“Mobility year zero”, the designation of Il Giornale di Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan, focuses attention on the way large urban areas are undergoing phases of reorganization and transformation, which of course also concern space, as explained by Vittorio Macioce and Emilio Cozzi, journalists and space expert writers, in bookstores from today with the volume Camminare tra le stelle, published by Feltrinelli and co-written with astronaut Luca Parmitano. “It may have taken 5 billion years, but when the sun died we became extinct”, explained Cozzi while underlining that humans have been on Earth for 200 thousand years and “we have not yet managed to get to our cosmic garden. Because, astronomically speaking, Mars is his home garden”. But the future imagined in the 70s and 80s by the best screenwriters and science fiction writers is not the future we experience today. “When we were kids there was a cartoon called The Jetsons”, recalls Macioce, which was “a picture of the future that children had before our heroes arrived, namely Grendizer and Captain Harlock”, a “normal” future with flying taxis, flying cars, artificial intelligence.
The future is currently, Cozzi continues, “very far away” but “soon it will be commonplace to think of scientists spending most of their time in orbit working on experiments that are currently the prerogative of astronauts”. For journalists, this is a short-term forecast, a maximum of 10 years, within which “we will see someone on the Moon again, because there is a race and Europe also has its say”. Indeed, he continued, outer space “since 2019 has become NATO’s domain, along with earth, sky, sea, cyberspace”. The future, today and tomorrow, would not exist without space, just imagine GPS, which is a “constellation of satellites, moreover of military origin”. Once upon a time, he continued, “I would use a road map and I would still get there. But nowadays sea and air traffic also depends on GPS.”
This is why, according to Cozzi, investing in space is fundamental. GPS is just one example, today early diagnosis of breast cancer is possible thanks to the problems of Hubble, the orbiting space telescope, which allows the development of software to make the images clearer. And the Moon, like Mars, is also important, even if, “in 1969, the Moon was no longer romantic. That is, man, the moment he set foot on it, lost it in some ways. I am very attached to the moon Astolfo, the moon on which man found everything that was lost on Earth, including his sanity,” says Macioce. But we stopped going there because, continues Cozzi, “that was the goal of both blocs, the Soviet Union and the United States. The United States won”, so “the goal had been achieved, going to the Moon cost a lot of money and the Vietnam War had also started”. Today we can return to it, because “there is another war, another struggle for strategic prestige.”
And on Mars? Cozzi’s hope is that “we will get there before thirty years, but this is unlikely, even if it all depends on what we mean, because currently there are robots on Mars and they are looking for signs of past life on the red planet”.
