This essay was originally written in French at the end of my two years in preparatory classes (CPGE), during a period of personal reflection. It is not a scientific article, but rather a philosophical meditation — a kind of ode — on the necessity of space exploration in the Anthropocene. I’m publishing it here not as an expert, but as a witness, hoping it resonates with others concerned with the long-term fate of humanity. The lyrical style of writing is a personal choice. 

At the end of my two years in preparatory classes  , a moment of rest finally arrived. That brief interlude allowed me to reconnect with the world — not in theory, but in its materiality, its slowness, its unease. I began reading the news again, following the course of events, paying attention to realities that academic urgency had long kept at bay.

That’s when something shifted.

The signs of climate change — which I of course “knew,” as any well-informed student does — ceased to be mere statistics. They became tangible. Present. Devastating. I had just finished reading a book on the Anthropocene when, one evening, I gazed intently at the landscape of my childhood. Truly looked at it. And I understood that the silent, green threat — the one that alters everything without ever raising its voice — had already reached my surroundings.

The heat was the first and most obvious sign: stifling, even after nightfall. But more disturbing was the insidious disappearance of flora and fauna. Hedgehogs had vanished from those woods. And the woods themselves were thinning, weakened, reshaped by chainsaws and industrial replanting, forming a gridded forest — efficient perhaps, but harmful in the long term. It was no longer an abstract alarm. It was here. At home. Before my eyes.

So instinctively, I looked up at the sky. Only a few stars pierced through the haze of light pollution. And yet, in the fractured dark, an idea — not mine, not new, but now burning with unfamiliar intensity — struck me:

The future of humanity lies up there, in the darkness of space.
Not as fantasy, but as necessity.

Homme et Espace

To say that Man does not come from the Earth would be a flat-out lie — a baseless profanation, an insult to the clay that shaped him. Man is of the Earth as the child is of the mother’s womb: flesh of its flesh, blood of its soil. How, then, could one assert — without trembling at the absurdity — that his future does not lie in the arms of this original nurse, the Earth?

And yet… Since the dawn of time, humanity has wandered across a single, modest planet, endlessly repeating the same cycle of births, struggles, and disappearances. For millions of years, his feet have trodden the same plains, his sails crossed the same seas, his voices echoed through the same valleys. Generations have risen, grown, loved, built, fought, and perished — without ever truly leaving the soft, confining embrace of this natal world.

If there is one thing Vercingetorix, Charlemagne, Shakespeare, and Victor Hugo share, it is not language, nor blood, nor even history — but the fact that they were all born beneath the same sky, on the same planet: that blue sphere suspended between day and night, third in the solar procession, adrift in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way — one among hundreds of billions of stars. And this galaxy is but one filament among others, linked to the Virgo Supercluster, itself nested within the immense structure known as Laniakea — the "immense celestial horizon." Our Earth, so full of life, of art, of memory, is, in the end, but a fleeting point in the abyss of a universe that remembers nothing.

And yet, from this near-nothingness, Man was born.

He was never meant to be more than another animal: fragile, slow, devoid of fangs or claws, lacking venom or armor. He does not fly, swims no better than a fish, runs no faster than a wolf, roars like no lion. But he dreams. He builds. He devises. He creates. He rises. By the sheer force of his brow and his hands, he mastered fire, shaped stone, dug into the earth, and in the span of a geological heartbeat, he leapt from woodfire to interstellar rockets. The horse gave way to the ship. Millennial darkness dissolved in the light of nebulae caught by his telescopes.

Man is invention, ascension, excess. A paradoxical being, forged in conflict yet driven by an unquenchable desire: to grow, to transcend, to command. Whether, as Hobbes claimed, he is a wolf to his fellow man, or, as Rousseau believed, a being estranged from nature — one truth remains: he cannot stand still. Growth is not an option. It is a necessity.

And while he has triumphed over beasts and forests, one entity remains — ancient, indomitable, more formidable than any myth: the Earth itself.

For if she was his mother, she may also become his grave. She fed him, bore him, crowned him king among the living. But now she quakes, roars, heats, exhausts. And already, she returns to him the harm he caused. She is the last trial, the final adversary — not to be hated, but surpassed. Not to be renounced, but no longer depended upon alone.

The future of Man, inexorable and imperative, is written in the stars.

Space is no longer a dream — it is an emergency.
It is neither utopia nor whim. It is a vital necessity, imposed by our progress, our needs, our very hypertrophy. One planet is no longer enough — not to nourish our bodies, not to house our ambitions, not to guarantee the survival of our species. It is not the easiest choice. It is not the gentlest of futures. But it is the only horizon left to conquer.

