From the very first moment, when he announced the name he had chosen for his papacy, Jorge Mario Bergoglio linked his work as head of the Catholic Church to the environment and the defense of humanity’s “common home,” planet Earth. Pope Francis chose the name because of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the environment for the Catholic Church, as well as a symbol of poverty. His first encyclical, in June 2015, was titled Laudato si — also taken from a hymn by Saint Francis of Assisi. That text was entirely focused on the environment and the fight against global warming. The text cast aside any climate denialism and arrived in a key context: just months before the United Nations summit at which the Paris Agreement was to be finalized.

In 2023, through an apostolic exhortation, the Pope updated that encyclical to, among other things, scold governments for not replacing fossil fuels responsible for the “climate crisis” with renewable energy at the necessary speed. In his autobiography, which came out in mid-January, he spoke again of the “climate emergency.” He added: “Our common home asks us to pause in our way of life, which pushes the planet beyond its limits and causes soil erosion, the disappearance of fields, the advance of deserts, the acidification of the seas, and the intensification of storms and other intense climate phenomena.” That’s exactly what science tells us, point by point, comma by comma: we are behind schedule, and extreme events are becoming more severe and frequent.

Francis was, without a doubt, the pope who embraced scientific evidence on climate change and led the Catholic Church to take a stand on such a strategic issue, one that ultraconservative and denialist populism has targeted with hoaxes and lies. Teresa Ribera, vice president of the European Commission and an international benchmark for climate diplomacy in recent decades, recalls that Bergoglio was “enormously respected for his social commitment” when he became pontiff. But “he immediately understood and embraced environmental protection as a central axis of peace and justice among humanity.” “His Laudato si, perhaps the most important ecumenical product of his papacy, marked a before and after in global climate action. Half jokingly, half seriously, he recalled: ‘God always forgives, men sometimes, and nature never,’” Ribera recalls.

That encyclical dismantled denialism and joined the pronouncements that other religious leaders had made in 2015 to pressure the signing of the grand pact against climate change, which finally happened on December 12 in the French capital. However, none of the other leaders’ pronouncements had the depth of the papal encyclical.

For Manuel Pulgar, Peru’s Minister of the Environment from 2011 to 2016 and another authoritative voice in climate diplomacy, the text represented “a very timely contribution by Pope Francis and the Holy See to the process that led that same year to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in September and, months later, in December, to the Paris Agreement.” “It defined an unprecedented role for the highest hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the multilateral debate on environmental issues,” adds Pulgar, who believes the encyclical was “a positive political signal” that, combined with others, such as the joint declaration by China and the U.S., “created the appropriate atmosphere for achieving the goal of reaching an agreement in Paris.”

“With Laudato si, he managed to reach so many people around the world and mobilize them at a very important moment when we were negotiating the Paris Agreement,” recalls Sara Aagesen, Spain’s Minister for Ecological Transition. Aagesen also participated in those negotiations at the summit held in the French capital.

The diplomat and politician Laurence Tubiana is considered one of the architects of the Paris Agreement. She highlights Bergoglio’s promotion of “a humanist vision of the global management of the commons.” Like her colleagues, she emphasizes the value of the 2015 encyclical as “a foundational text of the Christian commitment to climate action, which has inspired and shaped a new generation of committed people. By clearly exposing the causes of the crisis we are experiencing, Pope Francis reminded us to whom the fight against the climate crisis is directed: humanity as a whole.”

But the encyclical wasn’t an isolated text in his papacy, because the environment and climate change struggle were present throughout his tenure. For example, when he had a public meeting in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in 2019 with Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the great symbol of the fight against global warming at the time and the target of fierce attacks from denialists and conservative sectors. “Keep going,” the pontiff encouraged her. Then, in 2022, the Vatican finally ratified the Paris Agreement. And a year later, he attempted to participate in the climate summit held at the end of 2023 in Dubai, although health problems ultimately prevented him from doing so.

