Piece inspired by Carl Sagan is on display at Sesc – 05/06/2023 – Science

“Today, strange as it may seem, most of humanity does not know whether we are alone in the Universe or not.” This is the opening sentence of astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996), in his famous conference “The era of exploration”, in 1994. In it, the physicist spoke about the importance of space exploration and how it would enable the expansion of our knowledge about the universe.

About 30 years later, NASA is already planning civilian crews to take man to the Moon, but there are still those who consider that we are the center of the Universe.

It’s not surprising. Sagan was already aware, in 1994, of the enormous resistance and a certain arrogance of human beings in believing themselves to be unique, special, the result of a divine creation process or, for those less believers, at least the result of a perfect evolution.

It is more difficult to accept that we are simply the result of chance, of a cosmic explosion that occurred 13.8 billion years ago, which formed systems and planets, and then another chance, 3.5 billion years ago, when a primordial soup brought together atoms of carbon, hydrogen and water thus creating the first molecules capable of replication.

What followed were more and more stochastic events, producing mutations that were selected for—or not—generation after generation, until you arrived at one species, out of a dozen others, that somehow dominated language, technology, and culture. ability to modify life at will, thus also creating environmental disasters and extinction of other living beings.

Sagan understood that it was fundamental that we look with humility at the immensity of space — after all, the fact that there could be life on one of the other planets of the billions of existing galaxies is not dismissible. We just never found it. And, for that very reason, our responsibility is even greater to preserve life on Earth.

Inspired by this, the piece “Universo”, by Coletivo Comum, discusses science and art, universality with religion, from man as a creature made in the image of God to a primate a little inept at the skills of hanging from trees and hunting insects, but with a capacity for communication and social mobilization that made it dominate virtually all habitats on Earth.

This, of course, has not been a consensus throughout human history. The piece shows the historical divergences and —why not— persecutions as if they were criminals of scientists who dared to affirm that no, man is not the center of the world, and neither is the Earth the center of the Universe.

From Galileo’s inquisition to Bertolt Brecht’s plays on human resignation, from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the text goes, in 90 minutes, through all the challenges and new frontiers that were posed in the search for understanding of our role on Earth.

For Fernando Kinas, director of the play, the relationship between theater (art) and science is not something new, but what he wanted to present with this play is what he calls “theatre: document and social commitment”. “The Universe for us as a whole was very important, to think of science as Sagan says, it ‘invites us to admit the facts and not just our expectations and desires'”, he said, in an interview with Sheet.

In the cast, actresses Beatriz Calló and Fernanda Azevedo give strength to the script, bringing a feminine side to figures mostly represented by men: God and the scientist-lecturer (in Sagan’s place).

Another fundamental aspect in the trajectory is denialism, sometimes biased by religious issues, sometimes by party-political nature. In this sense, the show does not fail to mention the period of scientific obscurantism experienced in recent years in the country under the Bolsonaro government. “The separation of science and politics does not exist. It is essential to understand that science is within politics and vice versa”, he says.

In a world where even scientific paradigms that have long since been unveiled, such as the Earth being round and revolving around the Sun, are viewed as opinions, not facts, there is also a clear need to bring science into our lives: culturally, social and behavioral.

The reporter went to the show at the invitation of Coletivo Comum