The eruption of La Palma has rightly aroused enormous interest in volcanoes. And it has triggered the usual extremes of Manichaeism in a large part of this society. What are Canarians doing living in volcanic territory? The most radical of simplicity ask themselves, among the different irrational reactions of surprise.
The truth is that we can speak of planet Earth as a metaphor that explains many human behaviours. Ignoring the reality doesn’t prevent it from existing, nor the potential dangers and adventures it entails. The boiling magma that is not seen when you don’t want to look. And ignorance is a stone mask for reason.
We know hardly anything about the physical space in which our life is settled. We think we live on solid ground but only the crust of the planet is apparently solid. It ranges in thickness from 5km at the bottom of the ocean to 70km in the mountainous areas of the continents. From there it apparently sinks 11km into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific and rises to the summits of the planet’s ‘Ochomiles’. At this point in history it is not known with certainty what is inside the Earth: iron crystals at very high temperatures, it seems. magma, gases. Everything is an approximation of how it behaves. The central core is estimated at a distance of 6,300 km and the outer belt at 3,000 km. And only 12.3 km deep has been drilled on the surface, in a hole 23cm in diameter. It was in the Kola Peninsula in Russia, within the investigations of Soviet geologists at the time. It started in 1970, stopped when the temperature reached 180º and today it is an abandoned place for few tourists. Other countries also tried with less success. The technique, however, was very useful for advancing oil prospecting and obtaining geothermal energy.
It is possible to find these data in some publications where at least several of them coincide. The British BBC has also done some informative work. Little else, unlike other topics that are scattered in superabundance, even from the tiniest pockets of triviality. This is a society that lives on the surface in its most exact sense. If I dwell on this explanation it is to see how little we know of this reality in which we plant our lives, our homes, our present and future, the way we go through our days. It is astonishing the tranquility with which we faceMost of them have no idea. At the slightest hint, fear or denial. And there are no absolute certainties, I insist once again, nor should there be paralysing fears so as not to continue walking. But it is good to know more, always more, of everything we can.
The metaphor of the Earth can serve us to see the joyful ignorance with which we approach other spheres of knowledge that condition us, from solid bases to the information that is produced every day. Today more than ever, paradoxically, true facts remain under the epidermis plagued by hoaxes and shouts. We live with small parcels of reality that are often tricked. And that exposes us to dangerous twisted paths full of risks.
The Earth has been spinning for more than 4.5 billion years. We know for sure that it is moving inside. That’s how its face was formed. Pangaea broke apart into continents. It readjusts itself in more or less perceptible earthquakes. It expels fiery lava when it needs to. We begin to know when, although not with precision; even less, what its destructive capacity will be each time. It happens from time to time, of course. It would be unlivable otherwise.
Much more dangerous is the sum of ignorances to the caliber of the metaphor of the Earth. The constant eruption of support for ideologies contrary to the common good and even to Human Rights. How much stupidity in the epidermis that ignores powder kegs. Not wanting to know, as an example among many, what the trips to New York of the president of Madrid and her harmful policies hide as eruptions of social abrasion. With five private and public Spanish media covering the event, alone at her first press conference. The scandalous media support of those who proscribe information in the permanent search for private benefits. The risks that banality hides and that bite when they are not seen and foreseen.
To travel, with Jules Verne, to the centre of the Earth, as ardent as the sun itself around which it revolves, is an entelechy, but to set foot on the firm ground of knowledge is an essential, unquestionable task.
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