Green Speech by the Pope

During Bergoglio’s 12-year papacy, climate change has accelerated, and scientific evidence that this human-caused warming is also behind the intensification of extreme weather events has become more solid. Unlike other social issues where the Church moves very slowly or not at all, the pontiff’s “green” rhetoric has evolved at the pace set by science and activism. If in the 2015 encyclical he spoke of “climate change,” in the 2023 update he alluded to the “climate crisis,” and in his autobiography he used “climate emergency” to refer to this problem.

The exhortation in which he spoke of the climate crisis — Laudate Deum (2023) — fits well into this evolution of Bergoglio’s environmental discourse throughout his papacy. Although he defended “multilateralism,” he harshly criticized recent climate summits. “Today we can continue to affirm that the agreements have had a low level of implementation because adequate mechanisms for control, periodic review, and sanctioning non-compliance were not established,” he maintained. Furthermore, he criticized the blocking attitude of some nations: “International negotiations cannot make significant progress because of the positions of countries that prioritize their national interests over the global common good.”

Manuel Pulgar highlights the Pope’s proposal to reconfigure multilateralism by generating “a new procedure for decision-making and legitimizing those decisions.” This is because he was proposing something that is currently “discussed in various forums, and that is to achieve a kind of greater democratization in the multilateral process.” “Both documents, Laudato si and Laudato Deum, represent a new perspective by the Catholic Church on the new challenges facing humanity,” Pulgar emphasizes. However, he criticizes the limited “dissemination” of these writings by the Church itself. “The Church would promote real change if it could convert these texts into simpler catechetical texts that would reach a mass audience of different ages,” he opines.

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Alabama-born physicist Kathryn Thornton, 72, embodies a historic shift in space exploration. Born into a working-class family, her first job was washing dishes in the restaurant run by her parents, who wanted their children to be the first in their family to go to college. Thornton not only achieved that, but also became one of the first female astronauts, embodying the new face of space exploration at NASA, which until then was dominated by white men with military training.

Thornton traveled to space four times between 1989 and 1995, and is the woman who has spent the second-longest time outside a spacecraft, performing spacewalks. In 1993, she was the only woman to participate in one of the most complicated spacewalks in history to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, an observatory that had cost around $2 billion and was returning blurry images due to a flaw in its optics. The mission was successful and restored the instrument for science, which has since helped make some of the greatest discoveries in the history of astronomy. Many years later, Thornton’s eldest daughter, who was 11 years old when her mother helped repair Hubble, earned a PhD in astrophysics using images taken by the very same telescope.

This week, Thornton will visit Spain to give a talk at the Starmus Festival, which kicks off Friday on the Canary Island of La Palma. In this interview with EL PAÍS, the astronaut reflects on how much space exploration has changed, especially in the current era, which she views with some dismay. She expresses astonishment at Elon Musk’s power and his influence over NASA, as well as concern about Donald Trump’s attacks on science in the U.S.

Question. How would you explain to someone what it would feel like to go into space for a spacewalk?

Answer. You train in the water tank and other simulators, but you find out when you first go out that all simulators lie to you in one way or another. And so you get pretty smart in the first 20 minutes about how to move around and maintain control of your body. Because when there’s no gravity, and you stop moving your hands, for example, the rest of your body still has momentum unless you apply an opposite torque to keep your rear end behind your front end. I’d say it’s like moving a refrigerator on ice, while wearing skates. It’s hard to get moving, but much harder to stop.

Q. What is your most vivid memory from your trips to space?

A. One of them was definitely letting go of the solar array from the Hubble we repaired. I just took my hands off of it, didn’t push it anywhere, and it floated away. I could see it flapping like a giant bird flying through space, right above Saudi Arabia, which is a beautiful part of Earth seen from space. It was mesmerizing.

Q. Do you have any bad memories from traveling to space?

A. On my second mission, I had a rather frustrating experience. We had to capture a satellite and strap a new booster motor on it. But it turned out to be much more difficult than expected. The predictions about how it would behave when interacted with were pretty far off. It weighed about 4,000 kilograms, and half of that mass was liquid propellant. And the satellite was rotating, which gave it gyroscopic stability, but since it wasn’t a solid mass, it didn’t behave exactly like we thought. The method we had intended to capture it with didn’t work. So we did the first and only three-person spacewalk. I was inside, guiding everything and making sure they got into the airlock. They went out and grabbed it with their hands.

