Return to the Moon, flee from the Earth

Humanity, with the Artemis mission, is once again looking towards the Moon and, with it, unearths from the memory chest the old space race that marked the Cold War. Back then, amidst the dangerous tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world fractured into two irreconcilable blocs and the conquest of space became another stage for geopolitical competition. It was not just about reaching further, but about demonstrating who had the capacity to impose themselves on the other. In this context, the media flooded the collective imagination for years with images of rockets, astronauts, and distant planets. A persistent iconography that not only informed, but also shaped how society thought about tomorrow. Because, fundamentally, every society is also built upon this inevitable question: what awaits us in the future?Imagining life in space involved speculating about what this day-to-day would be like, and design was launched to rethink furniture, cars, and housing for this projected future. Between armchairs that evoked capsules and residences that seemed like orbital stations, the "space age" fashion was born, conceived to facilitate a hypothetical interplanetary life. Creators like André Courrèges or Pierre Cardin opted for rigid outfits, detached from the body, almost like shells. White, associated with the aerospace universe, became the dominant color, accompanied by helmets and metallic boots. In parallel, Paco Rabanne's proposals took fashion towards the realm of engineering, with pieces made of metallic plates that stretched the very limits of the discipline.What is revealing, seen with perspective, is the extent to which these speculations about the future have outstripped reality. If we had listened to Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Star Trek or even to The Jetsons, today we would already be living among flying cars, off planet Earth and in zero gravity conditions. But perhaps it is even more significant to note that, if technological imagination often goes too far, it tends, on the other hand, to fall short in other areas: such as women's rights. In these imaginary worlds, they continue to occupy subordinate positions, even in futures where humanity already inhabits other planets. And this forces us to ask whether we are really dealing with speculations or, rather, with projected male desires.However, beyond the television impact of the first moon landing –a moment highly choreographed from a propagandistic point of view by the United States–, the most transformative image was not that of the Moon, but that of the Earth. The Blue Marble photograph, which became humanity's first selfie, revealed a paradox: after years of division and confrontation, what we saw was, in reality, a single shared unit. And it was precisely this compact image that activated, in a part of the population, a new pacifist and ecological consciousness.Unlike the Cold War, today the United States does not compete in a strictly bipolar world, even though the space race continues to be a duel, this time with China, which has also set out to step on the Moon in the coming years. It is, however, inevitable to point out the paradox: at a time when the world seems to be fragmenting and humanity is going through a deep crisis of values, we look outwards again. Perhaps, as in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris", this journey is not so much about the future as about the past. Or perhaps – and herein lies the question – it should serve us, precisely, to look better in the mirror and rethink where we stand as humanity. But perhaps, seeing the recent images of Artemis astronauts wishing a Happy Easter from space and looking for eggs around the ship, what is in doubt is not the future, but whether we still have any shred of self-awareness.