It's better to pay attention in the first minutes of each first episode of each season of For All Mankind, and we are going for the fourth. The Apple TV+ series takes us to an alternative past in which the space race accelerated. In each start, news that never happened, but could have happened, will be told at full speed. Between the sixties and the first two thousand. And that give rise to a different world.
The genre of fiction that changes our past is called uchrony. In this case, the USSR arrives first to set foot on the Moon, and that provokes a fierce competition for space between the two superpowers. To make matters worse, with Gorbachev not only does the Soviet bloc not collapse, but it expands its influence in the world, so we have a continued Cold War, although tempered, until the beginning of the 21st century. In this fictitious past we will follow astronauts, engineers and NASA managers in a tough battle with the Soviets, the Chinese and even the North Koreans on missions to the Moon, Mars and an asteroid.
Those very quick reviews of the news only provide context. Lennon survives Mark Chapman's attack, and the Beatles reunite, but John Paul II does die from Ali Agca's shots; Camilla, and not Diana, marries Charles of England first; Michael Jordan does not sign with the Bulls; the Chernobyl disaster is avoided. There's even a US president we haven't had yet, and she even comes out of the closet.
The plot is attractive, thanks to well-constructed characters, with whom you grow attached as you watch them age (no digital effects: it's all makeup), and who also show all their complexities: here the intimate and the political intersect. In that time that has not passed, humanity looks up, to the stars, and does not remove space projects from its list of priorities. Create permanent bases out there. And from those remote places come some solutions to our problems, like the dream of clean energy.
We tend to think that the history we have known is inexorable. That the things that happened had to happen that way, because we have studied how they came to happen. That Greece would lead to Rome, maritime exploration to colonialism, the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, Versailles to Hitler, Hiroshima to the Berlin Wall, 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq, perestroika to Putin. And none of that was predetermined. Millions of decisions, those of powerful people first but not only, are writing history. In chaos the butterfly effect occurs.
We could have been on Mars for decades, yes, if the means had been put in place for it at the time. We could also have become extinct in the missile crisis of 1962. If the past could be different, it is because we can change the future. Let's not repeat the hackneyed tagline “as it could not be otherwise.” Everything could be different.
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