Q. You were one of the first female astronauts, and you were at NASA for 12 years, what was that experience like?

A. I wouldn’t say it was terribly challenging. The fit of some things, particularly the spacesuit, was probably the biggest challenge because it wasn’t custom-made. It’s made up of various parts. So they give you a shorter upper arm than some of the guys would wear, a shorter lower arm, but they don’t change the diameter. When you try to bend your elbow, you start interfering this piece with this piece, which restricts your movement enormously. When you’re training in the water, you’re flopping around inside that suit. If I were to get positioned on my back in the tank, I would fall into the back of the suit and I couldn’t reach the gloves because my arms couldn’t reach. There were a lot of things like that. It’s not really a gender thing; it’s more a build thing, which of course is correlated with gender. In the end, you can either complain and make someone else do it, or work really hard to make it work. And that’s what I did.

Q. What do you think about current space exploration?

A. There have been many changes. My NASA was completely different to that of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. At the NASA I came into in the shuttle program, we were flying a lot of people, and we were flying a lot. I myself had four flights in six years, which is unheard of now. With the retirement of the shuttle and the arrival of the space station, everything changed. I don’t think we’ll ever see that rate or that number of flights again. Crewed missions to recover satellites or repair Hubble are no longer possible. I don’t know that that’s a bad thing if we go off and do something even more spectacular. I would love to see people walk on Mars, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Q. Do you support going to Mars instead of the Moon?

A. Yes, I’m on the Mars side. If we need to go to the Moon sooner to make the journey safer, then I support that too. But I worry that if we establish a permanent base on the Moon, that we will have sunk an anchor in there and have a hard time moving past that.

Q. Why?

A. After the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s, our next goal was to have a permanent presence in space: a space station. That was the focus for over 25 years, until we finally achieved it in 2000. Since then, there’s always been somebody in space. But we haven’t done much else: just orbited the Earth over and over again. We won’t be able to move forward until we end that. We have to decommission the space station, and NASA will hand over the baton to commercial space stations. Only then can NASA move on to the Moon and, hopefully, develop something beyond.

Q. Did you ever imagine that the richest man in the world would be a space entrepreneur sitting to the right of the president of the United States?

A. I’m completely flummoxed by that whole concept. Every day we’re surprised by something new, and we have no idea what’s going to happen next. Unfortunately, I have no factual information. I can only blather my thoughts, which aren’t necessarily based in fact, but rather on what I read or hear.

Q. Are you concerned about a wave of layoffs and cancellation of projects like the new Nancy Roman Space Telescope?

A. Yes, some of the science missions are probably in danger. It’s heartbreaking. Not just for NASA, but for the other space agencies.

Q. Could the mission to land the first woman and person of color on the moon also be in jeopardy?

A. Yes, of course. All the progress we’ve made over the past 70 years is in peril.

Q. What do you think of China as a new space power?

A. China is already our biggest competitor. Before that, it was the Soviet Union, and that competition is what got us to the Moon. I don’t see competition as a bad thing. In the past, even with ballistic missiles pointed at each other, we collaborated with the Soviets in space. We’ve worked with the Russians for 25 years on the space station. I think we could do that with China, if we chose to. But right now, we’re in a competition.

Q. What current space technology do you find most promising?

A. There’s a lot of potential in high-specific-impulse, low-thrust engines, like plasma engines. When I was teaching orbital mechanics, I asked my students to design a trajectory to Mars, and they unwittingly proposed an idea very similar to the Gateway [the lunar outpost]: take multiple components out of Earth’s gravity, assemble them in space, and, at least for cargo, use low-thrust, continuously operating thrusters — like a “slow boat” like the ones that go to Antarctica. You can send cargo to the Gateway, and from there, slowly to Mars. For people, we would use a different system, but for materials, it’s a possibility.

