The engineer and astronaut Luca Parmitano remembered the other day the psychological test he had to pass to enter the European Space Agency. It seemed obvious to me that before putting a guy in a kind of fridge, and throwing it from Kazakhstan to dock it in a space station that revolves around the earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour, they need to confirm that it is not in their right mind.

One of the exam questions was what would you change about this world if you could change one thing, to which Parmitano replied that all the inhabitants of the earth would speak the same language. He said it with a pragmatism of a scientist, of a non-Spanish scientist, or he would only have dared to make such a statement from outer space, and in the middle of a mission with no return .

One might naively think that Parmitano's idea does not threaten cultural identity. And to say that everyone spoke in English, or in Chinese, was not saying that you can not know and even continue to speak German, Galician, Friesian or Roma. But one would have no idea how it works, for example this country, if one believed that there are no politicians, backed by millions of citizens, willing to defend the right of our astronauts to use their co-official languages ​​on the Space Station, and would like dedicate part of the budget to putting translators in Houston, or at the Darmstadt operations center . If for Parmitano a better world is a world with only one language, for much of our country, it is a world in which individual rights are defended by translating.

I recognize that it would be hard for me to decide on one thing to change in the world, but it would seem like an intolerable betrayal that, if I had that opportunity, characters like Jordi Cuixart , Jordi Sánchez , Puigdemont or Oriol Junqueras would not choose Catalonia to be a nation.

It is true that the psychologist analyzed men destined to study the growth of tadpoles in orbit, and the functioning of bacteria in space rocks, and of microorganisms that allow us to colonize other planets, or the behavior of a protein that causes Alzheimer's . That is, they sought solutions for the survival of the species; and for those that a nation, or the entire planet, is nothing more than a beautiful rock mass condemned to disappear, and to go around every 92 minutes. That is why I keep asking myself what the psychologist would have pointed to this answer.

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