Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (Nostalgia de la luz)

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

The old German telescope,

that I've seen once again after so many years,

is still working

in Santiago, Chile.

I owe my passion for astronomy to it.

These objects, which could have come

from my childhood home,

remind me of that far-off moment

when one thinks one has left childhood behind.

At that time, Chile was a haven of peace

isolated from the world.

Santiago slept

in the foothills of the Cordillera, detached from the rest of the world.

I loved science-fiction stories,

lunar eclipses

and watching the sun through a piece of smoky glass.

I learnt by heart the name of certain stars

and had a map of the sky.

It was a simple provincial life.

Nothing ever happened.

The Presidents of the Republic

walked unescorted through the streets.

Only the present moment existed.

One day this peaceful life came to an end.

A revolutionary tide swept us to the centre of the world.

I was lucky to be a part of this noble venture

which woke us all from our slumber.

This time of hope is forever engraved in my soul.

At around the same time,

science fell in love with the Chilean sky.

A group of astronomers

found they could touch the stars

in the Atacama Desert.

Enveloped in star dust,

scientists from all over the planet

created the biggest telescopes in the world.

Some time later,

a coup d'etat swept away democracy, dreams

and science.

Despite living in a devastation zone,

Chilean astronomers

carried on working, supported by their foreign colleagues.

One by one, the secrets of the sky

began to fall upon us like translucent rain.

In Chile, astronomy is a passion shared by many.

I'm just one enthusiast amongst thousands.

Our humid planet has only one small brown patch

that has absolutely no humidity.

The vast Atacama Desert.

I imagine that man will soon walk on Mars.

This ground beneath my feet

bears the strongest resemblance to that faraway world.

There is nothing.

No insects, no animals, no birds.

And yet, it is full of history.

For 1 0,000 years,

this region has been a transit route.

Rivers of stone

provided natural paths.

The caravans of llamas and men

came and went between the high plains and the sea.

It's a condemned land, permeated with salt,

where human remains are mummified and objects are frozen in time.

The air,

transparent, thin,

allows us to read

this vast open book of memory

page after page.

The telescopes

are the window to the cosmos.

This is where the celestial mystery begins.

In the glow of the night, the stars observe us.

At the bottom of the lakes of sand

are petrified fish and molluscs.

I can pick them up with my hands.

The hills and the Indian fortresses merge into one.

Apparently there are meteorites under the rocks

that can affect a compass.

I have always believed

that our origins could be found in the ground,

buried beneath the soil or at the bottom of the sea.

But now, I think that our roots are up above,

beyond the light.

Where do we come from,

where are we and where are we going?

Where do we come from? It's a key question.

It has always been at the core of our civilisations.

As for religion,

the world of science today

tends to separate science from religion.

And yet the fundamental questions pondered by man

are of a religious origin and motive.

That's my opinion.

It's a matter of discovering the origins of mankind,

of our planet, the solar system.

Finding out how a galaxy, a planet or a star is born.

All these questions about our origins,

we astronomers try to answer.

It's a never-ending story.

What eats away at the astronomer is "the origin of".

I study diffuse galaxies whose origins are a mystery.

We don't know why they do not self-destruct.

We try to shed light on these difficult questions.

That is science.

We try to answer two questions,

we do so as best we can, and four more arise.

That is the nature of science.

Some say that we're not very efficient,

that in answering two questions, we trigger four others.

But that's science; it's never resolved.

That's what I like about it.

The mystery of science is eternal.

Below these domes

are other messages which also come from afar.

These rock carvings, made by pre-Columbian shepherds,

are over 1 ,000 years old.

Here, more than anywhere else,

I feel that the desert

is revealing a secret.

All of our life experiences,

including this conversation, happened in the past.

Even if it is a matter of millionths of a second.

The camera I am looking at now is a few metres away

and is therefore already several millionths of a second in the past

in relation to the time on my watch.

The signal takes time to arrive.

The light reflected from the camera or from you,

reaches me after a moment.

A fleeting moment, as the speed of light is very fast.

How long does it take for moonlight to reach us?

Just over a second.

- And sunlight? - Eight minutes.

So we don't see things at the very instant we look at them?

No, that's the trap.

The present doesn't exist.

It's true.

The only present that might exist

is the one in my mind.

It's the closest we come to the absolute present.

And not even then! When I think,

it takes a moment for the signal to travel between my senses.

Between when I say "this is me" and when I touch myself,

there is a lapse in time.

The past is the astronomers' main tool.

We manipulate the past.

We are used to living behind the times.

That's how it is.

Like an archaeologist who also studies the past.

Exactly.

A not-so-distant past, but it's the same.

- He tries to imagine... - Exactly.

A historian does the same thing.

Geologists, too.

They know that the deeper they dig, the older the things they'll find.

It's the same for us.

The present is a fine line.

A puff of air would destroy it.

On this flat rock face

are the outlines of two human faces, perhaps masks.

They were carved by the pre-Columbian shepherds

who passed through here.

It was a natural route to San Pedro de Atacama.

These drawings resemble those carved on the mountain opposite.

We are on the prehistoric road that runs alongside the rock drawings.

The modern road was laid on top of the old one.

There on the right,

we can see drawings of llamas and people.

The astronomers

created an enormous telescope

to bring two seemingly incompatible things closer:

the origins of everything

and the past of everything we are today.

Two different situations...

Today they receive the past.

But, at the same time, they receive the most distant past of all

which is the origin of the whole system.

They study one past and we study another.

They are in the present recording a past

which they have to reconstruct.

They have only minute clues.

They are archaeologists like us.

Why are some places more suitable for this study of the past?

It's a real mystery.

The question is: why are there archaeologists and astronomers

in the same place?

The answer is simple.

Here, the past is more accessible than elsewhere.

The translucency of the sky

is, for the archaeologists of space,

what the dry climate is for us.

It facilitates our access to evidence from the past.

The translucency enables the astronomers

to shed light on the mysteries of space.

This is why we share the same territory.

We are at a gateway to the past.

That's right. It's a gateway we know how to go through.

But when we come out again,

will we have made discoveries that will shake our lives forever?

This remains a mystery to me.