The success of a film like Star Wars was unexpected even for its filmmakers. The mastery of its music, its stereotypical characters, its history linked like the most classic stories of our oldest times…
It had all the necessary elements to succeed, it had everything we wanted to see on the big screen. It was the embodiment of our childhood dreams, of our adolescent aspirations, of our adult melancholies.
It was a film that talked about a distant future, with laser weapons and space cruisers, but when we look at it closely, we discover something very important for its plot: all the characters, the events, the battles, everything that is reflected there, is and it has been part of our past and also, of course, our permanent present.
The incessant struggle for the power of a few, the constant wars (which even though they could be extinguished in one place, are immediately born in another). Also, the excessive ambition, the excessive love for the material value of any form of currency that has universal value, and of course, the incessant and unscrupulous search for the supreme place in society, and with it the possibility of controlling enormous numbers of beings in the way they act, and even worse, think.
The transliteration of the past and present, still primitive and savage, into an extremely distant future, is one of the things that may have made Star Wars successful.
But this is not good news for our children and grandchildren.
Will our future continue in the exact same way as our past?
Throughout the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century was always seen as a synonym for hope and development, for a beautiful and sugary vision of future humanity, unfolding throughout the universe while ethical and moral values rose ever higher.
From there arose Star Trek, a series that not only empowered the best feelings and the union of everyone for a common good, but also fought against the negative trends present in society (of the time, and unfortunately even today) including the racism.
It remains to wonder how a television series about these supreme values took on a special place in a part of the population. But perhaps the best question would be what difference there is between Star Wars and Star Trek, not only in the social, economic and moral approach, but what would be the numbers that we would obtain as a result of comparing which part of humanity would prefer one of those two futures: the future of permanent wars and struggles for power and money, or that of a united humanity and with higher ethical and moral considerations.
Why do we bring this idea to the present moment?
Humanity and planet Earth itself are approaching a crossroads on our path to the future. The overconsumption of the planet’s resources, the constantly growing pollution, the high level of population of human beings, the waste of resources on a planet with finite resources, is leading us to a situation never seen before in human history and very difficult to face.
Throughout the history of humanity, we have developed under very easy principles: increase the consumption of the resources of a planet with well-established borders, wear down the planet by taking for ourselves the resources that our children and grandchildren might need. All economies (related to any social system that has ever existed) are based on the predation of the planet, without taking into account the consequences. We have been, and continue to be, in a mad race to see who gets there first, who has the most and who controls the most.
But nature has laws. Just as a few bacteria on an experiment disk full of food, multiply without brakes until they are exhausted and all die before realizing that their behavior is not intelligent. We are on exactly the same type of path, riding the “train of the development” and looking only around us and never towards the future.
Earth’s resources are being depleted, we are warming the atmosphere we need to live, we are destroying wild nature at an accelerated pace, and yet the vast majority of us insist on continuing along the same path.
So, what do we see for our future?
The final crisis of human civilization is very near. How close it is, we cannot say exactly.
But it is time to realize very important things. If in reality we are as intelligent as we say, we should have realized, a long time ago, that we are going wrong.
Thus, our predilection for excessive competition, the infinite increase in consumption and waste, the conscious choice of the warlike and unethical path, individualism, greed and selfishness is taking us down a path without a future.
The possibility raised by astronomers, of the idea of the “Great Filter”, is already clearly visible on the horizon of humanity. It is our choice to decide whether we do something, and change the destructive path we are on, or let ourselves be carried away by the wrong values of “Star Wars” and end up like bacteria that have multiplied to the limit and were left without food.
The image of an experiment full of bacterial corpses can this time be transformed into a planet sterilized by the species that, paradoxically, called itself “intelligent.”