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For many centuries, the sky has been inhabited by Gods. It belonged to the Gods, but it also belonged to everyone. Now we often watch it in anticipation of the Big Bang
Star Wars is back in the news, because the president of an intelligence commission in the United States reported that there is a “serious, extremely sensitive, recently revealed” problem: the unexpected militarization of space using nuclear weapons. In addition to fear-mongering laser systems, such as the Kalina and Peresvet, the West’s secret soiree featured a new rocky guest: the 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missile, NATO code SS-N-33 (pictured left). “So far, only Moscow has at its disposal these carriers, which in the United States are still in the experimental stage.” Dmitry Peskov denied this, but America’s concerns were so serious that Blinken asked China and India to persuade Russia to abstain, arguing that they too would also die in the big bang.
While politicians try to mitigate the situation, the services are building up fire
The danger is taken very seriously in Washington. News reports say that President Biden, immediately after Navalny’s death, first “tried to calm fears prompted by recent-days anxiety about Moscow’s new military capabilities” by assuring that “what the Russians are doing does not pose a nuclear threat to Americans in space.” But this was immediately proven wrong: intelligence agencies agree that it is a time bomb, quietly orbiting over our heads but capable of indirectly destroying the economy from the sky and leaving people stranded on the ground. It won’t take long for global communications systems to collapse, nullifying virtually everything, from banking to cell phones, air traffic to talk shows. The debris from the explosion would be scattered in low Earth orbit and make it impossible to maintain the current situation: intersection, colonization, and a welfare state in the sky. The only precedent for testing a bomber in space dates back to 1962. Although it was conducted by the United States over a remote atoll in the Pacific, it destroyed all of Hawaii’s electronics, suddenly interrupting all telephone services and destroying or severely damaging many satellites. A test so alarming that the United States and the Soviet Union rushed to negotiate the Outer Space Treaty that precludes even the possibility of nuclear weapons being placed in the atmosphere or in space for any reason. Imagine what would happen if an atomic bomb exploded in space today, and maybe more than one, scattered in all the right places.
There are fears of a “mysterious” disaster that could trigger a chain reaction
Who knows why, there are fears that there could be some other mysterious accident parallel and opposite to the one with Nord Stream. And not in the depths of the oceans, but on the tops of the empyreans. What goes around, turns around, either it’s double down to play ahead of the curve. It will be a catastrophe that will cause other chain and avalanche catastrophes. The Wild West in heaven and hell on earth. And hello to 400-euro kamikaze drones, nuclear algorithms, digital intelligence, guidance systems, etc. Behind Star Wars is the larger problem of the vulnerability of the Western technological structure, which thrives also because it is extremely complex, intertwined, interdependent, vast, and therefore vulnerable. The Gulf International Forum has already warned of the inevitable fragility: there are enough Houthis advancing in the Red Sea to jeopardize the network of undersea cables that connect the most remote and vulnerable areas of the five continents, transmitting financial transactions, phone calls, information, and instructions of all kinds.
The revolutionaries of the Third International, particularly Gramsci, had long speculated about the power of civil society in the West, where the state was only “an advanced trench behind which stood a powerful chain of fortresses and casemates.” This society is far less civilized today than it was then, Trump is proof of that. The West is very strong and at the same time very vulnerable. Once Pandora’s box is opened, no one can predict how it will end. Einstein’s prophecy may come true: “I have no idea what weapons will be used in Third World War, but in the Fourth War there will be fighting with clubs and slingshots.” Of course, there is no longer the firmament of the past, the eternal silence of Blaise Pascal, or the sheltering sky of Paul Bowels. Some people think life is a bottomless pit, since they don’t know when they will die, they believe that heaven will protect them forever and never let them return from nothing to nothing, to the endless emptiness of life that besieges us.
The sky, once inhabited by gods, has now become the base of hyper-technological and often deadly misadventures
Through the eyes of scientists and poets, every culture has lifted its eyes to the sky, which still bears in its name traces of a supernatural purpose. The sky has always been populated by Gods, often fiery and vengeful, equipped with lightning and thunder. Then Galileo pointed his telescope upward, and it became Kant’s starry sky. It gradually repopulated with hyper-technological garbage, coexisting shoulder to shoulder with the air war that began in 1911 and has demonstrated its intrinsic democratic characteristic since 1939: bombing cities indiscriminately kills soldiers and civilians, militarists and pacifists, good and bad.
The sky belonged to the gods, but it also belonged to everyone. There was room for everyone. Even for Italy, which has become a world leader in astronomical observations of Earth. The sky is an example of innate synchronized harmony, but especially of possible mutually beneficial global cooperation: international commercial aviation, subject to strict rules in the common interest and with common satisfaction, 24 hours a day and every minute of the year. A model of transparency and coexistence. The pacifist intention to use space resources to fight underground crime, develop agriculture, and study climate change is exclusively Italian. There are many wonderful things you can do in space. Actually, not.
Covid, urgent meteorological transformation, and Ukraine: it seems this is a dress rehearsal for the prototype of the end of the world. Meanwhile, Euclid, the European Space Agency’s remarkable flying telescope, steadily continues its journey into the dark universe. It is moving backwards, through billions of years of cosmic history, and feverishly takes selfies with one galaxy after another, like a brash and unrepentant tourist. It is said that we will be able to return to the vastness of spacetime, up to the point of photographing the divine moment of the Big Bang; meanwhile, there are those who will not hesitate to arrange the Big Bang on a millimeter and minimalist scale, a downscaled, ultra-sixteenth-note reissue: a homemade, local, artisanal thing, unsuccessful in its means and yet definitive in its results.
