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After a time when the space race took a backseat, in recent years it has gained new momentum. In the past it was linked to the Cold War, today, however, to private initiative and, disturbingly, to its military use.
War in space. Last week it became public that the United States believes that Russia has the capacity to destroy Western satellites. Posing space as another battlefield is not a new idea, but rather it already accumulates a certain history in which Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars constitutes a somewhat strange chapter. However, we must not forget that in space matters things often do not happen as expected.
The race to the Moon. The space race of the 20th century was not strictly military, but it was political and propaganda. The man who gave the definitive push to the United States to take the lead and reach the Moon was John F. Kennedy in the 60s. Now the notebook of his travels through Europe, when he was 20 years old, has been published, a kind of intimate diary of his youth.
Air Cavalry. Kennedy was one of the actors, although not the main one, in the Vietnam War. One of the images of the conflict that remains most in the retina of thousands of people are the attacks from the sky, carried out by the intimidating American helicopters, the air cavalry. A combat mode immortalized by Apocalypse Now, by Francis Ford Coppola.
The revolution of waves. Not everything that has come from heaven has been destruction. Important technological advances in the world of communication came to light between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. One of them was the radio, which revolutionized societies as a mass medium. Now it has just been a century since the first broadcast of the State’s oldest radio station: Radio Barcelona.
Enemy number one. Antonio Rodríguez Aguado was a great public enemy of the Republic in the capital during the Civil War, according to this entry on the Guerra en Madrid blog. The story of Rodríguez Aguado, a member of the rebels in Republican territory, is that of one of the most important agents of espionage and the fifth column, a network whose activity is little known today by the general public.
A walk through the Louvre. The Louvre Museum offers several thematic virtual tours. This, for example, focuses on the exchanges of objects and raw materials between very remote areas of the planet, from Antiquity to the golden age of great exploration. It’s not like being in the museum, but it’s a good substitute.
Walls and barriers. It is surprising that over the centuries countries continue to apply the same measures and strategies as always. A recurring example is the construction of walls and barriers to block the passage of human groups. The latest news in this regard is that Egypt is building a wall to prevent a flood of Palestinian refugees from entering the country as a result of the announced Israeli operation in southern Gaza. Although the Egyptian authorities deny that it is a containment structure, the appearance of the enormous concrete panels that have appeared in various media is familiar to anyone who follows international news. Egypt is not a unique case: Israel has already built this type of barriers on its borders with Palestine and in the United States the armoring of the border with Mexico was one of the great workhorses of the Trump presidency. Some Eastern European countries have also erected fences to contain the arrival of migrants.
Historically, this type of construction has always existed. Without taking into account the fortifications that surrounded cities, building walls is almost as old as humanity. The most famous example of the 20th century was the Berlin Wall, which for almost 30 years stood as a symbol not only of the partition of Germany, but of the Cold War. But in contemporary times there are other notable examples resulting from wars, such as the green line in Cyprus or the demilitarized zone in Korea (in the latter case a complex that goes beyond a simple wall).
But the particular history of this type of structures has a much broader history. The Chinese Wall, built between the 5th century BC to the 16th century AD, had the function of containing invasions and demographic pressure from southern Mongolia. Hadrian’s, which separated Britain from the part of the island that had not been conquered, dates back to the 2nd century AD and can still be visited at various points. Or the Great Wall of Gorgan, in Central Asia, was built by the Sassanids to confront nomadic incursions.
Obviously, what Egypt is building is very small compared to these great testimonies of the past, but it is interesting that, in the era of artificial intelligence, biometrics and drones, the use of stone – actually concrete – continues. having so much validity.
