Clara and Malala´s world

Weeks ago, on the International Day of the Girl, the International Plan Organisation made alarming numbers public. Approximately 75 million girls around the world do not have access to education because of economical, religious and social reasons. Futhermore, according to the World Health Organization, at least 140 million women were victims of genital mutilation in the past decades, and it is estimated that 3 million girls will be sexually severed next year. A great number of them, for not having “the right to enjoy” sex, according to muslims.

Clara Ma is a 15-year-old Kansas student and attends high school. Three years ago the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had launched an essay contest addressed to all USA students in order to name the next Mars mission. Clara participated suggesting the name “Curiosity” for the rover that would explore the red planet. According to her, curiosity represents the flame that lies in every human being. She believes that everybody asks themselves about their own existence, nature, and everything that exists in the Universe.

Ma wrote that our ability to ask questions and have doubts, approach us to knowledge. Her suggestion was taken into account and Curiosity, which costed around USD 2.5 billion to NASA, is today in the red planet studying the martian geology and trying to find out whether Mars could one day host a human colony.

Unlike Clara, Malala Yousafzai who is also 15 years old, has to fight for education in a country contaminated by male chauvinism and religious intolerance. This teenager is a militant for women´s rights and consequently for individuals ones at such a young age, in Pakistan. For a couple of years she´s been writing a blog to inform against Taliban aggression in the valley of the Swat river in northern Pakistan. Because of her opposition to the religious totalitarism, despite being muslim but westernized, radicals threatened her to death, since as a woman she has “no right to study” and should stay at home to take care of men, as ordered by Allah.

Unfortunately, fundamentalists achieved their goal and a couple of days ago they shot Malala after getting her off the scholar bus where she was traveling along with her classmates. The bullet impacted near the young blogger´s spine, but physicians could take the bullet out of her body. Today, Malala is slowly recovering in a hospital in England.

It was Malala´s father who three years ago, despite taliban´s threats, opened a school for girls. During the first months students didn´t wear a uniform and had to hide their books and notebooks in order to go unseen by religious radicals.

The problem of male chauvinism is still present in monotheisms, in some of them stronger than in others, and this is evident both in Muslim countries and in the West, who are mostly Christians. Women, in many cases, are still relegated or denied certain rights such as equal pay, sexual education and abortion.

We live in a contradictory world. In the one hand we have huge techno-scientific advances which help us not only to improve our knowledge of the Cosmos, but also to broaden our daily wellbeing with new inventions and greater confort; while in the other hand religion reminds us that many haven´t left the caverns yet and intend to live in the Middle Ages when the woman was subdued by divine command.

Clara as well as Malala are evident examples of changes experimented in the last years. Our world could go on and keep itself by the side of scientific advances or get stuck with arbitrariness and agressions made by soldiers of ignorance who show hatred for matter and wait for extraterrestrial rewards. Clara and Malala are girls who have the absolute right to explore the world with their own eyes and nobody can keep them away from the privilege of thinking by themselves. To censure them is characteristic of religious people, not of the civilized world. 

A gift from the stars

“We are stardust,” used to say the astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan, attempting to show us how every single chemical compound found on the human being upon Earth, is also found in other parts of the universe.

Last Friday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, reported that the spacecraft Voyager 1 has recently reached the edge of our solar system, breaking the record of being the most distant menmade object ever. “Scientists observing this fast increment are approaching to an unavoidable historical conclusion, that the first mankind messenger is reaching the outskirts of our solar system,” pointed out NASA in a special release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, in Pasadena, California.

Days ago, another sophisticated and powerful X-rays telescope named NuSTAR, was launched into orbit. NuSTAR will study black holes and the cosmos in general with unprecedented resolution. Meanwhile, China, foresees to speed up its spatial station program by sending their first female astronaut into space.

Any outsider to the scientific field or astronautics development would go against these missions or goals because in real terms they demand the investment of high amounts of money from any government or private company inside the industry. However, it should be recognized that there are many mission achievements that benefit not only to the scientific community, but to the entire humankind. The first achievement, that could be considered even philosophical or abstract, is having overcome great challenges. Constraints such as the lack of knowledge or archaic technology were overcome by research and also by making mistakes.

To be more specific, we could mention some products of applied science after the astronautical development, which go from grinded food for babies to portable computers, not forgetting the Global Positioning System, GPS, and the electric chairs or robotic arms for people with different skills.

Even then, the most surprising fact is that we are reaching the borders of our neighborhood! And even though our solar system frontier is not well defined yet, Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and holds basic information about our species and home in the universe, is now about 18 billion kilometers from the Sun. “It is traveling at a speed of aproximately 17 kilometers per second and it takes data 16 hours 38 minutes to arrive to NASA´s network down on Earth,” reported NASA.

As a species, we are breaking barriers that were never thought before. We live in a world that left behind the dark ages and decided to look up at the stars and study them, in order to understand each other. Real knowledge cannot be conceived if scientific research is limited. No society or country makes progress if mathematical speculations are shorten or creativity and experimental skills are curtailed from most brilliant citizens. The amount of unknown facts and data about nature in our own Earth is still huge. Therefore, mysteries of our cosmos are even greater.

However, the possibility of getting closer to the knowledge of how and why things work the way they do, is raising.

Going back to Sagan thoughts, and the hostile world we live in, where we face scientific and technological revolution day by day, we could assert that today more than ever, we are giving huge steps into the unraveling of stardust mysteries.

Someday, our sun will die leaving us the challenge of colonizing other regions of our spatial neighborhood. We do not know when this will happen, but we should be ready for when it does. Meanwhile, remembering that in old ages it was a luxury to speculate about what lied beyond the clouds, we could devote ourselves to the task of enjoying a planet more sociopolitically stable, sustainable and worth living in.

To respect the place we live in is the best way to honor the “gift from the stars,” life through millions of years.