Moon in strict live broadcast, bombs fell and rained miserably on Beirut, the US president announced the liquidation of an entire civilization in a flash and the IMF warned us to prepare for the worst. While we were telekinetically watching the Moon, the permanent global war accelerated its homicidal and lunatic impulses on Earth. And this, when freely looking at the Moon is a universal right all over the world that, for now, no one has managed to prohibit or commercialize. Yet. It won't be for contradictions or antagonisms, nor because one thing doesn't deny the other –or does it– nor because they steal our attention every day, the most profitable contemporary business, while they steal our wallet every night. Improbable balance, if indispensable scientific knowledge excites me with every advance, the geopolitical lunar imperial race terrifies me with every step. Words of Montaigne: "Anaximenes wrote to Pythagoras: how can I occupy my time solving the secret of the stars, if I always have slavery and death before me?".To that film titled Don’t look up –don’t look up and don’t become aware, in the era of the anthropocene, of how we are destroying the planet–, we could add Don’t look down –avoid always looking at the devastating social consequences of capitalism in its rogue, warlike, authoritarian, and sociopathic phase–. Even, they also subtly order us never to look to the side –not to worry if the neighbor is about to be evicted, if their mental health is faltering, or if loneliness is consuming them–. That is to say, almost generally, the systemic systematic order is that, between the navel and the spaceship, we look nowhere. And that we only look at the screen, where the algorithm –which already knows you better than you do– will make you happy with addictive dopamine. Without giving up any battlefield, those we choose and those we don’t, I can’t help but say this week that is ending: I wish libraries were filled more than TikTok. I wish. And if they say, as a metaphor, that Yuri Gagarin blurted out "I don't see any God up here", one wonders, down here, where the hell is God in Gaza. Nowhere?Journey to the Center of the Earth, it turns out that the urge to escape to conquer the Moon clumsily connects, in a revived geopolitical space race, with the real repeat offenders. The steppe wolves of the free market and the pimps of power – so often Martian, so often alien –. The hidden face of the Earth has nothing hidden about it: it would be not what is not seen, but what we do not want to look at. What we see every day and refuse to accept. An Essay on Blindness, Saramago would say. Artemis II will cost 93 billion dollars. 3.8% of a runaway global military budget. It is the same amount with which the UN has estimated the cost of eradicating hunger completely from the face of the Earth – not from the Moon –. Meanwhile, in space, we are doing the same as on Earth: polluting it into an infinite landfill. It is officially estimated that more than 10,000 tons of debris and scrap metal are already orbiting the Earth. A poem –A Farewell to the Astronauts– by Hans Magnus Enzensberger delves into the wound: "Only on planets / where no orange trees grow / nor walnuts nor vines / do I give little value. [...] Poor in imagination and rather conservative / I stick to older / promises: / the earth to the earth / and the dust to the dust".Neither technophile nor technophobic nor technoneutral nor technofascist, many years ago I read a small gem of sublunary terrestrial ethics called People Who Don't Want to Travel to Mars (Catarata, 2004). It was written by the good Jorge Riechmann, a philosopher, professor, and committed citizen. Today Jorge is facing prison sentences, in two trials scheduled for May in Madrid, for protesting, peacefully and scientifically, against inaction in the face of the climate emergency. Things that happen on Earth and not on the Moon, because surely there are other worlds, but I would say they are all here. In that book, which I revisit often, I read a phrase by Stanisław Jerzy Lec: "Don't try to reach the Moon. It should still last us a billion years." It is quite likely that nihilistic technofantasy makes us believe in other planets because we no longer believe in this one, and that it makes us believe in technological transhumanism because we no longer give a damn about the ambiguous and ambivalent human condition. Completely abandoning terrestrial exploration – let's say – of social justice, ecosocial transition, political democracy, or freedom among equals. Close to the ground, between the right to look at the Moon and the duty to preserve the Earth, we must radically resolve that one thing is the imperial colonization of space under the brutal law of the far west and another, very different and antagonistic, the humble wisdom of Carl Sagan. Long ago, about this pale blue dot where we still live, he wrote this, regarding the face – neither hidden nor dark – of the Earth:«Look again at this spot. It is here, it is our home, it is us. In it all of those whom you love, all of those whom you know, all of those of whom you have ever heard, every human being who ever lived, lived out its life. The sum of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor or explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties committed by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel upon the hardly distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill each other, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot. Our home. That pale dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The universe is a very big place in a very big cosmic arena. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The universe is a very big place in a very big cosmic arena. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot.Our planet is a lonely point in the great expanse of cosmic darkness. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from anywhere else to save us from ourselves. Earth is the only world known for now to harbor life. There is no other place, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle down, not yet. One way or another, for now, Earth is the place where we must make our stand. Astronomy has been said to be an experience of humility and character building. Perhaps there is no better demonstration of the folly of human prejudices than this distant image of our tiny world. For me, it underscores our responsibility to treat each other more kindly, and to preserve this pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known. Amen.

Science fiction is one of the genres that best allow us to verify that human imagination is more reliable than we ourselves are often willing to admit. In the space of not many years, science fiction ideas that were cataloged as mere fantasies have become realities: for example, only one hundred and four years separate the publication of the novel "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne from the arrival of Apollo XI on “our” satellite. Changes have occurred more rapidly as the 20th century progressed and the 21st arrived: the script for the film Blade Runner (freely based on a story by Philip K. Dick) brought to the table issues such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, climate change, or large migratory movements, which in little more than forty years are the most prominent problems on the international agenda. Another film based on a novel (science fiction practices promiscuity of narrative languages, and goes hand in hand with literature, cinema, comics, video games, etc.), like Soylent Green, posed the global food crisis and the degradation of democracy with the consequent emergence of authoritarian forms of government, as we see today. The Californian company Foundation is driving the mass production of a robot called Phantom MK-1 that – unlike other major robotics proposals known so far – is specifically designed to fight in war situations (Terminator). Major technology companies have long been researching time travel and the colonization of Mars.The lesson of all this is that everything we imagine is also real. If we can imagine it, it is already real. That is why, from Aristotle to the Surrealists, there have always been those who have defended the lucidity of dreams. Ideas that at some point were rejected, ridiculed, or directly persecuted as fantasy, delirium, or blasphemy (such as traveling to the Moon, demonstrating that the Moon orbited the Earth and that the Earth orbited the Sun, or asserting that the Earth is round and not flat) become empirical and undeniable realities thanks to the intelligence and persistent effort of a species, the human one, which does not always dedicate itself to committing atrocities.The Artemis II mission has opened the era of Moon conquest. The objective will be to inhabit the Moon, establish bases and laboratories there, work there, build there, colonize it. This means a new race between the world powers, and the need to deploy an ad hoc legislation that will be complex and that will have to be avoided (I don't know how) from being put from the start at the service of oligarchies and oligopolies. And that another science fiction prediction is not fulfilled, in this case from the film Matrix: “You humans –Agent Smith said–, you establish yourselves in a place, you consume all the resources, and when you have exhausted them, you go to another place and do the same thing again. There is only one other species that behaves this way, and that is the virus.”

The day after the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission have made history by becoming the humans who have traveled farthest into space —406,771 kilometers from Earth—, ARA interviews Josep Maria Trigo, principal investigator of the Asteroids, Comets, Meteorites and Planetary Sciences group at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Catalan Studies for Space (IEEC).