Shall it stay if we go now?

In the project “Space is the Place”, I dealt with the question of whether we need to take a step back and look at our earth from the future in order to fully understand its worth.

The premise of my short film is that the vision of the future as we have it in the 21st century is doomed to fail, but we only realize the importance of our planet when we leave it and take a look back from this fictional future. The blockbusters of recent years often deal with the colonisation of other planets or spaceships. Moreover, the project of Elon Musk, who wants to make mankind “multiplanetary” and colonise Mars with Space X, is set in close future. What all these scenarios have in common is that they regard the future of Earth as uninhabitable, unsalvageable and replaceable and thus reject Lovelock’s theory – seeing in earth rather the only home that shelters and nurtures us.

Lovelocks Gaia theory states that the earth is a self-contained, constantly interacting and above all, under no circumstances reproducible system, that keeps all its inhabitants alive.

The film takes place on a failed man-made space biotope, a few days before the final return to Earth. We follow the events in a library, where two employees are preparing for the launch.  The big question is, which of the books written on the biosphere still have a “raison d’être” back on Earth. Some of these books and thus knowledge was essential for survival in space but could lose all usefulness as soon as they leave this place. The difficulty is to imagine the hypothetical value of the books on Earth.

Through the brief discussion between the two, we learn more about the events of the last few years on this biosphere and, in the best case, gain a new appreciation for our actual home planet.