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Gogglebox is a television program that has been widely watched on Channel 4 in Britain since 2013. Each episode features families, couples, or groups of friends sitting on their sofas watching their own television and commenting on what’s on it. The program was imported under the title ¡Aquí mando yo! (I’m in charge here!), and although Spanish broadcaster Antena 3 quickly withdrew it due to a lack of viewers, for many it was their first introduction to the phenomenon of reaction videos, a format that is now hugely popular on YouTube and TikTok.

Like millions of teenagers on Twitch, those who watch Gogglebox don’t see something directly, but rather observe the gestures and listen to the critiques of other viewers watching that content. This mirror game is one of the mechanisms most used by contemporary content creators. In fact, it’s what all those streamers do who — without competing or creating a review or guide — record themselves playing video games with routine or repetitive, almost boring mechanics. For example, recently, YouTuber IlloJuan uploaded a Euro Truck Simulator game lasting more than six hours that has already garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Euro Truck Simulator is a cheap game that runs on any computer and simulates truck driving on realistic routes in minute detail (you have to keep to schedules and obey speed limits). What’s the point of watching someone else calmly drive a virtual truck for hours instead of playing the game ourselves? Why do we watch videos of people cleaning homes instead of grabbing a cloth and peering into the corners of our own kitchen? What’s better: watching a soccer match live or watching the changes in a streamer’s distraught face?

A shark with Nike sneakers

You Are Being Followed (2025), the latest novel by Belén Gopegui, features a pair of investigators working for technology companies who pursue two other individuals whose attention spans are failing to fully sink into the depths of the internet. This seemingly ordinary man and woman have something exceptional about them: despite all the distractions, technology platforms have detected that they are still capable of patiently observing the world around them. That’s why they’re called “the recalcitrants” or “the unrepentant,” and finding a way to capture their interest (and that of the few who remain like them) could prove to be very profitable.

Although the mechanisms used by technology companies are very sophisticated, there are always those who are left out. Furthermore, when we expose ourselves to increasingly elaborate stories, narratives full of unexpected twists, or successive audiovisual “masterpieces,” we may end up exhausted by the oversupply. Perhaps that’s why it’s sometimes explicitly absurd content (like memes of Tralalero Tralalá, a shark wearing Nike sneakers) or the most predictable formats that end up hooking the unrepentant. Those who don’t receive a dopamine hit in the form of a red notification from their favorite app may get it by watching something seemingly boring.

Essayist Jorge Dioni develops this thesis in Pornocracia, an essay published by ARPA Editorial. Dioni argues that the entire content industry has replicated the business model of pornography, which, in addition to sexual arousal, offers recognizable formats and familiar endings. Those who consume pornography know what’s going to happen, and that, while instability grows in all areas, is also a relief: “Any platform has content to watch pornography for decades without stopping and is constantly refreshed with very similar videos. They all have the same masculine narrative structure and the same rhythm. They are full of automatisms. They are a format. The repetition of leisure time is reassuring compared to the uncertainty of other vital spaces, such as work,” he explains in his work.

“We could talk about narrative saturation,” the author confirms to EL PAÍS. “Since everything already uses narrative mechanisms (advertising, politics, etc.), we’re constantly seeing stories and narratives, and everything is presented to us in this form, which leads to a certain saturation and a desire to seek out repetitive actions that simulate a connection with reality. It’s like people who watch plays.”

So, is this the reason why we’re fascinated by such unexpectedly viral content as carpet cleaning or streamers who record themselves studying for hours? In these cases, a certain desire for order also emerges, as Dioni continues: “The predictability in realistic content connects with the desire for order and the desire for a sense of time. Begoña López Urzaiz and Noelia Ramírez dedicated a podcast to the posh women who organize our lives: this idea of having a routine that organizes life, like in monastic orders, which gives meaning to the days, without having to waste energy wondering what we have to do. It’s the idea of regaining control that has been in political discourse at least since the 2011 [financial] crisis.”

