stars

In this work, you will not find the answer to this question. However, you should come to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of the time in which we can ask it at all.

This work is not unlike the age-old philosophical questions: “Where do we come from?”, “Where are we going?”, and “Why are we here?” These questions have been asked countless times over generations, and you will not find their answers here. Instead, I aim to frame these timeless questions in the context of “humanity” as a new, emergent concept—one that, on the light I will be describing it, has never existed before in the history of our species at a Global scale.

I approach this inquiry from my particular background. I was raised in a Mediterranean, European cultural context, deeply influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy and state-building traditions, as well as by the values and narratives of the Abrahamic religions.

On top of that, my education has shaped my worldview and the sources of information I draw upon. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Cosmology. My academic and professional pursuits have included projects in neuroscience, astrophysics, dynamical systems, perturbations, information theory, causality, human evolution, and the cultural dynamics of loss and survival. These areas of study form the framework on which the ideas in this text are based.

Moreover, within this “Western” perspective, I come from València, born into a Catalan-speaking family. Both of my grandfathers hailed from the same town in which I was born, Sagunt, and were Catalan-speaking. My grandmothers, however, emigrated to Sagunt in the 1940s, during the post-Civil War period, from the interior of València. They came from a region that had historically spoken Aragonese but had since transitioned to Castilian. Like many mixed families, my linguistic landscape is varied. My maternal grandmother did not adopt Catalan in the family environment, while my paternal grandmother did.

Economically, my grandparents’ livelihoods were tied to the land: farming, orange orchards and related industries, baking, and later neighborhood retail shops. Their social standing ranged from lower to upper-middle class.

Although I grew up in a predominantly Catholic society, my parents raised me as a free thinker. They were agnostic, and my natural inclination toward skepticism, empiricism, and atheism was both allowed and encouraged in my family and educational circles. Even my paternal grandmother, the most religious and spiritual person in my family, supported my questioning nature. Despite being a Christian believer, she was skeptical of the Catholic Church as an institution, often remarking, “Do what the Church says, not what the Church does.” My interactions with the Catholic Church were minimal, limited mostly to festivities and a brief period of religious education when I was six or seven years old to prepare for my first communion. Even then, my early atheism led me to openly express my doubts—sometimes at the cost of being made to face the wall for extended periods.

Politically, my parents aligned with left-leaning Catalan/Valencian nationalism, which advocates for self-determination within the historical boundaries of the former Kingdom of València. They moved away from the land and family businesses, pursued higher education, and worked in government positions—one in city hall taxation and the other as a school counselor and head teacher.

València itself is a land of historical significance, renowned for its fertile, irrigated grounds that date back centuries. It has supported industrial-level agricultural production, particularly of fruits like grapes and oranges.

Culturally, Valencian and Catalan traditions are distinct within the Iberian Peninsula. The peninsula is home to three states (Andorra, Spain, Portugal) and part of the United Kingdom (Gibraltar). Spain itself is a multilingual nation with four main languages—Euskara (Basque), Catalan/Valencian, Castilian (Spanish), and Galician/Portuguese—as well as several smaller, rapidly disappearing Romance languages like Aragonese and Asturian.

The history of València is one of successive cultural layers: Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Arabs, and Berbers. Catalans were the last colonisers, arriving in the 13th century to a land that had been predominantly Arab in culture. For centuries, the region was home to the three main Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, under the Spanish monarchy, the Jewish and Muslim populations were expelled—the Jews in 1492 and the Muslims in 1609. In my hometown, Sagunt, it is estimated that Jews once constituted 20% of the population and Muslims 20-30%. Within three or four generations, nearly half of the town’s inhabitants were forced to leave their ancestral lands.

Those who remained faced strict scrutiny, forced conversion to Catholicism, and severe punishment for any violations of its practices. This era gave rise to the infamous Spanish Inquisition. My homeland, therefore, is one depleted of its historical religious and cultural diversity, with a language brought by colonisers and later persecuted. Despite centuries of suppression, our language endures, albeit in decline.

València is also known for its vibrant cultural traditions, such as the Falles de València, Fogueres d’Alacant, and Moros i Cristians d’Alcoi, correfocs, among many others. These festivities highlight the resilience and creativity of our people.

This framing is intended to underscore that, in a different sociocultural context, with different formative experiences and interests, the themes of this text could be entirely different. Humans are the only animals (as far as we know) capable of sitting under the stars and pondering the universe’s future—imagining what it might look like in 100, 1,000, or even a trillion years—and questioning whether “humans” will exist at all in such distant times. Remarkably, these thoughts inspire actions in the present.

Beyond these star-gazing, future-oriented humans, we have created something entirely new: the concept of “humanity.”

This text encourages the question of “humanity” to be explored by as many diverse perspectives as possible. Willingly or not, we are living in the age of “humanity”, the Anthropocene. We are no longer merely individuals or groups; we are now “humanity,” understood as a collective that seeks to include every individual of our species on equal terms under universal rules. These rules, of course, arise largely from the cultural context in which I was raised. Still, we must critically examine the limits and implications of this universal view.

This work is not about humans but about “humanity”: how it came to be, how it can “think,” and whether it, too, can look to the stars, recognise the beauty of this question, and act now in light of it.

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