chirale

Image from Starchild Official Website, click to go there. Asumi is the latter, dark haired character.

Twin Spica is a story about dreams and friendship of a group of classmates in a newly-created course to become astronauts.

The protagonist Asumi Kamogawa is a simple, well designed and interesting character. Twin Spica is a good story about seeking one’s dreams and about futility of loneliness, where true friends help each others to pursue their common goal.

I’ve just signed an online petition on https://www.europeanreferendum.eu/. Proposed by: Union of European Federalists (UEF) (www.federaleurope.org) and Young European Federalists (JEF Europe) (http://www.jef.eu).

It aims to get 1 million supporters (now 14.065) for an European referendum about Constitution in 2009.

Just today I read an interesting (even if well-aged) article from Ian Crawford talking about the interdependency of two goal I support: the institution of a World Federation and an ambitious space program able to develop the technical solutions aimed to spread the humankind across the Solar System and beyond.

Crawford’s dissertation seems to me holding too much on Fukuyama’s interpretation of the “End of History”, partially justified by the time when the article was written (1993).

Now the inevitability of a liberal democratic world order seems more uncertain as more urgent. As Jurgen Habermas stated in Der gepaltene Westen, response to international crime organizations cannot be a “war” like we are fighting against a national state, but an international police effort. A World Federation could give that cosmopolitan order necessary to undertake such type of “world internal affairs”.

The erratic agenda of national states have slowed space exploration (obsolete Space Shuttles, delay in construction of International Space Station), and civil development of space is systematically putted aside in favor of military expenses in difficult times. People over same planet fearing each other cannot see the same sky, if they cannot figure it.

So, an important effort of whom support both the institution of a cosmopolitan order and the investments in civil space programs today could be…to tell a good story.

Distant from an inflated idea of a science fiction messed with fantasy elements, a good, old style science fiction story can give an idea of what this sky could be, inspiring a nostalgia of future all the more stronger when more realistic and controversial.

I have recently watched the animated series PlanetES, and I found in it both the ideas of the irrationality of divisions within humankind and the realization of space ambitions by ordinary women and men seeking their place in the human family and fighting their fears.

I appreciate this return of the true spirit of science fiction, when I was disappointed from series like Enterprise, so unilateralist since the opening, a shadow of the Roddenberry’s universe.

The opening of PlanetES includes Tsiolkovskij and even the V2, controversies are not hidden and the history is not unilateral. Future are neither an utopia nor a dystopia, but an evolution of today society.