Читать книгу Let them all tell you what happened - Mercedes Pescador - Страница 9

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft was planning to leave the Solar System in the nineties, Carl Sagan asked for its camera to be pointed towards us to take our photograph. And this way, we found out that we are nothing but a pale blue speck in the Universe. Now, that little blue speck is under a death threat made by a virus that scientist call COVID-19. These scientists, vilified by believers, chiromancers, preachers and haruspices, are now chased by journalists, political and social networks. To kill them? No! To find out the truth. COVID-19 is saving us from the post-truth era. From the ephemeral kingdom of Twitter and Facebook.

Scientists are teaching us to wash our hands and look after our bodies, something that thousands of gods and priests hadn’t manage to achieve.

The one who calls himself God’s representative on Earth has locked himself in a palace. He doesn’t speak. And the square were his sheep usually hover around, is now empty. If he were to come to his window to give a speech, he wouldn’t have an audience, as he had deserved for centuries. The country which they say is God’s reign, Italy, is deserted. Europe, the empress of terror for centuries, is shaking, moaning and in lockdown. It’s a positive feeling to notice how pleasantly peaceful it is now, in the middle of Trump’s silence, and also now that the Chinese dragon hardly spits the flame of a match. The overly mass-produced goods are detained at the harbours because consumers are buying less. The oceans, infested with tankers, are desolate. The airports, empty.

What are we learning from this? Our own insignificance. Our belonging to a little planet which we had destroyed with no compassion and with the hope of reaching quickly a fantasy heaven. The apocalypse has arrived already; we’ve been building it for centuries. The churches are heading towards becoming museums, we could even substitute them for schools. Teachers could now achieve the position required by humanity eager for knowledge. Schools should function twenty-four hours a day, and at the same time brothels should close down.

Our arrogance has made us think that Earth is immense because there are cars that reach 400 km/h and planes that get to 1,200 km/h. However, our planet travels the Solar System at around 40.000 km/h and the light’s wave-particles travel at 300.000 km/s. The universe we can actually manage to see is just 5% of the total, the other 95% is made out of dark matter and energy. It’s believed that the history of mankind only spans across 200,000 years, while the known Universe’s is estimated around 13m500 millions of years.

We have deified our ignorance! The search for a sole path should be understood as multi-trajectory; what we considered to be true, as untrue. It’s advisable to change the predictive ability of priests for the scientific empire of the doubt; our eagerness to live in balance, for the permanent unbalance; the search for equality, for the awareness of the unequal reality. It’s in our own interest to learn again what we thought we already knew.

To those people who thought the world was going to end, I give you the good news that it’s hardly starting thanks to a virus. It has made us aware of our small size in front of the immense universe and it has left wide-open the doors to the world of wonderland.