Three years ago, perhaps more than ever, science is the beacon of reference in the face of the multiple environmental and geopolitical threats that await Homo sapiens. Not exactly the latest discovery or the stunning images of the new telescope, but rather the way of seeing, thinking and imagining that science has.
The colossal and solid idea of evolution (also the Big Bang, the table of the elements, plate tectonics, the atomic model) helps us determine the causes, the origin, or at least the initial state of the phenomena that dominate the world, its characterization, components, complexity and changes to this day.
History presents us all this in a linear and socio-political or fragmented geo-economic manner, and thus, how states, powers, and people are observed to side as if they were football teams or a recreational series of good and evil, apart by understanding, it fuels chaos and confusion.
Through astrophysics, we can determine our place in the complexity of that starry sky. Together with physics and chemistry, we can understand how the bricks with which everything is built are made, and how everything that moves and works (including us) is arranged and arranged.
With these foundations, biology helps us understand how life is built, why we are alive, and what the precise and complex conditions for life are for it to continue to occur on this little blue spot orbiting a tiny star in the middle of its existence.
This certainty, that way of seeing and thinking, helps break down what appears to be a global turmoil where it is no longer known who believes in all this drama, and grants the “alternative” facts.
The logic that led to the emergence of the United Nations (and its valuable organizations such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO, FAO, etc.) after a catastrophic armed conflagration, was based on the fact that it is the peoples of the world who suffer from epidemics, diseases, wars … and they are also the ones who survive! The United Nations is not a perfect international institution, but it is a beacon for nations to turn to in difficult times.
At UNESCO, we have a global institutional scaffolding of closely interconnected science, education and culture. Another win for people is the World Health Organization, the global scaffolding for human life sciences, threats to species, coexistence with others and substances harmful to human biology.
Science will not tell us who is lying or not, who is right or wrong, and who is good or bad. It will show us facts, evidence beyond what we can believe, doubt or imagine, foundations of movement and sustainability of what Sapiens do to move forward or give up: energy, food, water, health, environment, biomass in balance, complex microbiomes with phenomena such as microbes and viruses jumping from one type to another. Tools for everyone, not just a few.
Paraphrasing Robert Zimmerman, Nobel Prize for Literature 2016: The answer, friends, floats in the wind, the answer lies in… the science.
* Journalist and science reporter UNAM