Tomorrow, humanity must tear itself from its cradle — not out of contempt, but out of duty. For it is there, in the shimmering darkness of the stars, that the beating heart of its survival now lies.

This destiny of Man is not to be mourned. It is neither degradation, nor exile, nor betrayal. It is necessity. A naked, imperious, inescapable truth. For Earth, slowly but surely, is revealing the edges of its limits, the thresholds of its hospitality. A finite planet cannot contain a species destined for expansion — a being inscribed in the endless spiral of growth.

Dogmas, ideologies, and the fevered speeches of political doctrines may clash and dress themselves in virtue, each claiming to hold the key to humanity’s salvation — no matter. Whether carried by the egalitarian breath of communism or the raging winds of capitalism, Man runs on. A race no longer toward the horizon, but toward the precipice. What generations have set in motion, no one can now halt. The machine is in motion, and the century will come when we must account — not before God, but before the abyss — for the slow murder of our Mother.

And even as mourning begins, we must leave the house.

Some may stay, perhaps, to tend the memory, to keep the light burning in the ruins. But the river of history flows on — toward other shores.

Space.
Once the realm of gods and dreams, the domain of titans and chimeras. Long confined to fables, it is now being wrested from the heavens by science. What was once sacred becomes attainable. What seemed reserved for immortals slowly opens to the trembling hand of Man. The deeper the white coats pierce the starry dark, the more this silent void reveals itself — as terrain not of myth, but of exploration, of conquest, of future.

The great walls that once isolated Man from the cosmos are crumbling, one by one. Gravity, the absence of air, deadly radiation, bodily atrophy, the fragility of the psyche... All that once condemned us to stillness is now being slowly dissolved by the patient scalpel of knowledge. Science — perhaps the only domain where humanity, however briefly, speaks with a single voice — gives, builds, liberates. It allows us to dominate nature, to heal it, to shape it — or to escape it.

It is science, and science alone, that will give Man the power to escape Earth’s mortal embrace. To break free from this birthplace-turned-prison. To unfold the wings nature never gave him.

And yet, even as chains fall away, one final jailer remains.
A silent, eternal, indifferent enemy.
One that existed before cities, before speech itself.
One that separates worlds, and defies all speed, all calculation, all will.

Distance. Space itself.

This cruel paradox: that space should be both the horizon of our salvation and the ultimate obstacle.
Cosmic distances are not long — they are vertiginous. They are not measured; they are contemplated with dread. Light-years laugh at our machines, our vows, our pride.

Thus it becomes clear: humanity’s lease on Earth is nearing its end. Not in a burst of trumpets or a farewell song, but in the slow asphyxiation of what was once a garden. Soon, we will be asked to leave. The only question is whether we will go willingly — standing, dignified, masters of our own departure — or be cast out, evicted like tenants made unwelcome, strangers to our own home.

To hope for the union of mankind today is an act of almost pathetic innocence. Even the most fervent idealist, the one who still believes in ancient brotherhoods and modern utopias, would be forced to lower his eyes before the disheartening theatre the world now offers. For even on the brink of extinction, black gold still roars louder than white peace, and the old demons — borders, interests, pride — still steer the ship toward ruin.

Man falters, not for lack of science, but from an excess of discord. He stumbles, not over the laws of physics, but over the laws of his own nature. And yet, despite the cacophony and the quarrels, Earth gives him a command — clear, irrevocable:

“Move… or die.”

A time will come — and it approaches with giant steps — when the only possible consensus will no longer be political, moral, or philosophical. It will be the darkness of space. The common goal, not chosen but imposed, will be to flee the void, to find elsewhere what this world can no longer offer.

And then — perhaps — at the edge of collapse, in the glacial solitude of the stars, humanity, for the first time, will finally walk in step.
Not out of virtue, but out of necessity.

I am but a man. Born on a blue planet, somewhere in the dark arm of a galaxy among billions. I breathe a gifted air. I walk upon inherited soil. I am no prophet, no scholar, no hero. But I have eyes, and I see. I have memory, and I know. Earth is weakening. She has given us everything — and we have taken it all.

I do not claim to know the answer, nor even the way. But I know this:
We cannot stay. Not forever.
To stay is to wither.
To stay is to betray what we have become.

I believe Man is not meant to die where he was born.
I believe our duty is not to bury ourselves with the Earth, but to carry her memory beyond her own bounds.
I believe space is not a luxury, but a necessity — a moral obligation to those who will come, to those who do not yet have names.

I do not say it will be beautiful.
I do not say it will be just.
I say: it is what remains.

So whether in the silence of a ship, in the shadow of a distant station, or in the red dust of an unknown world, I want Man to be there.
Not to dominate.
Not to escape.
But to continue.
To exist.
To bear witness.

I believe space is our final future.
And I choose to believe in it.