Sometimes, the desire for things to be a little more organized “out there” is the flip side of the need to disconnect from oneself and from an intimacy that for centuries seemed almost impermeable and is now flooded with notifications and duties. Much of the seemingly simplest content, or those where all responsibility is left to a mediator, can be consumed as mere pastimes, and it’s easy to lose track of time when what you’re watching lacks narrative structure. However, the process sometimes goes further: this content can also serve to initiate dissociative states.

For example, through watching (not playing) a video game. In her book Traumacore, Núria Gómez Gabriel describes a time when she “couldn’t stop watching YouTube videos of people playing the Silent Hills P.T. demo,” a video game “in which the source of terror consists of walking and/or zooming down an L-shaped corridor through which you can only access a bathroom and some stairs that connect back to the start of the circuit.” If dissociation has been defined as “sensing one’s own actions from a distance, like moving away from one’s body and coming back” and can become a disorder with serious consequences for mental health, there is content that can induce it or, at least, help sustain it.

In some contexts — Gómez Gabriel speaks of “dissociated feminism” and the voluntary or involuntary displacement “of emotions outside the body” — dissociation becomes, again according to the author, a state beyond despair, “a deranged response that is not organized on the street and that serves as a shield against the hypocritical morality of certain social networks and online communities.” The compulsive consumption and production of indecipherable, empty, or grotesque content is one of its symptoms, almost a stifled cry in the face of the order, rhythm, and esthetics of the products that usually triumph on the networks.

Domestic realism and productivity

In their essay After Work, philosophers Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek refer to the entire imaginary surrounding family life that governs how we live in intimate spaces as “domestic realism.”

“Domestic realism” is an idea, a social imperative constructed through household appliances, family traditions (closely related to the sexual division of labor), and representations, such as American cinema from the 1950s or, more specifically, all those YouTube videos of cleaning and tidying. In the same text, the philosophers warn that, despite the technological development of recent decades, the weekly hours dedicated to housework in Europe have not decreased, but are actually increasing year after year, and they attribute this paradox to rising standards of order and cleanliness.

So, when a young woman (again, the sexual division of caregiving) suggests you watch her clean, or Marie Kondo convinces you to be a little more organized, in some way they are preparing you to lead a life as normative as theirs. Writer and philosopher Javier Moreno, author of The Transparent Man, points out that, in these cases, “it’s also obvious how attractive it is for someone (and even more so if we feel a certain admiration for them) to reveal their intimacy to us, to let us into their home to see how they pack suitcases, unpack, or chew (via ASMR) raw rice for several hours. The viewer always seeks to soak up the streamer’s charisma or aura.”

Moreno, who is optimistic about the phenomenon, believes that “we mustn’t rule out the possibility that in some cases there is an underlying idea of the ready-made, that is, the attempt to subvert an everyday situation to try to find something extraordinary in it.” Thus, amid so much cleaning and video reaction, we could end up finding intentionally or inadvertently artistic and transgressive approaches, such as sleep streaming. In these videos, someone broadcasts how they are trying to sleep or pretending to do so while their followers continually wake them up with comments and chat noises. The result is disconcerting: it seems like a metaphor for the world of work.

Finally, the success of inane content, reactions, and broadcasts of everyday events could be explained by something much more prosaic, one that also has to do with productivity: even while we’re entertaining ourselves, we want to make the most of our time, and divided attention creates the illusion that not a second is being wasted. As long as it’s not dissociated, these products allow us to do other things at the same time or simulate (as is the case with reactions, with multiple screens within the main screen) that we’re moving on multiple simultaneous planes.

In a context of decreasing attention spans (there’s much debate about whether we’re capable of concentrating for longer than a fish) and optimization of any task (social acceleration consists of more and more actions being performed or fitting into decreasing time periods), the possibility of multitasking is irresistible: some people already work while watching others work on another monitor, or those who play video games while watching other people’s games.

So, while it sometimes seems (especially when watching Tralalero Tralalá and Bombardino Cocodrilo) that the structure of social media is so addictive that anything integrated into its distributive logic can work, driving all the production and circulation of unusual or absurd content, there’s usually something else going on. And often that fuel is a mix of emotions as ancient as loneliness, despair, and the need to belong to a community.

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