The way we live, by Fernando Acosta

Who has not stopped to look at the stars at night? For any human being, always conditioned by reason, the mere observation of the starry dome raises two questions: what is there and what are we doing here?

This book offers a very complete argument for the double question.

It may sound pretentious, but there is no doubt that this journey from the astronomical to the geological, the sociological and the philosophical becomes an exercise in scholarship between science and critical thinking. All this to question our model as a civilization given over to globalization. Without failing to indicate that the writing finally confronted with a dissemination and awareness-raising will makes everything fascinatingly understandable.

Few times the dissertation of a connoisseur of any field ends up acquiring in its development the synthetic aspect of this work. A truly surprising balance in 360 pages full of details, examples and theories that end up composing a symphony about the way we live, in our passage through a universe for which we are barely a sigh in its irrepressible expansion.

It can be said that we started with the Big Bang as a mapped beginning of everything and reached even the mere existential consciousness of the reader who devours the pages. In the meantime, we enjoy the most curious data extracted from various sources: for example, knowing how science could determine that the expulsion from Paradise occurred on Monday, November 10, 4004 BC. Although of course, they had it easy, Monday had to be.

But something of the most interesting thing about this book is that, in some way, it comes to place us as a uniform rational species. We are not so different from our predecessors. Despite the disparities in our way of understanding the world. From yesteryear, when we believed that we were the heart of the cosmos, to a present day when we are the plague of a planet barely suspended around a star. And that means feeling alone with the handicap of having to tackle the most important dilemmas of our civilization right now, without any noticeable advantage over our ancestors.

With its structure of travel from the beginning of everything to the possibilities of the future, the book's argument is filled with rich scientific references (particularly brilliant in the geological and astronomical aspects), which offer a pleasant reading. In the sophistication of the narrative, however, we return to being those children contemplating the starry sky, while as adults we can relocate ourselves in this limited world that we have left.

It would be very daring for me to try to make a more technical summary of such copious research work and the interesting dissertation that accompanies any argument. But it is true that the best synthesis that can be made is that this book is one of the most complete current references to understand what we do in the world, and what we could do in order not to end up causing the sixth great anticipated extinction, the first designed by those affected by planet Earth.

From the nebular hypothesis that unites astrophysics and even philosophy through thinkers like Kant to a review of the general condition of the human being. Everything makes sense to launch projections on our fate on this planet, a destination that, in any case, will hardly be that already indicated sigh of an energy that expands towards diffuse confines.

From the Generalitat, from the cosmos, from the solar system reaching Earth seen as Pangea. We then stop to melt the geological, the biological and even the evolutionary in their crucible. The entire contextualization of our human condition.

A place as ours as the Earth is not so ours either. In its thousands of years many have been the species that have gone and that have disappeared in a diversity also marked by cataclysms and disastrous episodes.

However, we cannot even get dramatic when we affirm that we are charging the planet because without a doubt the Earth will survive us and it will only be a matter of having passed through here with more pain than glory if we achieve the self-destruction that we have programmed (After the Chernobyl exclusion zone, looking for a synecdoche as a metaphor for the disappearance of man, life re-emerged). So it may just be about keeping the planet habitable to ourselves the longer the better. And that entails recovering balance and ancestral respects.

If we take a look at the most remote past of our planet, the vicissitudes of paleoclimate and many other vicissitudes can provide us with solutions for the current drama. We find interesting details about the disappearance of the megafauna in the book (perhaps it is that in the end the small always has a better chance of escaping, of hiding)

Despite now having science and technology as the perfect union as bastions, we are not much safer than when humans gave themselves up to mythology or religion. Nor can it be said that our time has seen great advances compared to other humans who were able to experience various discoveries of the first magnitude.

Because, for example, today the Malthusian dilemma of overpopulation continues to hang like the sword of Damocles, adding to it the scarcity of fresh water as a consequence of climate change. Unfortunately we can already see the threshold of 2ºc to consider climate change as a threat comparable to a former pandemic in its feasible devastating effects. The year 2036 appears for many scholars as the top, the journey of no return ...

This threshold is not something gratuitous, a whimsical limit. It is about considering the average temperature just before the Industrial Revolution, and we have already exceeded it by more than 1ºc. Much of the blame for this increase seems to be the consumption of fossil fuels. And that's where I wanted to understand in reading (optimistic of me), that there is still hope. Although green energies also have their controversial aspects ...

Like any realistic reading, we also find in this book a fatalistic point that addresses possible extinctions. The Anthropocene in which we live, considered as an era in which man changes everything, transforms everything, equating them to past times marked by significant changes.

We tackle the tomorrow of a planet with feverish syndrome that can translate into uncontrollable migratory movements and many conflicts.

Luckily, or out of optimism capable of changing negative inertias, becoming aware through books like this one, we can add wills to change.

You can now buy The way we live: The Human Being, his Rupture with the Environment and With Himself, a very interesting book by Fernando Acosta, here: