• Analysis: Investiture as a theater, and its actors

What could we learn from the aliens if one good day they visited us and, in a show of charity, decided not to exterminate us? A civilization that has been able to fracture the space-time line to land in Burgo de Osma (it will not always be Area 51) must have an unimaginable force technology. Or perhaps, the complicated thing (and even impossible if we pay attention to Stanislaw Lem) is the transmission of information. Language depends so much on our physiology that the most elementary of biological changes in intergalactic beings would make the simplest communicative act a titanic task. But overcoming this stumbling block, how many humanist or superhuman feats would we not be able to? Goodbye to war, inequality, injustice. A higher civilization is assumed to be a degree of civility beyond the speed of curvature. And so.

The Strugatski brothers (Arkadi and Boris) are both more pessimistic and more optimistic than the preceding paragraph. In just one paragraph of Extraterrestrial Picnic (the novel about which Tarkovski raised Stalker ), he clearly summarizes his point of view. In his view, if a "visitation" occurs, as they call it, visitation itself would be the greatest achievement and discovery . It would not matter who the aliens were or why or why they approached Earth. Nor would it be relevant if we could learn something from them. The man gives what he gives and if they left us some of their science we would manage to make it explode in the face of the opposite. But what would be irrefutable is that Humanity would finally know with certainty that it is not alone in the universe. And there would be no excuse. If we continued to do things wrong, we would have no forgiveness from either God or history itself.

I thought about all this while the newscast and each newspaper, digital or more digital, relayed the other "visitation", that of the Spanish left: an uncommon fact. Maybe not as rare as the arrival of aliens, but almost. I imagine that each meeting of Sánchez and Iglesias is equivalent to a meeting between Martians each prisoner in their particular universe. They are people on the left and talk about things on the left; left-wing documents are exchanged and they dream of left-wing futures. But there is no way that they understand each other left talking. Perhaps what they have not understood is the very nature of the visitation, the opportunity we say unique in a world like this so little left. They do not seem to realize that, as the Strugatski would say, the anomalous and even extraordinary is the very possibility of visitation, visitation itself and that as they continue engaged in their particular chaos, they will end, I fear, like the stalkers themselves ( men who traffic in their own way with dreams of reaching a new and better civilization) of the novel of the Russians: lost, sick and engulfed even by a reality that, in effect, is always right-wing.

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  • Pablo Iglesias
  • PSOE
  • We can
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