‘For All Mankind’: Things could be different. We could have been on Mars decades ago

If you watch For All Mankind, you better pay close attention to the first few minutes of each episode. The Apple TV+ series, now in its fourth season, takes us to an alternate past in which the space race moved at a faster pace. In each opening, viewers get to see a quick recap of news that never actually happened — but could have. Events that took place between the 1960s and the early 2000s of a fictional, different world.

The genre that presents an altered version of our past is called uchronia. In this case, the USSR sets foot on the Moon first, which sparks a fierce competition between the two superpowers. To make matters worse, with Gorbachev, not only does the Soviet bloc not collapse, but it actually expands its influence around the world, so we have a prolonged — albeit tempered — Cold War, which goes on until the 21st century. In that fictional past we see astronauts, engineers and NASA managers engaged in a tough fight with the Soviets, the Chinese and even the North Koreans on missions to the Moon, Mars and an asteroid.

Those quick news recaps serve to provide some context. Lennon survives Mark Chapman’s attack and the Beatles get together again, but John Paul II does die from Ali Agca’s shots. Camilla, not Diana, marries Prince Charles. Michael Jordan never signs with the Bulls. The Chernobyl disaster is averted. There is even a female American president, and she comes out of the closet.

The series is attractive thanks to its well-constructed characters, which you grow fond of as you watch them age (no digital effects here: it’s all makeup) and who also display a full range of complexities; here, the intimate and the political intersect. In that time that never happened, humanity looks up, to the stars, and keeps the space projects in its list of priorities. It creates permanent bases out there. And from those remote places come some solutions to our problems, such as the dream of clean energy.

We tend to think that the history we know is inevitable. That the things that happened had to happen that way. Greece would lead to Rome, maritime exploration to colonialism, the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, Versailles to Hitler, Hiroshima to the Berlin Wall, 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq, the perestroika to Putin. But none of that was predetermined. Millions of decisions — those of powerful people first, but not only — write history as we go along. The butterfly effect works in chaos.

Had the necessary means been implemented at the time, we could have been on Mars decades ago. Or we could also have become extinct during the missile crisis of 1962. If the past could be different, it means that we can change the future. Let’s stop saying that “it couldn’t have been any other way”; it could.

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