It's better to pay attention in the first few minutes of every first episode of every season of For All Mankind, and we're on the fourth. The Apple TV+ series takes us into an alternate past where the space race accelerated. With every launch, news that never happened but could have happened is told at full speed. Between the sixties and the first two thousand. And this creates a different world.
The genre of fiction that changes our past is called Uchronie. In this case, the USSR is the first to set foot on the moon, leading to fierce competition for space between the two superpowers. To make matters worse, the Soviet bloc with Gorbachev not only does not collapse, but also expands its influence in the world, so that we have an ongoing, albeit weakened, Cold War until the beginning of the 21st century. In this fictional past, we follow astronauts, engineers and NASA managers in a tough battle with the Soviets, the Chinese and even the North Koreans on missions to the moon, Mars and an asteroid.
These very brief reviews of the news provide context only. Lennon survives Mark Chapman's attack and the Beatles reunite, but John Paul II dies from Ali Agca's gunshots. Camilla, not Diana, marries Charles of England first; Michael Jordan doesn't sign with the Bulls; The Chernobyl disaster will be avoided. There's even a US president we haven't had yet, and she's even coming out of the closet.
The plot is attractive, thanks to well-constructed characters with whom you develop a bond as you get older (no digital effects: it's all make-up) and who also show all their complexity: here the intimate and the political intersect. In this time not yet passed, humanity looks up to the stars and does not cross space projects from its priority list. Create permanent bases out there. And from these remote places come some solutions to our problems, like the dream of clean energy.
We tend to believe that the history we know is unstoppable. That the things that happened had to happen that way because we investigated how they happened. That Greece would lead to Rome, maritime exploration to colonialism, the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, Versailles to Hitler, Hiroshima to the Berlin Wall, 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq, perestroika to Putin. And none of it was preordained. Millions of decisions, especially those made by powerful people, make history. In chaos the butterfly effect occurs.
Yes, we could have been on Mars for decades if the means had been available back then. We could have died out in the 1962 missile crisis. If the past could be different, it is because we can change the future. Let’s not repeat the hackneyed saying “How could it be otherwise?” Everything could be different.
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