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 ...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments