Impossible!
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, along with the others.
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The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning, mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home, as well as for schools. Technical institutions will reap the benefits of these achievements.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “We choose to go to the moon,” speech on the National Space Plan at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 1962
In 1962, the American public had the perception that the United States was losing the space race to the Soviet Union. The USSR had managed, just a few months earlier, to put Yuri Gagarin in orbit, the first man in space. This was no trivial matter, because at the time it was believed that whoever dominated space would dominate the world.
President Kennedy, who understood how much the fate of such a symbolic nation depended on the myths it clung to, climbed onto a stage in Houston, home of NASA, and delivered one of the most famous speeches in history, “We choose to go to the moon,” where he committed to reaching the moon before the end of the decade.
In those words, which sparked the most complex and demanding adventure ever undertaken by humanity, there was only one flaw: at the moment of delivering them, the American government had no clue how to make that promise happen. Neither the technology, nor the human resources, nor the knowledge needed to reach the moon existed in 1962. As NASA itself acknowledges, in the five years leading up to the successful Apollo 11 mission, an effort comparable only to the construction of the Panama Canal or the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, was deployed.
It is fascinating to reflect on how, in such a short time, we have gone from accepting — even demanding — that level of vision and idealism from our leaders, to quite the opposite. Today, if a politician proposes a goal, even something as modest as a guaranteed minimum income, we demand a white paper, three pilot projects, and an army of academics to bless it before they even dare to try. If today a President of the United States pledged to reach Mars in less than eight years without knowing where to start, they would never finish their term.
Nowadays, the first line of defense for those who do not want anything to change is to say that it is impossible. For more than four years now, since I was one of the first entrepreneurs to implement the four-day workweek in Spain, I have had a front-row seat to this story. (And that’s considering the four-day week is not even half as revolutionary as the changes in business organization carried out, for example, by Henry Ford in the 1930s.)
But that’s the thing: the transformations of the world are never possible until they happen. If they were possible, they would not be transformations. And not only that: the reason why one — a person, a country, or a civilization — takes on a challenge is not because it is easy and possible, but precisely because it is impossible. Because it is hard, because that effort, as Kennedy said, serves “to organize the best of our energies and skills.” Because it forces us to work and learn to become better.
This year, we have openned the second quarter of the 21st century in the midst of a flood of turbulence. We live in a disoriented world that desperately needs a new myth and new challenges to keep looking forward, to keep learning, to keep pushing the boundaries of science and education. Far more than any material limitation, what keeps us tied to this kind of collective unhappiness is that we have become unable to imagine and pursue the impossible.
But what if 2025 were the year we dared to dream again? It could be the year in which, for example, we finally faced up to the idea that work has to be just one of the things we do in life, but not the only one. The year to put mechanisms in place to have time and space to learn and explore, not because we are lazy, but because those are the skills that will create value in the 21st century.
It could be the year in which we realize that after conquering the ends of the Earth, the depths of the oceans, and outer space, what lies ahead of us this decade is to conquer inner space: to look inside and explore the ecosystem that exists within each of us. Humanity’s last frontier is not trillions of kilometers away, but in the infinite universe of consciousness; it consists of understanding how human intelligence works and how we can better connect one consciousness with another.
It could be the year in which we give ourselves permission to question the things in life that have been handed to us — for some, that is a gender identity, for others a professional identity, or a way of life — and begin to explore what would happen if we chose something different.
These are three impossible challenges that we should not be willing to postpone.